Remembering Cominform on the 79th anniversary of its founding

Seventy-nine years ago today, on 27 September 1947, an international conference in Poland concluded with the founding of a new organisation bringing together representatives of nine Stalinist parties. These parties came from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and Italy. The organisation’s official name was the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties. Before long, it came to be known as Cominform.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, which had usurped political power from the working class in the Soviet Union, was not seeking to establish an international leadership to advance world revolution after the Second World War, let alone to found a world party of socialist revolution. Its principal aim in establishing Cominform was to create an instrument that would safeguard its power and international standing, and thereby its material and social privileges.

One aspect of this need concerned Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a new network of buffer states was taking shape in the region under the Soviet Union’s decisive influence. The Kremlin bureaucracy sought to tighten its political control over the Stalinist parties in these countries. Yugoslavia was particularly important: during the war, the partisan movement led by Tito had built a mass base and military force of its own. Yugoslav representatives were given a prominent role in the founding of Cominform at a time when tensions between Belgrade and Moscow had not yet led to an open break. The Stalin–Tito conflict that erupted the following year would turn the organisation into an instrument of pressure against Yugoslavia.

Another factor behind the founding of Cominform was the rapid deterioration of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union after the war. In March 1947, the Truman administration announced the Truman Doctrine, presenting its request for funds to aid Greece and Turkey as part of an interventionist foreign policy with global ambitions. The Marshall Plan, announced in June, aimed to expand US influence over Europe’s economic reconstruction. Cominform was founded amid these developments.

The declaration adopted at the conference divided the world into two camps: the “imperialist and anti-democratic camp” led by the United States and the “anti-imperialist and democratic camp” led by the Soviet Union. This scheme left no room for the independent political struggle of the working class. The fact that the declaration drew attention to the aggression of American imperialism did not remove this fundamental problem. Workers were expected to take their place in the confrontation between states defined by Moscow, rather than act in accordance with their own historical interests.

Moreover, the declaration made no attempt to account for the alliance the Stalinist bureaucracy had forged with the United States and Britain only a few years earlier. During the war, these imperialist states had been presented as “democratic” allies; now the United States was the leader of the opposing camp. What had changed was not the class character of these states, but the Soviet bureaucracy’s relationship with them and its foreign policy needs. Yesterday, agreements with imperialist powers had been imposed on the workers’ movement; today, that same movement was to be mobilised to meet the demands of the bureaucracy’s conflict with them. In defending the wartime alliance while proclaiming the new division into “two camps”, the declaration laid bare this continuity.

Founded in 1919, the Communist International was a step towards organising the socialist world revolution. But with the rise of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Left Opposition led by Trotsky, it rapidly lost that character. Under Stalin’s control, the Comintern became an instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy’s foreign policy calculations rather than of the independent class interests of the international working class. Its dissolution in 1943, while the Soviet Union remained allied with Britain and the United States, was the culmination of this process. In a statement on 28 May 1943 explaining the decision, Stalin explicitly argued that dissolving the Comintern would strengthen Allied unity.

Cominform, founded four years later, did not revive the revolutionary purpose behind the founding of the Comintern; it had no intention of doing so. Instead, it adapted to new circumstances the practice, entrenched under Stalin, of subordinating communist parties’ policies to the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy. The organisation’s use against Yugoslavia the following year was a striking illustration of its character.

Cominform lasted less than nine years. After Stalin’s death, as the Soviet leadership sought to repair relations with Yugoslavia, the organisation increasingly came to be seen as a liability: it had become a symbol of the campaign waged against that country in 1948. Following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, Cominform’s dissolution was announced on 17 April 1956, and publication of its newspaper ceased. Its dissolution, like its founding, was no independent decision of the international working class. The decisive factor was the Soviet bureaucracy’s changing foreign policy needs.

For this reason, the anniversary of Cominform’s founding should be remembered as more than an episode in the history of the Cold War. The central lesson for the workers’ movement is this: the struggle against imperialism cannot be waged on the basis of political allegiance to a privileged bureaucracy that had usurped power in the Soviet Union and sought to subordinate parties in other countries to its own interests. The unity of the international working class must rest on its own independent programme and organisations, and on a perspective of world revolution.