Following the creation of the Comintern in 1919, the KPD affiliated to it and accepted its “21 Conditions”. Some of the Conditions, such as support for anti-colonialist movements and opposition to social patriotism, were positive and progressive. Much less so were those which established that the party press must “consistently spread the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”; that all “reformists and centrists” be removed from party organs; that both legal and illegal work be conducted; that party cells in the army be created; that the party must support the Soviet Union at all times; and that it must conduct “periodic membership purges” to clean out “petit-bourgeois elements”. Even in Tsarist Russia, many of the 21 Conditions were irrelevant or inoperative between 1905 and 1917. In 1917 the reason for the eventual triumph of the Bolshevik Party was its freedom to organise and campaign openly and legally. The 21 Conditions thus did not even apply to the country that had seen the triumph of Bolshevism, let alone a bourgeois democracy like Germany.
For the Comintern, and the Bolsheviks who controlled it, the prize was the USPD. Unlike the relatively small KPD it was a mass party of the German working class. It condemned Noske and the SPD but it also stood ready to participate in National Assembly elections and secure as much as it could for German workers from the newly established Weimar Republic. Between November 1918 and March 1919 the German working class gave its verdict on the two socialist alternatives to the left of the SPD. While the KPD stood aloof in sectarian purity, the USPD attracted 200,000 new members.
In July 1920 it was proposed that the USPD affiliate to the Comintern. Should that happen a mass-based German socialist party with 800,000 members would be working for the overthrow of the German state and its replacement with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Despite the election of pro-Comintern radicals Walter Stocker and Curt Meyer to the USPD leadership, the party as a whole was split down the middle on the proposal. Meyer, Stocker and the left wanted to affiliate. Kautsky, Hilferding and others wished to reform the Second International–in their terms, return it to the internationalism it had repudiated in 1914. Still others wished for an alternative between a Third International run by Bolsheviks and a Second International terminally discredited by its collapse into social patriotism. The Halle Congress would debate the proposal to affiliate to the Comintern. There would be two guest speakers from Russia on either side of the question–Martov and Zinoviev.
Martov would speak against the proposal with all the rhetorical and intellectual ability for which he was famous. The Politburo had wanted to deny him permission to attend Halle but Lenin insisted he be allowed to go.15 Zinoviev, who by 1920 had an international reputation almost on a par with Lenin and Trotsky, would speak for the motion. Second only to Trotsky as the Bolsheviks’ supreme orator, Zinoviev was a man of severe personality defects. Unlike Kamenev, Rykov and Shliapnikov, he had not opposed Lenin over the launching of the October Insurrection from political principle. Once it became clear that the Bolsheviks had secured power, Zinoviev instantly morphed into a hardline party boss, notorious for ruthless persecution of socialists with whom shortly before he had wished to form a coalition. Of Zinoviev, Trotsky once quipped, “Luther said, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other’. Zinoviev says ‘Here I stand. But I can do otherwise’”.
By the time of the Halle Congress, Martov was reaching the end of the line with Bolshevism. At the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1919, the Mensheviks had been allowed to send delegates and speak. Theodore Dan welcomed a “single revolutionary front, in all that concerns the defence of the revolution”.16 Martov, whilst recognising the need to defend the revolution from the Whites and pledging the Mensheviks to do so, read a declaration to the Congress that called for “freedom of the press, of association and of assembly […] inviolability of the person […] abolition of executions without trial, of administrative arrests and of official terror”. Lenin replied personally, criticising Martov’s declaration as “back to bourgeois democracy, and nothing else”, and concluding, “When we hear such declarations from people who announce their sympathy with us, we say to ourselves, ‘No, both terror and the Cheka are absolutely indispensable’”.17
Throughout 1920 the Mensheviks were allowed to hold meetings and print newspapers–in May a British Labour Party delegation to Soviet Russia was allowed to talk to leading Mensheviks and even attend their Central Committee meeting–but this freedom was constantly impinged. Their offices were frequently raided by the Cheka and their officials arrested. Their last industrial stronghold, the Moscow Branch of the Printers Union, was slowly squeezed into submission. When the British delegation visited Moscow, the board of the union exploited the brief slackening of control to call a “General Meeting” of printers, at which the union leader Kefali launched a blistering attack on the government. Far worse, the board arranged for SR leader Victor Chernov–a wanted fugitive–to come out of hiding and address the mass meeting. He received a rapturous welcome. Although the Cheka descended and many members of the board were arrested, the print shops remained covert Menshevik sympathisers well into the 1920s.
The Eighth All-Russian Soviet Congress of December 1920 was the last that Mensheviks were allowed to officially attend, and even then they were denied voting rights. Dan told the congress that with the stifling of popular initiative, “the whole system of Soviet democracy has ceased to function except as a mere façade for one-party dictatorship”.18 The brief opening to a “socialist opposition” promised in late 1918 had slammed shut. The debate between Martov and Zinoviev at Halle therefore represented two different philosophies of socialism and democracy. As Ben Lewis says in his invaluable study of Halle, “It was here, in the furor of partisan cheering and electrifying speeches, cut and thrust polemics and killer points, that the fate of the German, and perhaps the International workers’ movement, was fought out”.19
Zinoviev began by attacking his opponents for propping up the bourgeois order. “Who is saving the bourgeoisie?” he asked. “The so-called social democrats!” He excoriated Millerand in France, Branting in Sweden and Modigliani in Italy as betrayers of revolutionary socialists who would have overthrown capitalism if not sabotaged by parliamentary maneuvers. By contrast, he said, “The International does not wish to be anything else but the leader of world revolution”. He admitted the struggle to create socialism in a shattered war-torn country had been more difficult than the Bolsheviks had imagined:
Previously we studied socialism in books. We thought it could come about more easily. We had spoken of the concentration of capital, of the development of the productive forces. Everything would go forwards; electricity, nice houses etc. We thought we could bring the bourgeoisie to its knees through one strike and that everything would fall into our laps […] Now, comrades, it hasn’t turned out like this, history is taking other paths.
Having gained sympathy for an honest admission of difficulties, Zinoviev, knowing the USPD had arisen from the work of the Zimmerwald Union, compared the new Comintern to Zimmerwald and suggested that from these beginnings grew real revolutionary change. He finished by rejecting the theoretical version of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the SPD’s Erfurt Programme, and asked, “But we want you to tell us whether you are for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the actual, real sense–already initiated by the German working class in the January Days and by the Hungarian working class”. If so, Zinoviev offered the USPD and the KPD and other Marxist groupings a place in a “United Communist Party” fighting for proletarian revolution within the Comintern.20 It was a spectacular, seductive prospect.