Communist International

The Communist International, commonly abbreviated as the Comintern and also known as the Third International, was founded in Moscow in March 1919 at the initiative of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership of Soviet Russia. It was established as the successor to the Second International (1889–1916), which the Bolsheviks regarded as having collapsed into "social-chauvinism" when its constituent socialist parties supported their own governments during the First World War. The Comintern's founding congress brought together revolutionary socialists committed to the overthrow of capitalism by violent means and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the Soviet model. Its programmatic basis was Leninist Marxism, and its constitution declared it the general staff of world revolution, a single global party with national sections subordinate to its central authority.

The defining instrument of the Comintern was the Twenty-One Conditions for admission, adopted at the Second Congress in 1920. These required affiliated parties to adopt the name "Communist," to expel reformists and pacifists, to organise on the principle of democratic centralism, to maintain illegal underground structures alongside legal work, and to subordinate themselves absolutely to the decisions of the Comintern's Executive Committee (ECCI). The organisation passed through several strategic phases: the revolutionary offensive of its early years; the "United Front" tactic of the mid-1920s urging cooperation with social democrats; the ultra-left "Third Period" (1928–1934) that denounced socialists as "social-fascists"; and finally the Popular Front line proclaimed at the Seventh and final Congress in 1935 under Georgi Dimitrov, which urged broad anti-fascist alliances. Increasingly the Comintern functioned as an instrument of Soviet state foreign policy under Joseph Stalin rather than an independent revolutionary centre.

The Comintern shaped communist movements across the colonial world, including India, where M.N. Roy participated in the 1920 Second Congress and clashed with Lenin over the "Colonial Theses" concerning whether communists should support bourgeois nationalist movements. The Communist Party of India traces its origins to this milieu, with the Tashkent group formed in 1920 and the Kanpur conference of 1925. Stalin formally dissolved the Comintern in May 1943, a gesture of reassurance to his Western Allies during the Second World War, though Soviet coordination of foreign communist parties continued informally and was later partly revived through the Cominform (1947–1956).

For the UPSC examination the Comintern appears principally in the World History segment of General Studies Paper I, within the study of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the rise of socialism and communism, and the inter-war international order. Typical question angles include the distinction between the Second and Third Internationals, the significance of the Twenty-One Conditions, the M.N. Roy–Lenin debate on colonial strategy and its bearing on Indian nationalism, and the reasons for the Comintern's 1943 dissolution. Candidates should connect it to the broader theme of how revolutionary ideology interacted with anti-colonial movements and with the diplomacy of the Stalin era.