Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions ed. by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, and: Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, The Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War by Tyler Wentzell (review)

Transnationalism has been long established as a powerful framework for studying global networks of immigration and left politics. In recent years, much of this work has focused on left-circles beyond state-socialism, on anarchism and the Industrial Workers of the World, especially. But one book that has broadened this analysis to communism and the Comintern itself is Left-Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions.

Engaging broad orientations, biography, race and anti-colonialism, and nationalism in a global perspective, Left Transnationalism attempts to disrupt "transmission-belt" models of the Comintern, for which a "'Moscow Line' was transmitted from Moscow and received by the communist periphery," shackling global communism to "the security interests of the Soviet state" (5). For Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, this perspective has merit "because it is backed up by so much evidence" (5). But they argue, convincingly, that a "Moscow Line" was never always-already tethered to Soviet self-interest, nor was it so totalizing as to occlude reinterpretation or autonomy, even after the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s.

Indeed, as Lars T. Lih writes, the Third International "had a global perspective from the very beginning," revealed in "the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku and many debates at early congresses" (56). In the Canadian context, as Andrée Lévesque shows, such debate yielded genuine matrices of global support, linking radicals like Norman Bethune and local organizations to cross-border spaces aligned with, but not permanently subservient to, Moscow authority. The Young Communist League, Daria Dyakonova writes, could thus offer "dance groups, theatre sections … and choirs" to local Ukrainian and Finnish communities, in opposition to Comintern officials suspicious of "attachment to language and culture" (320). Of course, Moscow could direct and even uproot local leaderships for doctrinal transgressions, even as Comintern officials sought genuine emancipatory change. But as Drachewych himself shows, these directives could be applied inconsistently or reinterpreted, for a time. Unlike in New Zealand, the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) received virtually no direct instruction regarding Indigenous peoples' self-determination, crafting its anti-colonialism, and "episodic" (263) struggle against racism, instead around "the narrative established by the Comintern at the Sixth Comintern Congress," in 1928 (262).

The contributors' innovation, in this respect, is to move beyond traditional centre-periphery frameworks, to illuminate the horizontal ties operating "without the direct involvement of Moscow" (6), as well as intellectuals, like M.N. Roy, who could shift Comintern directives towards anti-imperial solidarity. It also explores themes and organizing-work long obscured by a focus on Soviet hegemony and national parties alone, especially as they pertain to racial justice and diverse theorizing on national and transnational linkages. Across networks in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, as chapters by Marc Becker and Sandra Pujals show, radicals like Seki Sano and José Carlos Mariátegui conducted immensely productive work in aesthetics, anti-colonial organizing, and theory-building, integrating universal goals in local contexts, even if such critics or fellow travellers were not always affiliated with the Comintern itself.

This is not to say Left Transnationalism elides Soviet coercion and violence. Rather, much as Bryan Palmer has urged historians to move beyond the binary of Moscow domination vs. local autonomy, it shows how a progressively "Stalinized" (379) Soviet Union could restrict the mobility of local organizers, too. (Bryan D. Palmer. "How Can We Write Better Histories of Communism?" Labour/Le Travail, 83 [Spring: 2019]). McKay's own chapter on "the...