On April 4, 1915, nine delegates from various neutral countries assembled in Bern to attempt to establish a center for a revitalized IVSJO organization.

Headquarters were established in Zurich, with Willi Münzenberg elected by the conference to fill the role of International Secretary of the reconstituted IVSJO.

The pacifist Center faction sought the establishment of binding arbitration and measures for the active limitation of armaments, while the revolutionary Left, inspired by events in Soviet Russia, increasingly came to see international revolution as the only possible solution to the inevitability of capitalist war.

In secret conditions in a beer-hall in Berlin delegates representing many of the socialist youth organizations of Europe assembled, called together by International Secretary Willi Münzenberg.

Some 19 delegates were in attendance, representing the socialist youth organizations of Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Spain, as well as an opposition faction from Czechoslovakia.

This matter had been tenaciously discussed at the 1919 Berlin Conference, with the Russian delegate, Lazar Shatskin, advancing the position that the various national youth groups should be under the immediate direction and control of the corresponding adult parties.

This position was opposed by others from the Western European socialist tradition, which envisioned an independent vanguard role for the communist youth movement.

At Berlin a compromise was reached, in which it was agreed that the YCI would not be considered a "sister" organization to the Communist International, but rather a "part" of the Comintern.

The Russo-centric contingent of the YCI had sought a gathering in Moscow in the summer of 1921, in conjunction with the previously scheduled 3rd World Congress of the Communist International.

[14] Nevertheless—and over the strong objections of its Russian contingent—the Executive Committee of the YCI independently decided to convene the 2nd World Congress of the organization's deliberative body on April 6 in Jena.

"That resistance and criticism was experienced is suggested by the fact that Lenin intervened in person in order to reconcile divergent opinions, and that Trotsky appeared at the congress to defend Comintern against the charge of subordinating the interests of world revolution to those of Soviet Russia.