The Young Communist International existed for twenty-three and a half years. It was founded in Berlin in November 1919 and it was wound up, with the Communist International of which it was a section, in May 1943. This book is a history of it, in sixty thousand words, published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in English translation in 1971. It gives the years up to 1921 some fifty thousand words, and the ending one sentence.
That disproportion is the subject of this introduction, but it should not be the first thing said about the book, because the first thing to say is that a good deal of it is real history, done well, from sources most English readers have never had access to. What follows is an account of both halves.
Start with the date, because the spine and the text are not the same year. The English edition is 1971; the Russian text behind it was finished around 1970. The latest events it can cite are all 1969: the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties held in Moscow in June 1969, whose main document the Introduction quotes at length; Nixon's establishment of a White House youth office in February 1969; the World Federation of Democratic Youth's Lenin-centenary appeal of May 1969. A photograph caption records the opening of a World Youth Rally in Moscow on 31 May 1970. The most recent book cited is V. I. Lenin on Youth (Moscow, 1970). The current party programme throughout is the one adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress of the CPSU — that is, 1961; the Twenty-Fourth Congress of March–April 1971 is naturally absent, but so is the Twenty-Third of 1966. This is a manuscript of 1970, issued in English the following year, and it reads like a book prepared for the Lenin centenary and the YCI's own fiftieth anniversary.
The front matter is unusually bare. It names Nick Bobrov as translator and Kathleen Cook as editor, and gives the author as V. V. Privalov. It offers no biography, no institute, no academic rank, and it would be easy and dishonest to supply one. What can be said about the author's position is what the footnotes say: he has worked in Russian-language congress stenograms, in the CPSU resolutions series, in German documentary collections published in East Berlin, in runs of Jugend Internationale and l'Humanité, and in the archives. He is a working historian of the youth movement, and the apparatus is his own.
The architecture, though, is the argument. Of roughly 57,000 words of body text, chapters I to III account for 49,831 — and they end in 1921. Chapter I covers the socialist youth organisations from Ghent in 1886 to the First World War and the Russian leagues; chapter II covers 1917 to the founding congress of November 1919; chapter III covers the Second Congress of July 1921 and the year around it. Chapter IV, 7,014 words, is asked to carry everything from 1922 to 1970. Its first section — 3,295 words — runs from the Third Congress of the Russian league to the end of the Second World War. Its second section, slightly longer, is a survey of the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students in the present day.
So: eighty-seven per cent of the book on the movement's first thirty-five years, of which barely two are years in which the Young Communist International actually existed; six per cent on its remaining twenty-two years of life; and six per cent on the organisations that came after it. A history of an institution shaped like that is telling you something before you read a word of it.
Here is the whole of what the book says about the end of its subject. It stands where the war narrative has just reached the Resistance:
Judging it inexpedient to maintain a single centre for the international working-class movement because this partly gave rise to bourgeois slander about "Moscow's interference" in other countries' internal affairs, the Executive Committee of the Communist International adopted a resolution on May 15, 1943, to disband the Third Communist International. This decision, approved by the Communist parties of the world and the Young Communist International, meant that the international communist youth organisation would also cease to exist as a section of the Communist International.
Four things are worth noticing, and they are all in the grammar.
The Young Communist International never acts. It approves, and then it "would also cease to exist" — in a subordinate clause, in the conditional-past, as a consequence of a decision taken by a different body. The organisation whose founding congress this book narrates over a dozen pages, delegate by delegate, resolution by resolution, is dissolved without a meeting, a vote, a date or a name.
The reason given is offence. Not the alliance with Britain and the United States, not the second front, not anything about the war; the Comintern is wound up because its existence gave rise to slander. This is, to be fair, one of the arguments the Comintern's own resolution of 15 May 1943 actually made, and Privalov is reproducing it. He is not reproducing the other one — the resolution's claim that the Communist parties had grown too mature to need an international centre — and it is easy to see why, since the preceding twenty pages have been about how the young leagues could not be trusted to run their own affairs.
The sentence is out of chronological order. It sits between a paragraph on the wartime Resistance and a paragraph that returns to "Mankind faced a terrible threat during the Second World War" and then goes on to a Moscow youth rally of September 1941. The book steps forward to 1943, disposes of the dissolution, and steps back to 1941 to resume. Whether that was Privalov's decision or an editor's, the effect is that the reader passes the death of the subject in transit and does not stop.
And nothing follows from it. The next sentence — "Closely linked with the Communist parties and continuing the YCI's best traditions, the communist youth organisations are consistently and staunchly defending the young working people's interests in every country" — jumps to the present tense and to organisations that are not the YCI. There is no successor named, no explanation of why the World Federation of Democratic Youth, founded in London in November 1945, is a different kind of body from the one just abolished, and no acknowledgement that the WFDY was a broad front rather than a communist international. The book refers to YCI congresses down to the Sixth, held in Moscow in the autumn of 1935, and then refers to no more — without ever telling the reader that the Sixth was the last one held.
The tell is in the Introduction, seventy pages earlier, and it is the most honest sentence in the book:
The Young Communist International, which helped to disseminate Marxist-Leninist ideas among young workers in many countries, was the Third International's reliable helpmate and reserve for almost 25 years.
Was. Almost 25 years. The arithmetic of 1919 to 1943 is right there, in the past tense, at the front of the book — and the reader who does the subtraction is the only one who will be told when the story ends.
The companion volume in this series, The Komsomol: Questions and Answers (Progress, 1980), cannot name a single leader of the Soviet youth league from before the sitting incumbent. Privalov can, and does. This is the more interesting case, because the erasure here works differently.
Lazar Shatskin appears nine times, always favourably, always as a figure of consequence. He is the Russian league's delegate to the Berlin founding congress in November 1919, carrying a mandate for an international "linked with the Third International". He delivers the first report there. He is the man whose delayed return home is the reason the YCI's foundation was not announced in the Soviet press until 10 February 1920. He argues down "youth syndicalism" in Yuny Kommunist. In June 1921 he and Willi Münzenberg jointly write to Lenin asking for ten or fifteen minutes of his time. Privalov quotes him directly: "If we want our organisation to retain its influence on the international youth movement, we must always bear in mind that all the West European organisations are looking to our league for an example." He was the Young Communist International's first secretary, and this book treats him as one of its founders.
His last appearance is in 1921. Shatskin was expelled from the party at the end of 1932 as part of what the authorities called a secret faction — Trotsky, writing in exile, named it in The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) as "a secret faction organized by Syrtsov, Lominadze, Shatskin and Sten" — and he was shot in 1937.
Alexander Kosarev appears twice, both times in chapter IV, both times as "first secretary of the CC LYCLSU": leading the Soviet delegation to the anti-war and anti-fascist youth congress in Paris in autumn 1933, and speaking at the world youth congress in Geneva in September 1936, where the book quotes him — "let us consolidate peace!" That September 1936 speech is the last we hear of him. He was arrested in November 1938 and shot in February 1939.
Willi Münzenberg appears eleven times — the book prints his name with a scanning error throughout, which I have corrected here — and the treatment is generous. He is the secretary of the Youth International bureau from the Berne conference of spring 1915; he reports on the draft political programme at the Berlin founding congress; he makes the Executive Committee's report at the Second Congress in 1921. Privalov quotes his recollection of Lenin at length: "The greatest contribution to the rapid revolutionary development of the Socialist Youth International after the Berne Conference was made by Lenin himself." He was the YCI's founding secretary, and this book gives him his due.
His last appearance is June 1921. Münzenberg broke with the Comintern in the late 1930s and was expelled; he was found dead in a wood in southern France in the autumn of 1940, in circumstances that have never been settled and are still argued about.
That is the pattern, and it is precise: the three men who built the organisation are named, credited and quoted, and each of them stops existing at the moment the book's detailed narrative stops — 1921 for two of them, 1936 for the third. Nobody is expelled, nobody is arrested, nobody dies. Shatskin and Kosarev were rehabilitated in the 1950s, which is why a 1971 book can print their names at all; the 1980 catechism, aimed at a less specialist reader, dropped them again. But rehabilitation restored the name, not the death. This volume can tell you that Kosarev spoke at Geneva in 1936 and cannot tell you what happened to him two years later, and it is the second fact that explains why the Young Communist International held no congress after 1935.
The gap is visible in the raw counts. The year 1937 occurs once in the whole book, as the imprint date of a Moscow edition of Dimitrov in a footnote. The year 1938 does not occur at all. Between the Sixth Congress of 1935 and the dissolution sentence there are 943 words, and they consist of the Geneva congress, solidarity with Spain, a failed unity approach to the socialist youth in the summer of 1939, and the war.
Searched as whole words across all 59,988 words:
The first of these is the remarkable one. This is a Soviet history of the international communist movement from 1886 to 1970, published in Moscow, in which the name of the man who led the Soviet state for a quarter of that period never appears once. Fifteen years after the Twentieth Congress, the solution to Stalin was not to assess him but to route around him: the actors are "the Party", "the Communist International", "the CC LYCLSU". No purge, no terror, no cult, no rehabilitation — and, equally, no defence. The word "Komsomol" itself never appears; it is always RYCL or LYCLSU. This is history written in institutional abstract nouns precisely so that no person has to be held responsible for anything.
Trotsky's absence is more interesting than a simple nil return, because he is in the book without his name. Discussing the "vanguardism" of the early youth leagues, Privalov writes:
It should be noted that certain leaders of the working-class movement supported the young people in their vanguardism for some time. These leaders soon betrayed the cause of the working class. In their efforts to win over the young people, they called them the "vanguard's vanguard", the "party's barometer", and so on.
The barometer image is Trotsky's, from The New Course (1923). And the companion Progress volume of 1980 supplies the name that this one withholds, in almost the same words:
It is a known fact that in his fight against the Communist Party and Leninism, Trotsky set the youth against the Party apparatus and the veteran Party cadre, hardened in the revolutionary struggle, calling the youth 'the Party's most sensitive instrument' and referring to the students as 'the barometer of the revolution'.
Two books in the same series, nine years apart, running the same accusation: one with the name and no citation, one with the citation withheld along with the name. Neither tells the reader that the position being condemned — that the youth are the most sensitive index of a party's health — was a warning about bureaucratisation, or that its author was murdered in 1940 by the state that published both books.
The rule for judging an absence is whether the author had the fact and a reason to use it. Three qualify.
The turn of 1939–41. The book takes the anti-fascist line of the Seventh Comintern Congress and the YCI's Sixth Congress straight through to the Resistance without a break. The summer of 1939 brings one more failed approach to the socialist youth, blamed on the Young Socialist International's leaders. Then: "The absence of a united popular front greatly facilitated the unleashing of another world war." Then the Resistance. The words Molotov, Ribbentrop, non-aggression pact and Hitler do not occur in the book. The Comintern's line changed in September 1939 — from a united front against fascism to an imperialist war in which both camps were guilty — and changed back in June 1941, and the young communist leagues of France, Britain and the United States had to change with it, at real cost. Privalov's narrative is constructed so that the twenty-two months in which the anti-fascist international was not anti-fascist simply do not exist. Two paragraphs later, the German invasion of the USSR is rendered as "The Soviet Union's entry into the war".
Czechoslovakia, August 1968. The final section carries the WFDY and IUS story right up to the book's own present: a consultative meeting of European youth organisations in Warsaw in 1967, an extraordinary WFDY session in Berlin in June 1967, another in Budapest in February 1968, an IUS solidarity conference held in Prague in March 1968. Prague in March 1968 — and not a word about August. The invasion split the international youth movement it is describing, and the book was written two years later. This is not chronology; the author had it and left it out.
The internal life of the leagues after 1922. Chapter IV's first section is not a history of the YCI at all. It is a history of Soviet international contacts: delegations that visited, letters that were exchanged, a Glasgow rally, a British youth delegation, an Austrian resolution, a review of international ties in 1928. The YCI's own Fourth Congress of 1924 is never mentioned. Its Fifth of 1928 appears once, as the body that praised the Soviet league. Its Sixth of 1935 appears twice, as an occasion at which Dimitrov, Pieck, Thorez, Togliatti and Gottwald spoke. The Executive Committee that dominates chapters II and III — which met, argued, split and reported — vanishes as an actor after 1921. The single source offered for the YCI's anti-war record in the late 1930s is a line from l'Humanité footnoted to an issue of August 1930.
A reader told that this book is worthless would be badly misled, and would miss the reason it is worth republishing.
Chapters I to III are a serious, source-based history of the socialist and communist youth internationals from 1886 to 1921, and much of the material in them has never been easily available in English. The first youth organisation, the Young Guards, set up at Ghent in 1886, and the wave that followed — Switzerland 1900, Italy 1901, Norway 1902, Austria 1904, Hungary and Denmark 1905, Germany, Spain and Finland 1906. The reformist counter-attack: the Hamburg and Nuremberg congresses of 1908 and the disbanding of the German youth organisations. Karl Liebknecht, who appears forty times in this book and is treated throughout as the movement's founding figure, at Basle in November 1912 with twenty-four representatives from nineteen countries. The Berne conference of spring 1915 that re-established the Youth International bureau in Switzerland under Münzenberg and founded Jugend Internationale, which then put itself at the disposal of the Zimmerwald Left. International Youth Day, first observed on 3 October 1915 across seven countries by about 120,000 people. The all-German young workers' conference at Jena in April 1916. The German oppositional youth organisations that formed in Berlin, Dresden and Stuttgart and had, as Privalov says, no common leadership until 1916. Membership figures, congress agendas, resolutions quoted from the stenograms. The footnotes go to East German documentary collections, to Jugend Internationale by issue and date, to l'Humanité by issue number, to Liebknecht's collected writings. This is not decoration; the chapters are built on it.
More surprising is the candour of chapter II's account of the founding congress, which is not a triumphal narrative at all. Privalov records that the Berlin congress divided, and that the vote to adhere to the Communist International's platform was carried by seventeen to eight. He records that the congress manifesto "made no mention of the Communist parties' leading role in the revolutionary movement, but gave prominence to the youth leagues", and quotes it: "As always in all phases of the revolutionary class struggle we must be the vanguard of the masses. We must lead the way." He quotes the Executive Committee's own boast on the eve of the Second Congress — "That which millions of people are expecting of the Communist International is being realised in the Young Communist International" — and calls it the heyday of vanguardism. He notes, sharply, that "the printed report by the YCI Executive Committee distributed to congress delegates was the exact opposite of the report made by Willi Münzenberg there", and that the delegates went further than Münzenberg's self-criticism. He describes the February 1920 article in Youth International arguing for the leagues' ideological independence, and quotes it.
He also does something a propagandist would not: he reports a negative archival result. Of the Münzenberg–Shatskin letter to Lenin of 15 June 1921, he writes plainly that "the archives have no documents showing that Lenin dealt with this question". An author willing to print that is an author who has been in the files.
The frame is of course Leninist — every one of these disagreements is narrated as an error subsequently corrected, and the correction is always the subordination of the youth leagues to the parties. But the facts are on the page, and a reader who does not accept the frame can still use them. The historical question the early YCI actually posed — whether a revolutionary youth organisation is an instrument of a party or a political body with its own judgement — is stated here more fully than in most accounts, precisely because Privalov thinks it was settled.
Two errors worth flagging for anyone using the book: an editorial footnote dates the Zimmerwald conference to 1916, when it was held in September 1915; and the book's sole engagement with Western scholarship is to say that the "allegations made by such bourgeois historians as Ralf Fischer and Richard Cornell that Lenin 'made little mention of the young people and their problems' until 1917 are a downright lie" — an epithet offered in place of an argument, in a book that elsewhere argues carefully. Richard Cornell's Youth and Communism had appeared in 1965; Privalov does not engage with it again.
The dissolution of May 1943 was not a mystery to contemporaries, and the answer to Privalov's one sentence was in print within weeks.
The Socialist Workers Party's National Committee published its statement in Fourth International in June 1943 under the title "The Third International is Dead — Long Live the Fourth International!". Its central charge was procedural, and it is the charge Privalov's sentence is built to avoid:
In complete violation of the Comintern's own statutes, a ukase by Stalin's puppets in Moscow is sufficient, without any pretense of prior discussion in the constituent parties. The members of the Communist Party learned about the dissolution from the capitalist press.
Privalov writes that the decision was "approved by the Communist parties of the world and the Young Communist International". The statement of June 1943 says the members read about it in the newspapers. Both cannot be true, and Privalov offers no evidence for his version — no meeting, no resolution, no date. On the motive, the same statement was blunt: "For the moment the dissolution is a substantial gesture by Stalin to curry favor with Washington and Wall Street." Two years later, reviewing the whole arc in Fourth International of July 1945, the same journal put it in a line: "In May 1943, Stalin sealed his collaboration with the 'democracies' by formally dissolving the moribund Comintern." That analysis had been made in advance, in 1933, when the call for a Fourth International was issued on the argument that the Third had ceased to be a revolutionary body; readers who want the long form should go to Trotsky's The Third International After Lenin (1928), which is the direct answer to official histories of this kind.
The most useful single companion, though, is exactly contemporaneous with Privalov. Ernest Mandel's "Peaceful Coexistence and World Revolution", in the International Socialist Review for March–April 1970, traces the whole trajectory — from the Comintern's first four congresses through the adoption of socialism in one country to "the decline and fall of the Comintern, and finally its dissolution by Stalin in 1943". Privalov was writing the same year, on the same subject, and the phrase "socialism in one country" does not occur in his book at all. That is the missing hinge. The Young Communist International was founded as the youth section of a world party of revolution; it was dissolved as a diplomatic courtesy by a state that had long since stopped wanting one. A history that cannot name the doctrine which made the second thing follow from the first is obliged to present the ending as an administrative detail, which is what this book does.
Read chapters I to III as what they are: a well-sourced history of the socialist youth internationals from Ghent in 1886 to Moscow in 1921, more detailed on the pre-1919 movement than almost anything else available in English, and unexpectedly frank about the arguments inside the young communist movement at its founding. Read the names in them — Shatskin, Münzenberg, Kosarev — and note where each of them stops.
Then read chapter IV against a clock. It has forty-nine years to cover and it uses seven thousand words, of which the dissolution of its own subject gets two sentences and the reason for it gets a subordinate clause about bourgeois slander. The founding of the Young Communist International is narrated hour by hour. Its death is narrated in the passive voice, out of order, and without a single name.
The book was published to mark fifty years of an organisation that had been dead for twenty-eight of them. It is a genuine piece of scholarship about the beginning, welded to an evasion about the end, and the seam between the two is the most instructive thing in it.