Present-day English-speaking historians on the tactics of the Comintern in 1928–1934

The article is devoted to the analysis of the assessments given by present-day English-speaking historians to the tactics of the Communist International referred to as the tactics of class against class. The article presents the assessments of the researchers adhering to the traditionalist and revisionist paradigms in the comprehension of the topic. Their attitude towards the Comintern determines their views on the tactics of class against class. The traditionalists find arguments confirming its harmfulness and destructiveness both for individual communist parties and for countries and regions as a whole, arguing that in 1928–34 many talented leaders were expelled from communist parties, which greatly weakened the role and decreased the significance of the latter; miscalculations of the Comintern leadership, who ignored the specificity of local conditions, most often led to the isolation of those parties and decreased their political authority in the labor movement. Revisionists most often come to the conclusion that during the period under consideration this tactics was quite appropriate and most often justify it, among other things, by the specific political situation in Europe and in the world. Historians who adhere to this trend initially based their judgment mainly on guesswork, but in the context of the opening of archives, they managed to produce an impressive set of arguments that made their positions quite strong. By studying the national and the local levels, scholars found out that during the Third Period of the Comintern, it was the communists (sometimes allied with socialists and social democrats) who resolved the issues of unemployment, race, protection of workers’ rights, etc. at the level of individual countries and regions quite often and successfully; a number of international organizations were established; the communist movement gained popularity not only among workers but also among the intelligentsia. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the assessments of the class-against-class tactics by modern English-speaking historians are combined in one study for the first time. The information base of the research includes the monographs and articles devoted to the activities of the Comintern and its foreign sections that have been published in recent decades in the English-speaking countries: Great Britain, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

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