In Stalins Gefolgschaft: Moskau und die KPD 1928–1933 (review)

The predominant role of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s is indisputable and well known.¹ Is there anything more that can be said about it in the crucial years before Hitler came to power? Yes indeed, as the present study amply shows. Bert Hoppe’s revised history dissertation, defended at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, profited doubly from the (partial) opening of the Russian archives: first, from access to new sources, and second, from the important development of the state of the art that followed in Soviet and communist studies.² This twofold potential has led to an advance in knowledge that proves particularly helpful concerning Moscow’s influence on communist parties and the way Stalin exercised power on the Comintern. Although this book does not engage in comparative or explicitly transnational analysis, it draws on new findings to contrast or illuminate certain aspects of the relationship among the KPD, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin’s leadership.³ The author, moreover, made up for the inaccessibility of certain Moscow archival collections, such as the Piatnitskii Secretariat, through the fortunate acquisition by the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) of voluminous microfilmed copies of documents concerning the KPD, which are now open to scholars in Berlin.

The aim of Hoppe’s book is neither to produce just another narrative about the dependency of the German party on the “center” in Moscow nor to write a “history from below” or a study of local communist “milieus.”⁴ The author’s focus is on the leadership, and he clearly situates himself on the side of Hermann Weber and his notion of “Stalinization.”⁵ However, this does not preclude a revision, as Hoppe states, of a one-dimensional view of the collaboration of KPD officials with the Comintern. Their loyalty to the Soviet Union, as well as that of large parts of the party membership, was voluntary, at least as long as the Nazis were not yet in power and there were other political options, and German Communists in the Soviet Union could still return to Germany at any time. Hoppe thus opts for a multi-layered approach to day-to-day relationships (Alltag) within the institutional context of the Comintern (15). Focusing on power relationships, he asks what opportunities Soviet functionaries had to exercise control, through which channels this happened, what reliable knowledge of the KPD and the German political situation the Comintern and Soviet party leadership really possessed (a question that is also relevant the other way around) and, finally, what Moscow’s means of intervention were. He also questions the nature of “Soviet interests.” Were they just imposed or were they also, in part, common to all communist parties? Was the KPD more than just a puppet in the hands of Stalin?

As the introduction says, there are significant arguments pointing to a “longing for Moscow” within the KPD. For one, the Bolshevik revolutionary model was an appealing secularized belief. For another, the German Communists lacked the kind of revolutionary tradition that the Bolsheviks appeared to offer. Finally, German workers could regard the political orientation of the Comintern’s “Third Period” (1929–32) as a rather plausible interpretation of social reality. This was the case not only because the KPD met with some of its greatest successes raising its membership from 98,000 to 252,000, and the percentage of its voters from 10.6 to 16.9, but also because the economic crisis hit the Weimar Republic in a much more drastic way when compared to France, for instance.

These premises and arguments are substantiated in nine subsequent chapters of quite different lengths. The approach is either events-oriented, focusing on key processes or incidents in German communism from the perspective of the Comintern’s role as...