Layer 1

Lenin’s Comintern Revisited

Buy hardcover (Brill)
Published Nov 2025

John Riddell

Author: John Riddell
The Communist International (or ‘Comintern’) was launched in 1919 to promote worldwide extension of the 1917 workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Russia. During the Comintern’s first years under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, it proposed and tested strategic and tactical concepts that retain their value and continue to be studied. While the Communist International was soon to be deformed and destroyed by the rise of bureaucracy and authoritarianism associated with Stalinism, its perspective on the fight for international revolutionary change still presents a compelling vision, and is an inspiring example for millions throughout the world.

Biographical Note

John Riddell is the founder and longtime general editor of the Comintern Publishing Project, which since 1983 has revolutionised the study of the Communist International, making its ideas and experiences available to new generations of activists and scholars alike.

Readership

The book is especially relevant to academic libraries, institutes, and historians, including (post)graduate students specializing in the history of communism, socialism, and youth movements during the interwar period.

Table of Contents

Foreword
The Comintern Publishing Project

1 Introduction: The Comintern Publishing Project

2 The Second International: Birth and Death

3 Toward a New International

4 Founding the New International (1919)

5 Achieving a Mass International (1919–1920)
Addendum: Theses on the Conditions of Admission to the Communist International

6 National Freedom and the Baku Congress (1920)

7 Advances and Setbacks (1920–1921)

8 Impatience for Bolder Initiatives: The March Action (1921)

9 ‘To the Masses’: The Third World Congress (1921)

10 Toward the United Front

11 Adoption of the United-Front Policy (1921–1922)

12 Party Organisation: Shaping a Policy

13 Implementing International Centralism (1922–1923)

14 The Communist Women’s Movement

15 Comintern Outreach: The Auxiliary Organisations

16 Fascism: The Search for a Response

17 For Global Black Liberation

18 The Comintern in 1922: The Periphery Pushes Back

19 The Soviet Republic and World Communism

20 The Workers’ Government – Evolution of a Concept

21 The Comintern as a School of Strategy

22 The Comintern and Asia 1919–1925: Fruits and Perils of the ‘Bloc from Within’

23 The Democratic Character of Socialist Revolution

24 Fateful Choices (1922–1923)

25 The ‘German October’ of 1923: A Failed Bid for Workers’ Power

26 The Emergence of Stalinism

27 Legacy of an International

References
Index