According to the Comintern's analysis, the current phase of world economy from 1928 onward, the "Third Period", was to be a time of widespread economic collapse and mass working class radicalization.
This economic and political discord would again make the time ripe for proletarian revolution if militant policies were rigidly maintained by communist vanguard parties, the Comintern believed.
The rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany in 1933 and the annihilation of the organized communist movement there shocked the Comintern into reassessing the tactics of the Third Period.
The Communist party had publicly proposed collectivisation to be voluntary; however, official policy was almost always ignored in practice; threats and false promises were used to motivate peasants into joining the communes.
Eventually, in what Issac Deutscher calls "the great change",[10] the policies of industrialisation and collectivisation were carried out in a ruthless and brutal way, via the use of the security and military forces, without the direct involvement of the working class and peasantry itself and without seeming regard for the social consequences.
[13] Kulaks could be shot or imprisoned by the GPU, have their property confiscated before being sent into internal exile (in Siberia, the North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan), or be evicted from their houses and sent to work in labour colonies in their own district.
Accordingly, attacks and expulsions were launched against social democrats and moderate socialists within labour unions where the local CP had majority support, as well as Trotskyists and united front proponents.
Another distinguishing feature of this policy was that Communists fought against their rivals on the left as vehemently as their opponents on the right of the political spectrum, with special viciousness directed at real or imaginary followers of Leon Trotsky.
Hitler's rise to power, consequently, was also a reason for the abandonment of the policy in favor of the Popular Front strategy because Germany became the biggest security threat to the Soviet Union.
Some authors like Robin D. G. Kelley and John Manley have penned local histories that portray Communist Party members as effective activists, heroic in many cases because their revolutionary zeal helped them confront extremely adverse circumstances.
Critics of this perspective argue that these histories gloss over or ignore both the horrors of Stalinism and also the devastating consequences of the Third Period inasmuch as it facilitated the rise of Hitler and alienated the working class writ large from the left because of its sectarianism and adventurism.