Word: comintern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...LAST WORK by the late English historian E.H. Carr;The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War represents the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant research on Russia and communism Deutscher. Wife of Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher, edits and introduces the book, left as an unfinished manuscript by Carr's death, and adds a "personal memoir" of its author, with whom she worked closely...
...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...
...that clandestine methods can be more cost effective than conventional combat: only 143 of Donovan's 16,000 agents were killed in action. "He gave the sons of the power elite a mission," Brown concludes. "He sent them, as the church had sent missionaries, and the Kremlin its Comintern apparatchiks, to every corner of the globe, to fight the Axis enemy and spread the American gospel of the Four Freedoms." Donovan also taught a still naive America that it was sometimes necessary to use questionable means to preserve freedom. Perhaps for that reason there have been no such heroes...