Editor’s Note:¶
Core Argument¶
The editor’s note situates the First to Second Congress of the Communist International within a compressed eighteen-month span of revolutionary crisis and counter-revolutionary consolidation. The core argument is that this interval, from March 1919 to July 1920, was simultaneously the decisive phase of the Russian Civil War and the peak of post-war revolutionary ferment in Europe. The note establishes that the military survival of Soviet Russia was not yet assured: the liquidation of Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich’s second offensive against Petrograd in October 1919 had removed the most immediate White threats, but by March 1920 Poland had resumed military operations, capturing Kiev by May. The Red Army’s counter-offensive recaptured Kiev and pushed into Poland, only to suffer defeat at Warsaw in August 1920, as the Second Congress concluded.
The European context is presented as a wave of uprisings and strikes, with the Hungarian Soviet Republic formed on 21 March 1919 and overthrown on 1 August 1919, and the Bavarian Soviet Republic established on 14 April 1919, lasting only until 1 May. These dates underscore the brevity and intensity of revolutionary openings. The note also records the stabilisation of bourgeois power: the signing of the Versailles Treaty on 28 June 1919, the inauguration of the Weimar Republic on 31 July 1919, and the electoral triumph of the National Bloc in France in November 1919. The Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch of 12-19 March 1920 is cited as the first open offensive of the German counter-revolution.
Against this backdrop, the Communist International is presented as having recorded major successes, organising sections of the world Communist movement in country after country. The note’s polemical thrust is implicit but clear: it argues against any conception of the revolutionary wave as a spontaneous or easily sustained process. The chronology demonstrates that revolutionary victories were fleeting and immediately contested, that the survival of the Soviet state was precarious, and that the Comintern’s organisational work proceeded under conditions of extreme military and political pressure. The note thus frames the Second Congress not as a gathering of triumphant revolutionaries, but as a council of war held in the midst of a still-unresolved global struggle.