Editor’s Note:¶
Core Argument¶
The editor’s note to the Second World Congress of the Communist International establishes the event’s historical and political significance as a landmark gathering of the international revolutionary movement. Held from 17 July to 7 August 1920, the Congress opened in Petrograd with a report by Lenin on the world situation and the tasks of the Comintern, before relocating to Moscow for its remaining sessions. Despite the ongoing Allied blockade, the Congress drew 218 delegates from thirty-seven countries across Europe, America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, of whom 169 held decisive votes and forty-nine consultative votes. The note thereby underscores the breadth and ambition of the early Comintern, which aimed to coordinate a genuinely global revolutionary struggle.
The core of the digest is a summary of the major reports and discussions that defined the Congress agenda. Zinoviev delivered reports on the role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution and on the conditions of admission to the Communist International, the latter a key mechanism for enforcing Bolshevik discipline on nascent communist parties. Lenin reported on the national and colonial questions, a subject of lasting theoretical importance. Bukharin addressed parliamentarianism, Radek the trade union movement, and Zinoviev the conditions for organising Soviets. Trotsky presented the Manifesto at the concluding session. A notable discussion on 6 August concerned the entry of Communists into the British Labour Party, a tactical question that exposed tensions between revolutionary purity and practical engagement with mass reformist organisations. The Congress concluded by electing an Executive Committee.
The note carries a pointed polemical thrust in its final sentence. It lists the Russian Bolshevik delegation—Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, Rykov, Ryazanov, Tomsky, Krupskaya, Pokrovsky, Rudzutak, and others—and then adds parenthetically: “Stalin was so unimportant at the time that he was not included in the delegation.” This is a deliberate historical corrective, aimed at the later Stalinist cult that retroactively inflated Stalin’s role in the early Bolshevik leadership. The note insists that in 1920, Stalin was a marginal figure, excluded from the delegation to the Comintern’s second congress, and that the real architects of the international communist movement were Lenin, Trotsky, and their collaborators. This is a quiet but unmistakable strike against the Stalinist rewriting of history.