Lenin's Concept of the United Front

The spread of Bolshevik theory beyond the eastern fringes of Soviet Russia soon faced serious limitations. Other than tiny groups of left-wing radicals, no one seemed eager to convert to Bolshevism. Most intellectuals held nationalist views, and the masses found those easier to understand than the abstract ideas of internationalism. “Pure” Bolshevik tactics aimed at the preparation of permanent revolution were unlikely to be very effective in the East. The task of ideological penetration that the Russian Communists faced gave rise to the question of how to adapt their theory to the particular conditions in countries at once industrially more backward than Russia and in a state of colonial and semi-colonial dependence. Lenin was the first to understand this, and it was he who shaped a new perspective:

The task is to arouse the working masses to revolutionary activity, to independent action and to organization, regardless of the level they have reached; to translate the true communist doctrine, which was intended for the Communists of the more advanced countries, into the language of every people. ¹

There ensued some revisions of the Bolsheviks’ interpretation of the world socialist revolution. Soviet leaders began to consider it not as “solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians of each country against their bourgeoisie”, but rather “a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries against international imperialism.” ² This approach underlay the effort to construct a new foundation for the Comintern’s China policy. The core constituted a special theory of anti-colonial revolution, which the Communist International began to elaborate in the summer of 1920, on the eve of its Second Congress.