The Young Communist International and Its Origins

The Young Communist International existed for twenty-three and a half years: founded in Berlin in November 1919, wound up with the Communist International in May 1943. This is a history of it, and the striking thing about the book is its shape. Roughly eighty-seven per cent of the text covers the years up to 1921. The organisation's remaining twenty-two years get six per cent, and its dissolution gets a single sentence.

That disproportion is worth knowing about in advance, because it should not be the first thing said. The first thing is that the long opening is real history, done well, from sources most English readers have never had access to. Privalov is a working historian of the youth movement and the apparatus is his own: Russian congress stenograms, the CPSU resolutions series, German documentary collections published in East Berlin, runs of Jugend Internationale and l'Humanite, and the archives. Chapter I traces the socialist youth organisations from Ghent in 1886 through the war; chapter II covers 1917 to the founding congress; chapter III the Second Congress of July 1921 and the year around it.

The formation of the communist youth movement - its quarrel with the social-democratic leagues, the question of whether a youth international should be politically independent of the adult parties, the Berlin founding and the Moscow congress that followed - is narrated here in more detail than in any other account available in English. Whatever the book does with the twenty-two years it hurries past, it is the standard source for the two it takes seriously.

Translated by Nicholas Bobrov, edited by Kathleen Cook.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the sentence in which the organisation ceases to exist.