Interbellum
The Western Schism
Soldier reading the influential Pravda in Moscow
The repression of Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinist groups in the Soviet Union and throughout the Comintern, was not a new thing, as it was happening since the forced exile of Trotsky from the USSR, and getting harsher every year. Thus, it was nothing beyond obvious to expect the Soviet government to show their dissatisfaction with the presence of Trotskyist elements in the Spanish power structure. This happened shortly after the elections, on April 20, when the leadership of the PCI and the PSOU were called for a meeting with the Soviet ambassador, where they received a letter signed by Maxim Litvinov, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, demanding the suppression of counter-revolutionary elements in Spain, namely the Trotskyists and the Anarchists. The communist and socialist leaders did not have much sympathy for both these factions, but they knew how strong they were, and that it was not wise to attempt a crackdown. The Soviet ambassador left the meeting empty-handed, after receiving a polite no from the Iberians.
The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was extremely angry and disappointed with the Iberian leadership, and this became clear for the whole world when, in the day after the meeting, an article was published in Pravda, called “Iberian Treachery”, violently criticizing the Federation’s government, denouncing them and the system they created in Iberia as a misrepresentation of Leninism, designed to fool and enslave the people. The answer came the following day in the official periodical of the Iberian government, called The Federation, who denounced the USSR's attempt to meddle in internal matters of the country, calling it “Soviet imperialism”, while the newspapers of the PCI remained silent on the matter. A deep split had clearly occurred between the two countries, and thus the Federation lost one of its main allies.
The Iberian disobedience was the last straw for Stalin, who decided to annihilate any opposition to his government, starting the Great Purge, which in Russia is called Yezhovshchina due to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD at the time, and the assassination of Sergey Kirov, one of Stalin’s greatest allies, was used as an excuse to begin the crackdown. The first victims were the former members of the so-called Right Opposition, notably its leaders, the Old Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky. They were all tried and convicted in the first of the Moscow Show Trials, on May 17, 1938, and were executed the next day. This was only the beginning however, as Stalin's objective was to completely purge the Soviet military from possible dissidents and to eventually kill or arrest all of the Old Bolsheviks, thus eliminating any possibility of political opposition. The Stalinist terror continued for nearly two years, taking the lives of at least half a million people, and even though it succeeded in destroying any kind of internal opposition, it failed to completely accomplish the elimination of the remaining leaders from the civil war period, and this would be decisive in the international sphere.
Two men managed to escape Stalin’s deadly claws, narrowly escaping Moscow after they correctly predicted they were next in the dictator’s list. Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev defected to France in May 22, 1938, and even though the PCF initially repeatedly demanded their extradition to the Soviet Union, they were granted political asylum in France after giving strong evidence their life would be in danger if they returned to the USSR. Stalin and the NKVD had underestimated the two Old Bolsheviks, and the man responsible for their arrest, Genrikh Yagoda, paid the price, being imprisoned and executed less than a week later.
The defection of Zinoviev and Kamenev cracked the political stability of the Comintern. The purges were recognized by the Soviet leadership, shown to the world as the elimination of counterrevolutionaries in the hierarchy of power, but the information brought by the two defectors presented a different perspective, with both men claiming it was nothing more than a massive crackdown against any kind of opposition towards Stalin in the Soviet society. On May 24, 1938, the biggest newspaper of France, Le Petite Parisien, placed the two deserters on the cover of the edition, and inside the periodical there was an article several pages long, which included interviews with Zinoviev and Kamenev, and pictures of a few documents they obtained with their remaining allies in Moscow, which somewhat proved the existence of persecution. The Soviet government quickly and vehemently denied the accusations, but the doubt was cast.
The accusations against Stalin, made by nothing more nothing less than two senior Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution, only increased the dissatisfaction of some members of the Comintern with the Soviet Union. Communist parties of Western Europe, which were very strong in their countries, were not happy with the extreme centralization of the Third International, as they were practically mere puppets of Moscow. The first dissent came from the PCF, after leader Maurice Thorez condemned Stalinism in a speech to the party leadership early on June. The French considered themselves the fathers of modern revolution, and wanted to bring the center of the communist movement westward, to Paris, since the first socialist experience happened there, in 1871, and so abandoned Stalinism as their official ideology, moving towards a pure and original form of Marxism-Leninism. The Italian Communist Party, which had all its leadership exiled in France, not surprisingly followed the example of their hosts, with Palmiro Togliatti supporting Thorez on his move away from Moscow. Both parties were banned from the Comintern on June 7, 1938.
The Western Schism was beginning to wane in mid-June when it received a much needed boost coming from Mexico. Leon Trotsky, after due deliberation, decided to travel to Europe, and arrived from America in Lisbon on June 15, being more than welcome by the Iberian government, which was very unhappy with Soviet policies. The PCI showed no opposition, and this led to the forceful withdrawal of the party from the Comintern, a move they were already considering to take voluntarily. Trotsky came into contact with the two deserters in France, and after brief negotiations, they opted to leave the old differences aside and arrange a meeting, which was to be held in Iberia.
The Summit of Bilbao began on June 28, and it was decisive for the organization of a common resistance against Stalinism. In it were present, aside from the three Bolsheviks, delegations from the communist parties of France, Italy and Iberia, from the POUM, and from the new Marxist Unity Party (PUM), a French Trotskyist movement created by former SFIO members Alexandre Bachelet and Maurice Pivert. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev agreed to recreate their United Opposition of the twenties, but this time on international level. A new alliance of communist movements, joined by all the parties present, with the clear intention of toppling Stalinism, was created, receiving the name of Fourth International –United Opposition. The Communist movement was irreversibly split in two.