The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was an international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism, and which was led and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress in 1920 to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The Comintern was preceded by the dissolution of the Second International in 1916. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were both honorary presidents of the Communist International.
The Red International of Labor Unions, commonly known as the Profintern, was an international body established by the Communist International (Comintern) with the aim of coordinating communist activities within trade unions. Formally established in 1921, the Profintern aimed to act as a counterweight to the influence of the so-called "Amsterdam International", the social-democratic International Federation of Trade Unions, an organization which the Comintern branded as "class-collaborationist" and as an impediment to revolution. After entering a period of decline in the middle 1930s, the Profintern was finally dissolved in 1937 with the advent of Comintern's "Popular Front" policy.
Yrjö Elias Sirola was a Finnish socialist politician, writer, teacher, and newspaper editor. He was prominent as an elected official in Finland, as minister of foreign affairs in the 1918 Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic, a founder of the Communist Party of Finland, and as a functionary of the Communist International.
József Pogány, known in English as John Pepper or Joseph Pogany, was a Hungarian Communist politician. He later served as a functionary in the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, before being cashiered in 1929. Later as an official in the Soviet government, Pepper ran afoul of the secret police and was executed during the Great Terror of 1937–38.
Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, also known as L.-O. Frossard or Oscar Frossard, was a French socialist and communist politician. He was a founding member in 1905 and Secretary-General of the French Socialist Party (SFIO) from 1918 to 1920, as well as a founding member and Secretary-General of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1920 to 1922.
Robert Berkeley "Bob" Minor, alternatively known as "Fighting Bob", was a political cartoonist, a radical journalist, and, beginning in 1920, a leading member of the Communist Party USA.
The Congress of the Peoples of the East was a multinational conference held in September 1920 by the Communist International in Baku, Azerbaijan. The congress was attended by nearly 1,900 delegates from across Asia and Europe and marked a commitment by the Comintern to support revolutionary nationalist movements in the colonial "East" in addition to the traditional radical labour movement of Europe, North America, and Australasia. Although attended by delegates representing more than two dozen ethnic entities of the Middle and Far East, the Baku Congress was dominated by the lengthy speeches of leaders from the Russian Communist Party (RCP), including: Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Mikhail Pavlovich, and Anatoly Skachko. Non-RCP delegates delivering major reports included Hungarian revolutionary Béla Kun and Turkish feminist Naciye Hanim.
Heinrich Brandler was a German communist, trade unionist, politician, revolutionary activist, and political writer. Brandler is best remembered as the head of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the party's ill-fated "March Action" of 1921 and aborted uprising of 1923, for which he was held responsible by the Communist International. Expelled from the Communist Party in December 1928, Brandler went on to become co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany Opposition, the first national section of the so-called International Right Opposition.
The 2nd World Congress of the Communist International was a gathering of approximately 220 voting and non-voting representatives of communist and revolutionary socialist political parties from around the world, held in Petrograd and Moscow from July 19 to August 7, 1920. The 2nd Congress is best remembered for formulating and implementing the 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.
The 1st Congress of the Communist International was an international gathering of communist, revolutionary socialist, and syndicalist delegates held in Moscow which established the Communist International (Comintern). The gathering, held from March 2 to 6, 1919, was attended by 51 representatives of more than two dozen countries from around Europe, North America, and Asia.
Ernst Meyer was a German Communist political activist and politician and a chairman of the KPD. He is best remembered as a founding member and top leader of the Communist Party of Germany and as the leader of that party's membership in the Prussian Landtag. A political opponent of Ernst Thälmann, Meyer was moved out of the top party leadership after 1928, not long before his death of tuberculosis-related pneumonia at the age of 43.
Otto Eduard Gerardus Majella Huiswoud was a Surinamese political activist who was a charter member of the Communist Party of America. Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement. Huiswoud served briefly as the Communist Party's representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1922 and was a leading black Comintern functionary during the decade of the 1920s.
The Communist Women's International was launched as an autonomous offshoot of the Communist International in April 1920 for the purpose of advancing communist ideas among women. The Communist Women's International was intended to play the same role for the international women's movement that the Red Peasant International played for poor agrarians and the Red International of Labor Unions played for the international labor movement.
Avetis Sultanovich Sultan-Zade (1889–1938) was a Persian-born ethnic Armenian communist revolutionary and economist, best remembered as one of the founders of the Communist Party of Iran. Sultan-Zade was a delegate to the Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920 and was for a time one of the leading figures of the Marxist revolutionary movement in the so-called "East." Following his demotion from the leadership of the Iranian Communist Party and the Comintern in 1923, Sultan-Zada lived in the Soviet Union where he worked as a government functionary in the banking industry.
International Red Aid was an international social-service organization. MOPR was founded in 1922 by the Communist International to function as an "international political Red Cross", providing material and moral aid to radical "class-war" political prisoners around the world.
A united front is an alliance of groups against their common enemies, figuratively evoking unification of previously separate geographic fronts and/or unification of previously separate armies into a front. The name often refers to a political and/or military struggle carried out by revolutionaries, especially in revolutionary socialism, communism, or anarchism. The basic theory of the united front tactic among socialists was first developed by the Communist International, an international communist organization created by communists in the wake of the October Revolution. According to the thesis of the 1922 4th World Congress of the Communist International:
The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.
The Executive Committee of the Communist International, commonly known by its acronym, ECCI (Russian acronym ИККИ - for Исполнительный комитет Коммунистического интернационала), was the governing authority of the Comintern between the World Congresses of that body. The ECCI, established by the Founding Congress of the Comintern in 1919, was dissolved with the rest of the Comintern in May 1943.
The Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) was a multinational conference held in Moscow from July 25 through August 20, 1935 by delegated representatives of ruling and non-ruling communist parties from around the world and invited guests representing other political and organized labor organizations. The gathering was attended by 513 delegates, of whom 371 were accorded full voting rights, representing 65 Comintern member parties as well as 19 sympathizing parties.
John Riddell is a Canadian Marxist essayist, historian, editor, translator and activist. He is best known as editor of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, an eight-volume series of books of Communist International documents, many of which have been translated into English for the first time.
The Sixth Congress of the Communist International was held in Moscow from July 17 to September 1, 1928. The Congress was attended by 515 delegates from 65 organizations from 57 countries. Adopting the theory of the "Third Period", Congress proclaimed social democracy to be "social fascism."
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic 
