ABSTRACT
The United Front of Socialists and Communists against the menace of Nazism, for which the Communist International had campaigned so single-mindedly since 1935, was laid in ruins. The hopes entertained by many Socialists that the split could indeed be overcome received new impetus from the dissolution of the Communist International in May 1943. In all of Europe—with the exception of Britain, which had successfully resisted invasion, and Sweden and Switzerland, which were both spared invasion altogether—Fascism had crushed Socialist and Communist parties alike. Even as the disintegration of the Grand Alliance had broken the links between the Socialists and the Communists, so did the imperialistic rivalries between the two Communist super-powers, only thinly veiled by ideological slogans, destroy the unity of world Communism. The destiny of international working-class unity had therefore come to depend on friendly relations between Communist Russia and a United States whose social system and political ideology formed an antithesis to Communism.
