He was also a member of the National Assembly, with some interruptions, from 1924 to 1955; Secretary of Comintern from 1935 to 1943; and Political Commissar of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1938.

Although their sympathies lay with the Reds and not with the Whites, the crews' primary grievances were: (i) the slow rate of their demobilisation (following the end of World War I) and (ii) the small quantity and atrocious quality of the rations.

He was nevertheless duly arrested, tried, and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment at hard labour by a court-martial held in Constantinople in July 1919.

In the meantime, following the lead of numerous other Communist leaders, he campaigned against rising French militarism, being arrested and imprisoned in Paris's La Santé Prison.

[3] In a report in November 1937, a Comintern member and the head of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, insisted that he should "change radically his working methods" and "refrain from intervening in military and technical matters affecting the Brigades".

[citation needed] Marty was once again elected to the National Assembly after the war, though high profile attacks in the press (many by men formerly under his command) had greatly diminished his influence within the party.

His career effectively ended when Étienne Fajon, a prominent Communist deputy and a minor press baron, denounced Marty and his former comrade from Black Sea Mutiny days, Charles Tillon, as police spies.

[7]He was a sharp, imperious-looking man, and looked capable of performing all the actions Hemingway and others have written about... he appeared to be vigorous, thrusting and bore evidence of long years of struggle.

[8]A conference was called by the Chief Political Commissar - Andre Marty, a Frenchman who had been the leader of the Mutiny of the French Black Sea Fleet after the 1914-18 war.

He was a large, fat man with a bushy moustache and always wore a huge, black beret - looking like a caricature of an old-fashioned French petty bougeois.

He always spoke in a hysterical roar, he suspected everyone of treason, or worse, listened to advice from nobody, ordered executions on little or no pretext - in short, he was a real menace.

In the introduction to Orwell In Spain,[11] his behaviour towards non-Communist Party pro-Republican forces is characterised by Christopher Hitchens as "coldly hateful".