Norman LaPorte

Towards a comparative history of Communism: the British and German Communist parties to 1933

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 inspired the formation of communist parties across the world. These, in turn, affiliated to the Communist International founded by the Bolsheviks in 1919, through which the national parties adopted a uniform organization, policy and theory. This article seeks to survey the development of the German and British communist parties between 1918 and 1933, examining the extent to which their experiences can be compared and contrasted within the increasingly uniform paradigm established by the Communist International under pressure from Stalins Soviet Union. By so doing, it rejects traditional monocausal arguments based exclusively on the machinations of Soviet power politics, suggesting instead that to understand the history of communism both nationally and internationally, it is necessary to consider a complex interaction of indigenous and external factors.

Ostpolitik before Ostpolitik: The British Labour Party and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), 1955-64

In 1955 West Germany joined NATO, while East Germany joined the Warsaw Pact. The GDR was not recognized by Britain, as it followed the FRG’s Hallstein doctrine, according to which the FRG was the only legitimate German state. The Labour Party officially had no relations with the GDR, but after 1955 an increasing number of Labour MPs, including some senior figures, travelled to the GDR and openly voiced their opinion that the GDR should be recognized. Such visits produced tensions between the SPD and the Labour Party. The article analyses why the Labour Party risked those tensions. It asks where it differed in its assessment and its priorities from the SPD. And it explores how it sought to overcome the Cold War division of the continent by propagating a new Ostpolitik which preceded the better-known Ostpolitik pursued by Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr in the FRG after 1963

‘Stalinization’ and its Limits in the Saxon KPD, 1925–28

Using newly available documentation, this article re-examines the debate on the political development of the German Communist Party (KPD) during the mid-1920s. Initially, the history of the KPD was written as the history of the party’s subordination to Moscow. However, with the rise of social history, historians shifted the focus of their research to the ‘view from below’. Moscow’s omnipresence in the history of German communism was replaced by the KPD’s ability to formulate policy in response to specifically German socio-economic and political developments. Taking a position between the poles of this polarized debate, Saxony is used as a case study to demonstrate that although the party per se was ‘Stalinized’ it proved impossible to uproot the local membership from their immediate local environment. Factionalism represented the organized response of local activists against the intrusions of a remote leadership, whose promotion of Moscow’s ‘line’ clashed with their own everyday experience.

“Kings among their subjects”? Ernst Thälmann, Harry Pollitt and the leadership cult as stalinization'

The cogency and distinctiveness of Weber’s original concept of Stalinization lay in its precision. At a general level, several defining features of the Stalinized communist parties could already be regarded as axiomatic. Disciplined and centralized, according to the precepts of democratic centralism, through the projection of these characteristics internationally these parties always accepted the ultimate authority of the Communist International (Comintern) and explicitly prioritized the interests of the Soviet Union. Few now question that there is more to the history of communism than this. Nevertheless, as a description of its organizational modus operandi these issues are no more the subject of serious contention than the dates — ever sparser — of Comintern congresses or the location of its headquarters in Moscow. The problem with much historical literature on communist parties, even in quite sophisticated variants, is how much of it fails to get beyond such description and its thickening into narrative. Stalinism, conceived as this relationship of centralization and subordination, continues to be seen as providing both description and explanation — which means, in the last analysis, that nothing is explained. Easy exposition leads to easy refutation, and debates within the literature not infrequently have a ritualistic character.

Introduction: Stalinization and Communist Historiography

One of the difficulties in developing an international comparative historiography of communism has been the elusiveness of any agreed framework for transnational comparison. In other respects, the movement’s international scope and centralized methods of record-keeping seem ideally suited to comparative work. Since the opening of the Moscow archives in the early 1990s, transnational scholarly networks have also flourished, as have a series of published symposia and research bulletins attest.1 Nevertheless, between work on national communist parties and analyses of the supranational authority of the Communist International, or Comintern (1919–43), the limited development of genuine comparative work remains striking. E. H. Carr’s highly regarded studies might in this respect be seen as a sort of epitome of the literature, combining meticulous party studies with the ‘scene from Moscow’, and yet offering explicit comparison as little more than a subtext.2