Documents of Civilization and Barbarism

Reading good Comintern history conjures the feeling of standing dead in the eye of the twentieth-century hurricane, immersed, nearly engulfed by the epochal storm winds of the age of extremes. Revolution and counterrevolution; communism and anti-communism; fascism and anti-fascism; colonialism and anti-colonialism; mass politics and state bureaucracy; intellectual-cultural innovation and censorship; interstate war and intrastate terror — these were the Olympian forces under whose caprices the foot soldiers of the Comintern lived (and died). To reconstruct the global architecture of the Communist International and the historical experience of those who inhabited it is thus to proffer an impression, through a sharp, select viewfinder, of an entire world “in an age of bloody confusion.”

One of the earliest book-length reflections, World Revolution, 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937) by C. L. R. James, appeared as an intervention in a live political situation, shortly after Moscow’s “Trial of the Sixteen” and the execution — along with fifteen fellow Old Bolsheviks — of Comintern founding chairman Grigory Zinoviev. James decried the ongoing deterioration of “the greatest revolutionary force that history has ever seen” as “the crying shame and tragedy of our age.”

British Trotskyist Duncan Hallas cleaved to a similar view in The Comintern (1985), which carried the story of its decline through to “the last spasm” of 1939–43. For Anglophone students in this century, the standard text may be Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew’s The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (1996), an intelligent and fair-minded overview of its high politics “from the perspective of the mid-1990s,” amid what its authors view as the “self-evident” failure of “the Marxist-Leninist project.”

Since then, the opening of the Soviet archives to researchers has stimulated a burgeoning specialized academic literature, including works from Silvio Pons, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Norman LaPorte, Kevin Morgan, and Matthew Worley, Margaret Stevens, and Oleksa Drachewych among others. Thanks to the industry of John Riddell and the Comintern Publishing Project, we today enjoy comprehensive translated access to the proceedings of the Lenin-era International’s canonical (and lesser-known) congresses, an important project that, as Paul Le Blanc recently observed, “suggests the need for an updated history.”

Against that backdrop, the English-language translation of Brigitte Studer’s Reisende der Weltrevolution (first published in 2020 by Berlin’s Suhrkamp Verlag) appears especially fortuitous. Professor emerita in contemporary history at the University of Bern, with a record of publishing on subjects including feminism, suffragism, and Swiss nationality, Studer has long been doyenne of European Comintern scholarship. She released her first, eight-hundred-page monograph on the International’s relations with Switzerland’s Communist Party in 1994.

Surveying the terrain of Comintern historiography in 1997, Studer and Berthold Unfried contended that the field stood “At the Beginning of a History.” They urged scholars to “widen the frame” of inquiry by incorporating “themes of contemporary social history” such as identity, gender, and the delineations of public and private life. This approach bore fruit in Studer’s 2015 volume, The Transnational World of the Cominternians, an edited compilation of largely self-contained chapters together comprising a detailed vignette of the lived communist commitment. The author cited a revealing line from the French communist writer Paul Nizan: “Communism is a politics, but it’s also a style of life.”

Redolent of The Transnational World in its elemental themes and motifs, though coming in at over twice its length, Travellers of the World Revolution marks the likely denouement of Studer’s distinctively twenty-first-century project of relitigating the history of the Comintern from “cultural, experiential, subjectivity- and actor-centred perspectives.” Its title denotes what she calls the “historically specific community of fate” embracing those women and men “who made revolution their vocation and for whom political engagement meant employment by the Comintern.” In this way, Studer explains, hers is “a somewhat different history of the Comintern, a history of the Comintern as place of work.’”

Professional Revolutionaries

Travellers is a triumph. Taking for its subject “the working lives and everyday circumstances” of the Third International’s “professional revolutionaries,” posted far and wide “on missions they hoped would bring about the revolutionary transformation of social and political relations,” Studer’s account is a full-scale Riveran fresco of the Cominternian experience, painted in vivid colors.

To write a book like this — both the culmination of decades of specialist scholarship and a popular history — requires the full sum of a senior historian’s powers: as polyglot archival excavator and synthesizer, individual and movement biographer, and above all as a storyteller. Eleven weighty chapters frame its peripatetic narrative, conveying the reader from each to the next of the successive “revolutionary hotspots of the inter-war years” and the street-level underworlds devised by the communist itinerants who were operating there.

As the post-1917 European revolutionary wave began to ebb, so did hopes that a Soviet Germany or Italy might arise to ease Russia’s isolation and backwardness. In 1919, as Studer recalls, Zinoviev predicted that “the whole of Europe would be Communist within a year,” but soviet republics in Hungary, Bavaria, and Bremen proved to be short-lived. The infant Comintern’s iconic Second World Congress in summer 1920 resolved to adapt to a longer time frame:

If the capitalist world order were to be destroyed and a world revolution brought about through armed insurrection, a political and administrative apparatus and a global network had to be constructed. . . . The mighty enemy could not be overcome by spontaneous actions, but only through the intervention of a hard-hitting, well-trained and coordinated avant-garde. The masses too had to be ideologically prepared. Such a transnational endeavour required organization, clear directives and resources in the form of money, know-how and personnel.

Assuming the familiarity of readers with Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other founding grandees like Clara Zetkin, Karl Radek, and Nikolai Bukharin, Studer foregrounds what she calls the “generation of 1920.” These were young communists, radicalized by the experience of imperialist war and the inspiration of the Bolshevik-led revolution, who “provided the [Comintern] apparatus with its first, and, with certain exceptions, its longest-lasting cadre.”

They included luminaries such as Germany’s “maestro of propaganda,” Willi Münzenberg, and the Indian cofounder of the Communist parties of Mexico and Spain, M. N. Roy, along with many lesser-known (or simply unknown) figures: “middle and low-ranking employees . . . mostly female assistants, secretaries, translators, [and] couriers.” The gifted linguist Hilde Kramer and the Potsdamer sisters Babette Gross and Margarete Buber-Neumann rank among the travelers whose path Studer examines.

Drawing upon memoirs and diverse biographical materials, including the confessional “party autobiographies” that Comintern employees were encouraged (and later compelled) to complete, Studer presents a fully realized cast of personalities. We learn not only about their political careers, but their national, class, and family backgrounds, education and employment histories, routes into revolutionary politics, personal lives and routines, tastes and prejudices, foibles and flaws. These main characters rub shoulders throughout the volume with the likes of Albert Einstein and Madame Sun Yat-sen, Marlene Dietrich and Augusto Sandino, Mahatma Gandhi, and Orson Welles, whose cameo appearances illustrate the wider transnational progressive milieu through which the Cominternian cadres circulated.

Studer is just as concerned with the “distinct lifeworld” of the Comintern’s globally dispersed foot soldiers, with a “dense network of acquaintances, friendships, love affairs and enmities,” as with the organization’s macroscale operations and policy. This imbues her narrative with human vitality, by turns charming and poignant. The subjects of the book were bound, as Buber-Neumann put it, “not by a contract of employment but by a common cause.” Each cell of foreign communists that the book anatomizes was also a close-knit thicket of interpersonal dependencies.

Within this exclusive pool of revolutionaries who crossed paths time and again, romance flourished naturally alongside comradeship. Many of Studer’s travelers paired off into couples, she observes, with “a notably high number” doing so more than once during their term as Cominternians. Yet lifelong relationships, amorous or otherwise, were rare enough, with the pressures of routine nomadism and the risk of imprisonment or worse to pull them apart. From the late 1920s onward, this situation was compounded by an increasingly fractious, sectarian, and intolerant political environment.

Bound up in her detailed reconstruction of personal relationships among the professional revolutionaries, Studer’s foregrounding of “the experiential and emotional aspects of [Comintern] history” is one of the book’s most resonant dimensions. Synthesizing varied contemporary perspectives and accounts, Travellers depicts how the Cominternian spectrum of feeling oscillated between transcendent optimism and annihilating despair, not to mention awe, excitement, resentment, physical terror, and sheer quotidian boredom or loneliness. “Political failure and the many adversities of everyday life,” Studer explains in a description that every active socialist will recognize, “posed a recurrent threat to professional revolutionaries’ self-belief.” For those who stayed the course through successive thwarted hopes, “a capacity to tolerate frustration was a must.”

Following the career courses of tens of prominent personalities, mentioning over three hundred by name, Travellers puts together a collage of “total engagement” in the pursuit of international socialism during the lives of its subjects as Cominternians. These were lives lived and sacrificed — often literally — in the service of “the political future of humanity, which would lose all meaning in the absence of a proletarian world revolution.” Conveying the world-historic height of the stakes placed by all upon their success, Studer goes some way toward explaining the “tireless commitment” of her protagonists, as well as their willingness “to justify means by ends.”

Most of the “generation of 1920” eventually experienced disillusionment, often in waves accompanying the Comintern’s changes of line and the ensuing mandatory ostracization of oppositionists, with matters coming to a head for many during the later 1930s (sometimes from inside a prison cell). This was not merely a question of discarding a party membership card: “In the social world of the Comintern, to leave the party was to betray the cause; so-called renegades were cut off socially and often defamed, later even persecuted. . . . The stronger the commitment, the greater the danger that resignation or expulsion provoked an existential crisis.”

In some respects unflinchingly critical, in others unmistakably fond of her subjects, Studer maintains a scholarly yet empathetic treatment of their lives throughout her study. Permitting them wherever possible to speak for themselves, the historian herself employs a sober, dispassionate, yet vivid narrative voice, allowing readers to form their own verdict.

When Studer does intervene on matters of overall interpretation, it is to push back against the anti-communist (and anti-utopian) condescension of posterity. In her conclusion, she quotes a retort to such patronizing hindsight from the former communist Manės Sperber: “Oh, the petty wisdom of survivors who see in endeavours that failed only the failure itself and who can so easily discover the causes.”

The Experience of Defeat

Studer’s book is certainly, in the last instance, a painstaking portrait of the Cominternian experience of defeat. Her narrative departs with most of its surviving characters after the final winding-up of the Comintern facing the conclusion, like Christopher Hill’s seventeenth-century English republicans following the Restoration, “that the world was not to be turned upside down after all.”

The inescapable fact of that eventual, epochal defeat weighs heavily throughout the text, giving even the most buoyant moments of its characters a mournful cast for readers in today’s world — separated from that of Studer’s Travellers by the experience of World War II, the Holocaust, High Stalinism, and all the ensuing depredations of imperial capitalism. Its cover emblazoned with the ghostly outline of Tatlin’s Tower, Studer’s postmodern revisitation of the triumphs and tragedies of the Comintern generation makes for an affecting, melancholic read.

But such “left-wing melancholia,” as Enzo Traverso notes, does not mean we must “abandon the idea or the hope for a better future; it means to rethink socialism in a time in which its memory is lost, hidden, and forgotten and needs to be redeemed. This melancholia does not mean lamenting a lost utopia, but rather rethinking a revolutionary project in a nonrevolutionary age.” Studer’s history constitutes a prime example of such “fruitful melancholia”: casting new light back upon the powerful emancipatory energies that the cause of worldwide socialist revolution once stirred among millions, which through their rediscovery by left-wing cadres today might — to quote Edward Thompson — “be brought once again to our side.”

While the historic challenges facing the travelers ultimately proved insurmountable, the experience of their attempt in the face of those odds is one which remains unrivaled in global history. The intellectual culture of the socialist movement in our own century would be greatly enriched by learning from that experience.

One of Studer’s great accomplishments is her recovery — against what she sees as common yet misleading conceptions of “the Comintern workforce” as “monochromatic” Stalinist functionaries — of the incredible diversity of the Cominternians, in terms of nationality, class background, age, personality type, social attitudes, political and procedural culture, and orientation toward the body’s progressive Stalinization: “Communists never formed a uniform class, not even in the second half of the 1930s, when Stalin had arrogated all power to himself.”

While the Bolshevik Party’s civil war–era democratic centralism meant the Comintern operated under an expectation of majoritarian “party discipline” from the beginning, matters were more complicated in practice, Studer explains. Demonstrating with reference in particular to the 1920 Second Congress that the history of the Comintern was one of “conflict, difference and dissidence” as much as uniformity, she concludes that the body’s “extreme homogeneity” by the 1930s, “such as it was, was largely achieved through repression and physical annihilation.”

Studer’s scholarly recuperation of the plurality and vibrancy of this interwar world is thus a vital corrective to both anti-communist and Stalinist falsifications of Comintern history. As the late Theodor Bergmann, last surviving cadre of the Weimar-era Communist Party of Germany (KPD), told Jacobin in 2016:

The history of Communism is not how Stalin described, nor how the bourgeoisie describes. Bourgeois historians say “it’s all the same, it’s all Stalinist” — that’s a lie. We have to try to write a different history of Communism, and pursue it.

Brigitte Studer has made an important contribution toward this urgent pursuit.

The Internationale

Beyond a compelling history of communism and communists, Travellers is also a study in a particular kind of globalization. “The twentieth century,” Studer tells us, “knew of no other organization or social movement so international in its rhetoric, so transnational in its practice, so global in its ambitions” as the Comintern. Employees of the Comintern lived out the revolutionary internationalism that classical Marxism had advocated as they “travelled the world on political missions.”

Her account traverses its necessarily planetary topography in chronological sequence down a chain of “global cities”: revolutionary Moscow, Baku, and Tashkent; cosmopolitan Berlin, Paris, and Brussels; nationalist Guangzhou (formerly Canton), Wuhan, and Shanghai; and Madrid, Valencia, Albacete, and Barcelona during the “Last Mission” to war-torn Spain — with the Soviet capital a recurring (though progressively inhospitable) “home” for the travelers throughout. Her cross-continental narrative brings to mind Indiana Jones’s propeller plane, trailing red lines across a sepia-toned map of the interwar world; readers unfamiliar with the globetrotting dynamism of Comintern field operations would be advised to strap in.

For the book’s protagonists, internationalism assumed “a great variety of practical forms,” with physical travel the precondition for them all. Studer opens her story with the personal responses of her subjects to their first “Revolutionary Rendezvous” amid the carefully choreographed internationalism of 1920s Second Congress, having made their way to Moscow across battlefronts and blockades. Most of these journeys across land and water were made illegally, which could involve chartering vessels using false papers, or being smuggled into Russia with repatriated prisoners of war; in the case of one party, it meant hijacking a German steam trawler. Not all of those who embarked on this pilgrimage made it back, with several lost at sea (including two Turkish communists who were drowned by the police in the Sea of Marmara).

The remarkable — sometimes theatrical — excursions routinely demanded of Comintern agents during their dangerous “transnational life-courses” are a memorable and exciting motif punctuating Studer’s chapters. They include John Reed’s armored train ride over the war-ravaged Caucasus as well as a five-week trek to Wuhan through the brutalized Chinese countryside and a car journey across the Gobi Desert into Soviet Mongolia. Studer also provides us with the details of one activist’s escape from Canton with the help of a bribed rickshaw puller, having instigated a workers’ uprising that was brutally crushed, along with a European communist’s participation in Mao Zedong’s fateful Long March to Yan’an.

The year 1933 saw a desperate scramble for passports to escape Germany, while those traveling to Spain a few years later had to clamber over the icy Pyrenees before experiencing joy at the summit: “We raised our clenched fists and shouted ¡Viva España! We began to sing The Internationale, quietly, a little self-consciously at first, then louder and louder.”

With flights available only from the later 1930s for those who received the (now ominous) “invitation home” to Moscow, national borders — and the art of their subversion — were central to the existence of the travelers as Studer depicts it. They spent their time “deploying countless aliases, disguising themselves as writers, journalists, commercial travellers,” traversing state boundaries with “false passports and double-bottomed suitcases.”

Such covers were not always infallible: Studer cites an episode when two Comintern secretaries in Berlin discovered “with dismay that they had both been issued with exactly the same forged passport.” However, progressive professionalization meant that by the early 1930s, all operatives “travelled under pseudonyms with matching false papers.” Encrypted communiqués and funds were ferried across frontiers by trained couriers, with “gold, jewellery and precious stones” expropriated from tsarist aristocrats sewn into their sleeves or “secreted in leather soles” to help finance revolutionary ventures.

Bristling with rote acronyms and contractions, Studer’s chapters familiarize the reader with the bodies that made up what she calls “the planetary system of international Communism.” The Comintern embodied a “highly ramified” superstructure of regional committees, bureaus, and secretariats. There were “cadre schools” like Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East, newspapers like Inprekorr and the Negro Worker, “front organizations” like Münzenberg’s League Against Imperialism and World Committee Against War and Fascism, and even military formations like Spain’s International Brigades. These various bodies were, as Studer explains, “interlocking, but also in competition” for resources and imprimatur.

Although the Comintern instituted as standard a “genuinely revolutionary” six-hour workday, its cadres often toiled long into their evenings, while Inprekorr staff “worked days and nights in alternate weeks, and much coffee was therefore consumed.” Even where communism was not formally outlawed, discretion was a necessity for the travelers; theirs was a world of “secret apartments and lodging houses,” of bookshops doubling as clandestine Communist fronts from Berlin to Shanghai. Operating undercover, many were assigned elaborate aliases, with one agent “finding employment as secretary to a Chinese professor of music,” conspiring to maintain the Comintern’s East Asian network whenever they were not busy organizing pantomime performances.

A disjunction between the policies elaborated in Moscow and practice in the more-or-less distant field was a consistent feature of the Comintern’s history, with operatives on foreign missions routinely obliged to make fateful discretionary decisions themselves. Studer stresses the difficulties in long-range communication between the Comintern, its emissaries, and national Communist parties, both logistical and linguistic.

Soviet contact with the Communist Party of China (CPC) during the 1920s depended upon coded letters and encrypted radio telegraphs transmitted via Comintern way stations with specialized “radio operators, coders and translators” to ensure secrecy. M. N. Roy and Mikhail Borodin, who were dispatched to persuade “their Chinese comrades” that Moscow’s line was correct, did not speak Chinese: like many Soviet operatives in that country, they relied for every interaction with CPC cadres upon interpreters of “variable quality.”

Every stage of decoding and translation added to the “ambivalent, even contradictory” nature of directives from Moscow, leaving much room for interpretation. The Comintern’s backing for the CPC’s united front with Chiang Kai-shek’s bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang before 1927’s Shanghai massacre encountered “obstinate resistance” among some Chinese Communists, as Studer recounts. The CPC leadership refused to “simply give in and accept the imposition of a political line it had grave doubts about,” which meant that Borodin and Roy — who to compound matters were increasingly at odds with one another — had to make their case before the party’s congress.

The anti-Stalinist left has long interpreted the infamous debacle of the Comintern’s China policy, which effectively subordinated China’s proletarian struggle to the preservation of an alliance with the governing, Soviet-allied Nationalists, as a classic example of the tensions between the organization’s revolutionary internationalism and the conceived interests of the USSR as a neighboring state under Joseph Stalin’s policy of “socialism in one country.” As Studer herself puts it, “The interests of the Soviet government as the representative of a state and the interests of the Communists organized within the Comintern no longer necessarily coincided, and contradictions began to appear.”

However, she concludes elsewhere that such failures “did not simply and exclusively derive from the clash between the interests of Soviet foreign policy and those of the world revolution, as there is sometimes a tendency to suggest.” Studer’s interpretation emphasizes the inherent difficulties of “analysing and interpreting the complex sociopolitical realities” across all the countries in which the Comintern operated, let alone “formulating and implementing appropriate tactics” to take advantage of political opportunities.

Here as elsewhere in the book, Studer portrays Cominternian failings, individual and collective, within their historical context. In doing so, she pronounces a more sensitive, lenient verdict upon those condemned in received left history for their association with the (sometimes catastrophic) founderings of revolutionary gambits that were placed in their charge.

The relationship of Bolshevism to anti-colonial thought and politics has been the subject of numerous academic and popular studies in recent times. Studer affirmatively restates the Comintern’s pathbreaking historic role as “the pioneer of a global, anticolonial, antiracist and anti-imperialist politics,” with 1920 marking “the beginning of a perceptible West-to-East shift in the Comintern’s strategic orientation” that flowed from that year’s Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East.

What Tim Harper dubbed “Underground Asia” stands at the forefront of Studer’s account, with Latin American, Caribbean, African, and Middle Eastern Comintern ventures relegated to a more peripheral presence. The sections highlighting Comintern engagement with the global politics of black liberationism are well drawn, albeit brief: Cameroonian-Berliner Joseph Ekwe Bilé receives an extended profile, and contemporaries like George Padmore, James La Guma, and Claude McKay appear fleetingly, although the CPUSA’s Harry Haywood is surprisingly absent.

Studer draws up the following balance sheet of the Comintern’s overall anti-colonial legacy: “The Communists were not the first to enter the field of anticolonial struggle, but, as Mustafa Haikal aptly put it, after 1925 they acted as the ‘decisive ferment’ that briefly transformed disparate political elements into a global if volatile whole.” Cominternian initiative “not only internationalized and globalized the hitherto regional liberation movements of continents far distant from each other, by highlighting what their struggles had in common; it also gave them a sharper political edge by promoting the demand for national independence.”

Studer has compellingly reincorporated one of the proudest (and ultimately most consequential) dimensions of her dedicated internationalism of her travelers into the popular story of the Comintern for a new generation of readers.

Against the “Bourgeois Plan of Life”

Willingly embarking upon this “perpetually precarious and unsettled existence” necessarily implied a rejection of what Studer calls “a bourgeois plan of life.” This refers not only to the bourgeoisie’s political universe and acquisitive habitus, but the totality of traditional social and cultural mores that were hegemonic within contemporary capitalism. Her book is distinguished by its attentiveness not only to the collective professional world of its subjects, but also to their personal (and inner) lives.

Channeling her specialization in women’s and feminist history, Studer’s provision of a “gender-historical perspective” upon the Comintern that she rightly terms “absolutely necessary” as a historiographical corrective finds expression in her engaging discussion of the roles women operatives played within the organization, and more widely of the themes characterizing their experience as women. She also supplies an evocative portrait of the popular art and culture of international communism in an age of modernist experimentation, noting that the Cominternian style of life frequently embodied a curious paradox, with “a bohemian and artistic avant-garde on the one hand and bourgeois family structures and habits of life on the other, despite the demands of illegal activity.”

Although they only constituted a “small minority” among Comintern operatives, women like Tina Modotti, Agnes Smedley, Ruth Werner, and the tragically fated Olga Benário Prestes represent many of the standout personalities of Studer’s narrative. In a period where the participation of women in political organizations on equal terms remained extremely rare, the International’s formal openness to women at every level of its structures (and rhetorical alignment with “the demands of left feminists”) attracted a number of young women radicals with the “novel opportunity for political, indeed public, activity.”

Following the radical gender politics of Clara Zetkin and Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai, women’s emancipation was “an uncontested core principle” in the early years of the Comintern, one that was “actively promoted” at its international conferences. Forthright addresses by pioneering “Eastern” Communists like Naciye Hanim, Khaver Shabanova-Karayeva, and Bibinur, “insisting on the autonomy of the struggle for women’s rights,” illustrated for Studer how “Communism had found a new ally in feminism”:

By proactively ensuring women a role at the Baku Congress, the Comintern clearly signalled the importance it accorded to the emancipation of Muslim women, and of women in traditional-patriarchal societies in general. In the process, the Comintern also made women the subjects of their own liberation.

Studer depicts the experience of gender and sexual freedom achieved by (some) women in the Comintern era. An egalitarian feminism came together with “the 1920s discourse of sexual reform,” in which communists participated. Animated by notions of “the New Woman,” young female Comintern operatives rejected bourgeois values and patriarchal norms, engaging in an effervescent lifestyle of utopian experimentation.

Studer identifies “a liberalization of sexual practices” and “changes in the relationship between the sexes” among her characters, involving open relationships, informal marriages, brief affairs, and children sired to different fathers. Given this revolutionary libertine sexual ethic, “the boundary between political/professional and private relationships” among Cominternians, unsurprisingly, “was often fluid.” Homosexuality too was “tolerated when not entirely accepted,” while several Comintern employees followed in the footsteps of Munzenberg and Gross as tenants of the sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, an early advocate for gay and trans rights: Hirschfeld, Studer notes, was “himself a Social Democrat, but quite open to Communism.”

This spirit was alive among women communists across the Comintern’s transnational world: in China, Agnes Smedley “not only found reassurance that she was still sexually attractive despite her almost forty years, but also came to realize the importance of the Chinese Revolution for women’s emancipation.” Yet it was in Germany that the Comintern’s female operatives were most immersed in the atmosphere of gender and sexual emancipation, amid the “new and radical forms of life and art” permeating Babylon Berlin:

Communist Party members encountered progressive intellectuals, artists, journalists, directors, actors and musicians in pubs, at the theatre performances and, last but not least, in meeting halls. . . . There were evenings of intellectual discussion, lectures on Marxism, readings of avant-garde literature. Comintern employees from other countries also enjoyed the lively intellectual and artistic life of the city, some of them becoming energetic contributors to it.

In spite of this progressive atmosphere, however, Studer explains how gender continually proved to be the single most important factor in determining a given revolutionary’s role in the Comintern. In practice, women were largely excluded from positions of authority, while supplying most recruits for “administrative, secretarial and linguistic” work. Women’s labor for the Comintern was, she stresses, “indispensable” for its operations, yet the International ultimately proved to be “no different to interwar civil society in simply not considering women fit for leadership or political responsibility.”

The persistence of the old gender regime within the Comintern “despite its ostensible commitment to the equality of the sexes” was ironically most pronounced in the family lives of the travelers themselves. Whereas single women communists were “more likely to be seen as independent political actors,” Studer explains, “the Comintern tended to treat wives as appendages to their husbands.” With men assigned the work of international revolution and women with that work’s administrative and social reproduction, Smedley experienced the absolute reliance of her spouse Virendranath Chattopadhyaya upon her ancillary labor as “the typically male exploitation of a female partner.”

Studer portrays this dynamic at length in her postmortem account of the nomadic marriage of M. N. Roy and California-born Evelyn Trent, beset with “hardships and strains” including male chauvinism: “Roy’s commitment to the Revolution did not automatically make him a feminist. As Roy apparently confided to [Henk] Sneevliet, ‘he did not like the combination of wife and politician.’”

The contradiction between the revolutionary-utopian feminism of many women Cominterians and the enduring patriarchal reality became sharper, Studer suggests, as the Soviet Union under Stalin regressed from many of the tentative gains for women’s emancipation that had been instituted following the Bolshevik Revolution. Studer details the “astonishment and horror” of many foreign communists at the 1936 recriminalization of abortion: “The Soviet Union, of all places, was going to backtrack on the right they had insistently demanded for women in the West.”

Darkness at Noon

Travellers of the World Revolution’s status as a work of immense tragedy is revealed most poignantly in the book’s closing passages — though the turning of the historical tide against the Cominternians becomes painfully conspicuous from Studer’s gloomy China chapters onward. The rigors of their mission and the dread prospect of its failure proved exhausting for many of Studer’s protagonists. As Trent confessed in a 1927 letter to Sneevliet, who like her was about to depart the Comintern: “I was so weary of being hunted from place to place, from country to country, of having to hide and always to be surrounded by a terrible fog of suspicion and fear, and to have others suspect and fear me.”

Police forces represent the unrelenting antagonists of the travelers throughout Studer’s account: Roy once complained that the British imperial police had pursued him “from Java to Japan, from China to the Philippines, to America, to Mexico and through most of the countries in Europe.” He was eventually imprisoned for six years in the Raj following his expulsion from the Comintern.

Political persecution and legal repression intensified internationally from the time of Chiang Kai-shek’s white terror in 1927. Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy in Germany, as Studer recounts, prompted the collapse of the most powerful nonruling Communist party “like a house of cards,” severely tightening the vise grip.

Seventeen of Studer’s traveler were ultimately murdered by the Nazis, while others fell victim to anti-communist forces in China, Japan, and Spain. However, the majority of her protagonists who came to a violent end did so in the course of the purges that Stalin unleashed against the cadres of international communism. Studer depicts in nightmarish detail the social enormity and intimate psychic terror of “Stalin’s wholesale attack on the cosmopolitan milieu of the Comintern.” Stalin himself is a curiously peripheral presence throughout the book, until his emergence in its final chapters as a grim reaper to “cut a swathe through the ranks of Comintern employees.”

Detailing the nauseous tailspin toward what Studer has previously called “the ‘Shakespearian’ finale of the world movement,” she narrates the paths several of her protagonists followed on their way to open opposition to Stalinism and its zigzagging international policy (often having previously denounced close comrades who had become “oppositionists” sooner than them). Such defiance ensured their ejection from the Comintern family. In the context of concatenating international defeats and the consolidation of Stalin’s absolutist dictatorship in the USSR, any form of pluralism within the Comintern was increasingly considered suspect: “Free discussion died out, and by the mid-1930s dissent had been criminalized.”

As Stalin’s persecution of his defeated opponents among the Bolsheviks ramped up in the aftermath of Sergei Kirov’s assassination, the merest suspicion of oppositional tendencies among Cominternians in Moscow became “cataclysmic in its consequences.” The Hotel Lux, once a haven for Studer’s travelers, became a prison house pervaded by “fear and mutual distrust,” with eighty-three of the Comintern staff members who occupied the building shot, while many others took their own lives.

Once the “carrousel of accusations” began turning, victims could include not only onetime supporters of Trotsky or Bukharin, but also many loyal Stalinists. Studer provides a close view of the trajectory of Heinz Neumann: at first one of “Stalin’s blue-eyed boys” in the KPD leadership, he eventually criticized the party line and was later arrested in Moscow and put through an annihilating process of interrogation and “self-abasement” before his execution in November 1937.

Neumann’s fate captures in microcosm the “road to Calvary” walked by fifty-seven other travelers named in Studer’s account (and innumerable thousands of Soviet Communist Party members). Neumann’s wife Margarete, deemed guilty by association with her husband, ended up among the hundreds of German communists who were deported back to Hitler’s clutches in 1940.

Stalin’s Terror proved to be history’s greatest exercise in the mass murder of communists, surpassing the accomplishments in that arena of Hitler, Chiang Kai-shek, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Syngman Rhee, Suharto, Ruhollah Khomeini, or any of Latin America’s military dictators. The great majority of Studer’s travelers who survived the purge years did so simply because they weren’t in Moscow at the time. As the US Trotskyist Max Shachtman once said of the CPUSA’s interwar leader Earl Browder, who was subsequently expelled from the party: “There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse.” That is not to suggest that the long arm of Stalin’s secret police met its limit at the Soviet border: Studer reminds us of the killings of Andreu Nin in Barcelona and Willi Münzenberg in a French forest.

On Studer’s telling, the end of the Comintern was a fait accompli long before its formal dissolution “without fanfare” in May 1943, as a sop to Stalin’s wartime Anglo-American allies. Moscow had already abandoned the Comintern officials based in Germany to fend for themselves after the Nazi takeover. By 1933, she contends, “in terms of Stalin’s foreign policy, the Comintern was an irrelevance.”

Thereafter “largely paralysed by the repression” inside the USSR from 1935, while the International’s Spanish mission ended in a bloody rout, the Comintern’s anti-fascist struggle in Europe was finally debilitated “in one fell swoop” by Moscow’s disorienting 1939 pact with “the arch enemy whom the Comintern agents considered here had devoted years of their lives to fighting.” Studer thus depicts the defeat of her travelers as one born of protracted intellectual suffocation, moral enervation, and overwhelming physical persecution as much as formal termination.

The Consolations of History

Concluding on the emotional note of the fall of France in summer 1940, Studer’s narrative takes its leave of the reader at midnight in the century. After 1938, she writes, “the future-oriented time of the Communists came to a halt.” Studer paints a picture of colossal, generational defeat, with few of the travelers who survived Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s genocides, and the wider apocalyptic maelstrom of World War II remaining unscathed.

Some, like Czechoslovakia’s Klement Gottwald, Hungary’s Mátyás Rákosi, and East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht became petty tyrants after the war, having emerged intact enough from the rending machine of High Stalinism to serve as viceroys in its new client hinterland throughout Eastern Europe. Others ended up broken into pessimistic, pro-American anti-communism: denouncing The God That Failed, informing on former comrades for Joseph McCarthy, or collaborating with the CIA. These two abject paths out of the world revolution represented twin historic tragedies, both of which reflected the demoralization of so many who had survived from the revolutionary “generation of 1920.” It’s bleak stuff.

However, not all of the travelers were bankrupted by the experience of defeat. China’s Zhou Enlai and Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, alumni of the Stalinist Comintern par excellence, led world-shaking anti-imperialist revolutions in their own countries that inspired the next great global revolutionary wave, that of the anti-colonial 1960s. Palmiro Togliatti spurred the partigiano insurrection against fascism at the head of Italy’s Communist Party, while Hilde Kramer helped devise Britain’s National Health Service.

A figure who is absent from Studer’s book, Moses Kotane, a graduate of the Comintern’s International Lenin School, proved instrumental in the formation of the alliance between the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party that eventually brought down apartheid. The revolutionary energies of international communism’s greatest generation could never be sapped entirely.

With her global account of their collective enterprise, Brigitte Studer has done unparalleled scholarly justice to the total experience of the revolutionary women and men for whom the Communist International was “a way of living the world.” Hers is an essential text for any reader seeking to understand what being a communist meant in an age where world revolution appeared genuinely on the cards.

Socialists of any stripe in the twenty-first century will recognize the personalities they meet throughout Studer’s narrative in their own lives, and for good reason. In their aspirations, pursuits, victories, failures, and even crimes, the professional revolutionaries of the Communist International were our comrades, and they remain so across time. This book is a worthy tribute to their revolutionary lives as they really lived them, and to the dream they lived them for. Travellers of the World Revolution, presente!