WI: foreign communists allowed to participate in the government of the USSR

I don't remember exactly how it goes, but supposedly at one of the world congresses of the Comintern, Amadeo Bordiga was supposed to have told Stalin that, if the Soviet Union was really the fatherland of the world proletariat and not just another nation state, it ought to be governed by a joint committee of all the communist parties of the world.

What if something similar had been implemented in reality, early on in the USSR's existence? (Or before there was a USSR, in the RSFSR). What if the Comintern governed Soviet Russia, rather than vice versa?
 
I don't remember exactly how it goes, but supposedly at one of the world congresses of the Comintern, Amadeo Bordiga was supposed to have told Stalin that, if the Soviet Union was really the fatherland of the world proletariat and not just another nation state, it ought to be governed by a joint committee of all the communist parties of the world.

What if something similar had been implemented in reality, early on in the USSR's existence? (Or before there was a USSR, in the RSFSR). What if the Comintern governed Soviet Russia, rather than vice versa?

Lenin would have been toppled in a week, possibly assassinated. The vast majority of Bolsheviks were Russians first and Communists second. Don't forget that becuase they didn't.
 
I don't remember exactly how it goes, but supposedly at one of the world congresses of the Comintern, Amadeo Bordiga was supposed to have told Stalin that, if the Soviet Union was really the fatherland of the world proletariat and not just another nation state, it ought to be governed by a joint committee of all the communist parties of the world.

What if something similar had been implemented in reality, early on in the USSR's existence? (Or before there was a USSR, in the RSFSR). What if the Comintern governed Soviet Russia, rather than vice versa?
Well, taking into an account that at the time when the SU was created Poland and Lithuania were independent states, there was at least one Politburo member who qualified as a foreigner, Felix Dzerzinsky: he was a Pole with the family estate in Lithuania. :)
 
Lenin would have been toppled in a week, possibly assassinated. The vast majority of Bolsheviks were Russians first and Communists second. Don't forget that becuase they didn't.

Melhlis, Stalin’s secretary, insisted that he is communist first and Jew second. OTOH, Stalin defined himself as a Russian of Georgian descent. Go figure. :)
 
Melhlis, Stalin’s secretary, insisted that he is communist first and Jew second. OTOH, Stalin defined himself as a Russian of Georgian descent. Go figure. :)

I think a lot of that had to do with what Russians in general thought about Jews. The smart money on their being a genocidal anti-semitic party in the 20th century would have been Russia not Germany in the 19th century.
 
I think a lot of that had to do with what Russians in general thought about Jews. The smart money on their being a genocidal anti-semitic party in the 20th century would have been Russia not Germany in the 19th century.
Well, anti-semitism was definitely there.
 
I don't remember exactly how it goes, but supposedly at one of the world congresses of the Comintern, Amadeo Bordiga was supposed to have told Stalin that, if the Soviet Union was really the fatherland of the world proletariat and not just another nation state, it ought to be governed by a joint committee of all the communist parties of the world.

So, just so I've got this straight, people from a couple of hundred countries and(I'd assume) their colonies are governing the USSR, but their respective homelands are all still governing themselves.

Even if I were the most internationalist Soviet citizen imaginable, I think I'd still have a pretty major problem with that.

And the less cosmopolitan elements of Russian society would probably view this peace-love-dove parliament as something like the Reconstruction legislature in Birth Of A Nation.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
I think it’s perfectly plausible that this would be set up but the foreigners would be given purely honorary positions without any actual power beyond acting as advisors.
 
I think it’s perfectly plausible that this would be set up but the foreigners would be given purely honorary positions without any actual power beyond acting as advisors.

Plus, the right to be purged and shot if they got too uppity. And their conservative home-governments would be laughing their heads off about it.
 
I think it’s perfectly plausible that this would be set up but the foreigners would be given purely honorary positions without any actual power beyond acting as advisors.

Maybe something like an even weaker version of the House Of Lords or the Canadian Senate. They'd have the right to scrutinize and debate legislation, block it for a while, but not actually kill it. Or maybe, like the Lords or the Senate, a technical right to block laws, but one that in practice they scrupulously avoid using.
 
Maybe something like an even weaker version of the House Of Lords or the Canadian Senate. They'd have the right to scrutinize and debate legislation, block it for a while, but not actually kill it. Or maybe, like the Lords or the Senate, a technical right to block laws, but one that in practice they scrupulously avoid using.

Well, most Soviet legislatures were just "rubber stamps" IRL. Outside the Central Committee and the Politburo, no one had real clout. An even weaker version of them might work. particularly under Stalin.

The clear threat of being sent in front of a firing squad if you step a millimeter out of line does wonders for "Party Discipline". About the only thing I could see them having the power to do is to proclaim how awesome Stalin is and everything he comes up with.
 
I don't remember exactly how it goes, but supposedly at one of the world congresses of the Comintern, Amadeo Bordiga was supposed to have told Stalin that, if the Soviet Union was really the fatherland of the world proletariat and not just another nation state, it ought to be governed by a joint committee of all the communist parties of the world.

What if something similar had been implemented in reality, early on in the USSR's existence? (Or before there was a USSR, in the RSFSR). What if the Comintern governed Soviet Russia, rather than vice versa?

Well, the USSR was governed by the All-Union Communist Party which technically speaking was only one section of the Communist International. So in that sense the USSR was theoretically ruled by the world Communist movement. In fact, in the early years of the Comintern dissident Russian Communists were naïve enough to appeal from the Russian Communist Party to the Comintern! (Needless to say, they lost.)

So is there anything that could make the Russian/Soviet Comunist Party really just a section of the Comintern (as it was in theory) and not its ruler? The only thing that could make the Comintern anything other than a Russian-dominated organization would be an early and successful Communist revolution in some other major nation like Germany--and that was always unlikely. As long as Russia was the only state where Communists were in power, she was bound to dominate the Comintern.

"At the Fifth Congress in 1924, the German delegate, August Thalheimer, declared: 'It is absolutely necessary, a historic necessity, for the Russian party to have the leadership of the Third International--of this there is no need to speak any further--and other parties will rank with it as equals only when they also take power, and know how to hold on to power and to make the transition to socialism.' The Japanese, Katayama, exclaimed, 'I affirm that I am opposed to the statement of Bordiga that the leading position of the Russian Communist Party in the communist international can be called into question.'

"At the Seventh Plenum, toward the end of 1926, the Italian, Palmiro Togliatti (Ercoli), brought the unwritten law into the open: 'Of course, we have the statutes of the International which guarantee certain rights to certain comrades; but there is something which is not in these statutes. That is the position of the Russian party in the International, its leading function — that goes beyond the limits of the statutes.'" Theodore Draper, *American Communism and Soviet Russia,* pp. 165-66. https://books.google.com/books?id=SlRc3KqcDygC&pg=PA165

And this would be true regardless of who controlled the Russian/Soviet Communist Party--indeed all these statements were made before Stalin's rise to absolute power. (In fact, once Stalin really did rise to absolute power, such statements disappeared for the simple reason that everyone assumed implicitly that the Soviet Communist Party, i.e., Stalin, was infallible.)
 
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