Word: comintern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...FIRST step I made was to put my best foot forward, ideologically-speaking. I hitched a ride with a quasi-legal import-export merchant to Nicaragua and then took an arms freighter to Cuba where I was able to register with the Comintern and buy some identification papers. I was now Rutger Gorbachev, long lost grand-nephew, twice removed, from the Soviet premier. I figured the pull might be useful later...
...book chronicles in excruciating detail the sordid Machiavellianism of the Comintern during Stalin's dictatorship, focusing on its already well--documented betrayal of the Republican Spanish government during the 1935-1938 civil war against Generslisimo Francisco Franco. It also shows that Stalin's idea of "socialism in one country" at the expense of the international resolutionary movement can lead only to the abandonment of worker democracy and the disintegration into state capitalism. Under state capitalism, communist countries must oppress their own workers in order to compete with capitalist nations. The Soviet Union had followed this path away from genuine socialism...
Because of Stalin's desire to attain a rapprochement with the West as the spectre of German and Italian militarism grew large the Spanish government became expendable Carr quotes a Soviet intelligence officer's account of a split in the Comintern between those that feared to provoke the animosity of France (these included Stalin), and those who felt that there was no moral choice but to come to the defense of the Republic These last Stalin branded as Protskyites...
...anarchists and the Trotskyites rose up in Barcelona but were crushed after a desperate struggle. The government blamed the Trotskyites leaders and dupes who engaged in "conscious lying, conscious provocation conscious support for Fascism." The Comintern engineered a switch in leadership, from the revolutionary socialist Largo Caballero to the moderate Negrin According to Carr. "The revolutionary ardor so easily whipped up in the summer and autumn of 1936 to fire the struggle against Fascism, had given place to the cool calculations of diplomacy: Spain was a pawn on the Eruopean chess board...
Carr asserts and convincingly defends, the thesis that once the revolution was seen merely in strategic terms by the Stalinist Comintern, the people's cause was as good as lost. The Civil War was a microcosm of the failure of the Soviet state to follow through Mars's call for the uniting of the world's workers. Unfortunately, Carr Shows only a little sympathy for the Trotskyites forces who refused to see the necessary distinction between the progression of socialism and the defeat of Fascism. His argument implies the moral failure of any reasonably strategic socialist country, and this reflects...