7th World Congress of the Comintern

The Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) was a multinational conference held in Moscow from 25 July to 20 August 1935 by delegated representatives of ruling and non-ruling communist parties from around the world and invited guests representing other political and organized labor organizations. The gathering was attended by 513 delegates, of whom 371 were accorded full voting rights, representing 65 Comintern member parties as well as 19 sympathizing parties.

The gathering is best remembered for its endorsement of a Popular Front of communist and non-communist forces against the growing menace of fascism in Europe, paving the way for advocacy of collective security between the Soviet Union and the various capitalist states of Europe. This marked a dramatic reversal of the Comintern's previous orientation towards class warfare endorsed by the 6th World Congress of 1928, the aggressive line of the "Third Period".

History

Background

Throughout the early 1930s the Soviet Union's People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, headed by Maxim Litvinov, had pursued a policy of attempting to win a broad international agreement to bring about military disarmament. This initiative had clearly reached a terminal impasse from the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, however, with the new political reality writ large by the October 1933 departure of Nazi Germany from the Geneva disarmament negotiations.

Still, there was little motion among the world communist movement towards construction of a broader united front with the socialist movement and their affiliated trade unions, with the Comintern continuing to train its rhetorical guns on the social democratic movement, which was held to have sabotaged the effort of the Communist Party of Germany to wage battle against fascism by propagating what the communists characterized as its "anti-Marxist theory of a 'peaceful,' 'democratic' road to socialism" among the German workers' movement.

There were some within the communist movement who began feeling their way to a new more collaborative orientation, however. The February 1934 Uprising of Socialists against right wing forces in Austria and movement towards cooperation between Socialists and Communists in France in fighting a nascent fascist movement there convinced Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, a leading figure in the Communist International that the Comintern's hostility towards joint action between Communists and Socialists was ill-considered. Dimitrov made his triumphant return to Moscow in April 1934 following acquittal in the Reichstag Fire trial determined to change the Comintern's fundamental strategy from one of antagonistic opposition to social democracy to one of cooperation in a joint struggle.