[6] Including the British Labour Party who issued a manifesto stating, "the victory of the Germans would mean the death of democracy in Europe"[7] while making no such criticisms of the Russian Tsar.

Lenin's term "social pacifist" aimed in particular at Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, who opposed the war on grounds of pacifism but did not actively fight against it.

In 1917, after the February Revolution overthrew the Romanov Dynasty, Lenin published the April Theses which openly supported revolutionary defeatism, where the Bolsheviks hoped that Russia would lose the war so that they could quickly cause a socialist insurrection.

[9] The victory of the Russian Communist Party in the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was felt throughout the world and an alternative path to power to parliamentary politics was demonstrated.

Resolute action by the German government cancelled the plans, except due to miscommunication in Hamburg, where 200–300 communists attacked police stations, but were quickly defeated.

[12] It opened with a tribute to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, recently executed by the Freikorps during the Spartacist Uprising,[13] against the backdrop of the Russian Civil War.

However, such a bureau was not formed and Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Christian Rakovsky later delegated the task of managing the International to Grigory Zinoviev as the Chairman of the Executive.

[14][note 2] Zinoviev served as the first Chairman of the Comintern's executive committee from 1919 to 1926, but its dominant figure until his death in January 1924 was Lenin, whose strategy for revolution had been laid out in What Is to Be Done?

[21] Ahead of the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in July through August 1920, Lenin sent out a number of documents, including his Twenty-one Conditions to all socialist parties.

The 21 Conditions called for the demarcation between communist parties and other socialist groups[note 3] and instructed the Comintern sections not to trust the legality of the bourgeois states.

Regarding the political situation in the colonized world, the Second Congress of the Communist International stipulated that a united front should be formed between the proletariat, peasantry, and national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries.

Amongst the 21 conditions drafted by Lenin ahead of the congress was the 11th thesis which stipulated that all communist parties must support the bourgeois-democratic liberation movements in the colonies.

[citation needed] Li arranged for Voitinsky to meet with another Communist leader, Chen Duxiu, in Shanghai and began to establish the Comintern China Branch, which evolved[how?]

[27] According to Russian historian Vadim Rogovin, the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD) had requested that Moscow send Leon Trotsky to Germany to direct the 1923 insurrection.

However, this proposal was rejected by the Politburo which was controlled by Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev who decided to send a commission of lower-ranking Russian Communist party members.

[29] At the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern in July 1924, Zinoviev condemned both Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923 after his involvement in Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic, and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy.

Geoff Eley summed up the change in attitude at this time as follows: By the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924 [...] the collapse of Communist support in Europe tightened the pressure for conformity.

[38] The Comintern proclaimed that the capitalist system was entering the period of final collapse and therefore all communist parties were to adopt an aggressive and militant 'left' line.

Numerous Comintern officials were also targeted by the dictator and became victims of show trials and political persecution, such as Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin.

[41] Wolfgang Leonhard, who experienced this period in Moscow as a contemporary witness, wrote about it in his political autobiography, which was published in the 1950s: "The foreign communists living in the Soviet Union were particularly affected.

"[42] Fritz Platten died in a labor camp and the leaders of the Indian (Virendranath Chattopadhyaya or Chatto), Korean, Mexican, Iranian, and Turkish communist parties were executed.

Leopold Trepper recalled these days: "In house, where the party activists of all the countries were living, no-one slept until 3 o'clock in the morning.

However, this did not prevent Hitler from signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Stalin in August 1939, which in turn meant the end of the Popular Front policy and, in fact, that of the Comintern as well.

The German-Soviet non-aggression treaty contained far-reaching agreements on spheres of interest, which the two totalitarian powers implemented over the next two years using military means.

"[44] This position has been described as a way for the Soviet government to explain its refusal to honour proposals for economic assistance to Poland, which had been made before and at the start of the war, since "it was found impossible to determine with any degree of certainty who was the aggressor and who the victim.

The declaration read: The historical role of the Communist International, organized in 1919 as a result of the political collapse of the overwhelming majority of the old pre-war workers' parties, consisted in that it preserved the teachings of Marxism from vulgarisation and distortion by opportunist elements of the labor movement.

[47] The dissolution was interpreted as Stalin wishing to calm his World War II allies (particularly Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill) and to keep them from suspecting the Soviet Union of pursuing a policy of trying to foment revolution in other countries.

It was a network made up of the communist parties of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (led by Josip Broz Tito and expelled in June 1948).

[57] In 2012, historian David McKnight stated: The most intense practical application of the conspiratorial work of the Comintern was carried out by its international liaison service, the OMS.

These included the transport of money and letters, the manufacture of passports and other false documents and technical support to underground parties, such as managing "safe houses" and establishing businesses overseas as cover activities.