Communist Internationals

In the heady days of 1848, Marx and Engels told us that the nation had started to outlive its usefulness. “The Communists are … reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationalities,” they wrote in the Manifesto. The trick with abolishing existing national frameworks, however, was that most people, Marx and Engels contended, had never really known any benefits from belonging to a nation in the first place, having been toyed with by the bourgeoisie who sought only their obedience and their votes. “The working men have no country,” they reasoned. “You cannot take from them what they have not got.”¹ So began the remarkable drive to build a new world order on a series of absences: an end to private property, something that few proletarians had ever known; the end of allegiances to land or patria; the death of the father; a new age of horizontal solidarities.

In the mid-19th century, few might have imagined how World War I and the tectonic shifts that accompanied the collapse of empire after empire would bring such a dream closer to reality. The year 1917 set the USSR in motion, but the practice of building socialist internationalism—or, more accurately, of building a world without nationalist blinders—would for decades move unsteadily between the conservative premises of a tenacious Realpolitik and the long promised age of “horizontal horizons,” pledges of a new life ahead that could often be sustained only by their continued deferral, promises of a shining future that deflected attention from the obstacles to its realization. The articles in this forum richly illustrate these dynamics.

Marx and Engels, of course, sorely underestimated how firmly nationalism was already rooted in the colonial encounter—a world beyond the metropoles of England, France, and Germany where they concentrated their energies—and how proletarians and patricians alike would rally around the national idea in times of trouble, no matter how unevenly the idea of the nation served its followers. The British scholar Tom Nairn would eventually call this dismissal of national allegiances “Marxism’s greatest historical failure,” with Stalin’s 1912 essay (the keystone effort in Marxism-Leninism’s campaign to harness and channel nationalist sentiments), “a sad chapter in the history of ideas.”² One result of this long chronicled Marxist-Leninist ambivalence is that while we know a great deal about the flow of national ideas across the history of the USSR, a practical grasp of internationalism—somehow ever the weaker ideological cousin—has long been consigned to the minutes of party plenums and subsumed into broader accounts of Soviet foreign relations. Yet internationalism as the daily embodiment of a way of reading, thinking, and working was rather different from the workings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Moreover, despite its extraordinary geographic breadth, as well as its leadership role in the cultivation of class consciousness across the 20th century, descriptions of the Soviet Union as a closed space became commonplace. How, then, did so many generations of Soviet citizens sustain such literate positions on global arts and culture, arguably to a far greater extent than their counterparts in market economies?

In her essay on Indian leftist writers of the 1930s, Katerina Clark walks us through one of the best-known fields of communist outreach, the pull of Soviet literature and the pride of place accorded to Moscow by international writers across the chaotically shifting landscape of the early 20th century. Clark introduces us to Mulk Raj Anand, the celebrated Punjabi novelist whose professional work and private correspondence testify to the dueling poles of London and Moscow for this defender of the lower castes and classes. For writers such as Anand, the temporary routing of the Communist Party in Shanghai in 1927 may have suggested the end of the call of East Asia, but his worldview remained a decidedly transregional one. While most people might look upon the 13th-century Mongol incursions into India as yet another abrogation of South Asian sovereignty, Anand argued in his 1930 work, Persian Painting, that Mongols need to be remembered, instead, for their pan-Asian ambitions.³ As Clark astutely captures, Anand’s claim to an art...