Founded in 1919 with world revolution as its declared goal, only to be dissolved without fanfare by Joseph Stalin in 1943, the Communist International (Comintern) developed a historically distinct form of political engagement that stood in the tradition of the European workers’ movement yet was in many ways unique. It formulated a new political grammar, a distinctive set of rules for a new form of collective, radical engagement.

Its means to this end were a strictly disciplined organization, a network that was in part underground and in part triumphantly public, directed and coordinated by an Executive Committee (ECCI). In the Comintern, the different facets of Communism came together: an international political program with a utopian dimension, cross-border political organization, and a territorially based political regime that had its own interests to pursue.

The revolutionaries more readily took on the challenge of this collective political adventure because the goal already seemed to be in sight. The fall of tsarism in Russia and the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 — or October 1917, as the Julian calendar had it — seemed to mark the beginning of a new age.