Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist,a revolutionary Marxist,and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Marx,Engels,Vladimir Lenin,Karl Liebknecht,and Rosa Luxemburg.
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.
Li Dazhao or Li Ta-chao was a Chinese intellectual and revolutionary who participated in the New Cultural Movement in the early years of the Republic of China,established in 1912. He co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with Chen Duxiu in July 1921. He helped build a united front between the CCP and Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party (KMT) in early 1924. During the Northern Expedition,Li was arrested and then executed by warlord Zhang Zuolin in Beijing in 1927.
Li Lisan was a Chinese politician,member of the Politburo,and later a member of the Central Committee.
The 28 Bolsheviks were a faction in the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The faction was formed among Chinese Communists studying at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow during the late 1920s and early 1930s. They received their nickname because of their strong support for the orthodox political positions advocated by Joseph Stalin and Pavel Mif. The leaders of the faction included Wang Ming,Bo Gu,Luo Fu,He Zishu,Wang Jiaxiang,and Shen Zemin. Sun Yat-sen University closed in 1930 and the students made their way back to China.
Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg,known by the alias Borodin,was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Communist International (Comintern) agent. He was an advisor to Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang (KMT) in China during the 1920s.
Wang Ming was a senior leader of the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the mastermind of the famous 28 Bolsheviks group. Wang was also a major political rival of Mao Zedong during the 1930s,opposing what he saw as Mao's nationalist deviation from the Comintern and orthodox Marxist–Leninist lines. According to Mao on the other hand,Wang epitomized the intellectualism and foreign dogmatism Mao criticized in his essays "On Practice" and "On Contradiction". The competition between Wang and Mao was a reflection of the power struggle between the Soviet Union,through the vehicle of the Comintern,and the CCP to control both the direction and future of the Chinese revolution.
Qin Bangxian or Ch'in Pang-hsien,better known by his alias Bo Gu was a Chinese senior leader of the Chinese Communist Party and a member of the 28 Bolsheviks.
The International Lenin School (ILS) was an official training school operated in Moscow,Soviet Union,by the Communist International from May 1926 to 1938. It was resumed after the Second World War and run by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union;it continued until the end of the Soviet Union. The ILS taught both academic courses and practical underground political techniques with a view to developing a core disciplined and reliable communist political cadres for assignment in communist parties around the world.
The Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) was a revolutionary training school for important communist political leaders. The school operated under the umbrella of the Communist International and was in existence from 1921 until the late 1930s. Part of the university was split into the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University.
Wang Jiaxiang was one of the senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in its early stage and a member of the 28 Bolsheviks. Wang held a variety of high-level posts in the Party:during the Civil War he was the director of the Red Army's General Office,upon the founding of the People's Republic of China he was the first ambassador to the Soviet Union,and then became the first head of the Party's International Department.
Xiang Zhongfa was a Chinese socialist who was one of the early senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The First United Front,also known as the KMT–CCP Alliance,of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),was formed in 1924 as an alliance to end warlordism in China. Together they formed the National Revolutionary Army and set out in 1926 on the Northern Expedition. The CCP joined the KMT as individuals,making use of KMT's superiority in numbers to help spread communism. The KMT,on the other hand,wanted to control the communists from within. Both parties had their own aims and the Front was unsustainable. In 1927,KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek purged the Communists from the Front while the Northern Expedition was still half-complete. This initiated a civil war between the two parties that lasted until the Second United Front was formed in 1936 to prepare for the coming Second Sino-Japanese War.
Pavel Mif was the pseudonym of Mikhail Alexandrovich Fortus,a Ukrainian and Russian Bolshevik party member from May 1917 of Jewish descent,a historian with a doctor's degree in economics (1935),participant in the Russian civil war (1918–20),a student at Yakov Sverdlov Communist University (1920–21),did communist party work in Ukraine (1923–25),pro-rector of Sun Yat-sen Communist University of the Toilers of China (Moscow) under Karl Radek from 1925,rector of the same institution after 1927,member of the Executive Council of Comintern concurrently,participant of the 5th (1927),6th (1928) Congresses of the Communist Party of China and the 4th Plenary meeting of its Central Committee (1931). Mif was arrested by the NKVD on December 11,1937,and sentenced to death in July 1938 for "membership in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization". He was executed on September 10,1939. In the year 1956,following the denouncement of Stalinism by premier Nikita Khrushchev,he was fully (posthumously) rehabilitated.
The history of the Chinese Communist Party began with its establishment in July 1921. A study group led by Peking University professors Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao to discuss Marxism,led to intellectuals officially founding the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in July 1921. In 1923,Sun Yat-sen invited the CCP to form a United Front,and to join his Nationalist Party (GMD) in Canton for training under representatives of the Communist International,the Soviet Union's international organization. The Soviet representatives reorganized both parties into Leninist parties. Rather than the loose organization that characterized the two parties until then,the Leninist party operated on the principle of democratic centralism,in which the collective leadership set standards for membership and an all powerful Central Committee determined the party line,which all members must follow.
Deng Yanda was a military officer in the Chinese Nationalist Party. He broke with party leaders in 1927,denouncing them as traitors to the party's original principles and in 1930 attempted to form a new party,which he called the Provisional Action Committee of the Chinese Nationalist Party or Third Party. It was later renamed the Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party. In 1931 he was convicted of treason by the Nationalist government and secretly executed. Today,Deng is recognized as a revolutionary martyr by the People's Republic of China.
Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League,or Thanh Niên for short,was founded by Nguyen Ai Quoc in Guangzhou in the spring of 1925. It is considered as the “first truly Marxist organization in Indochina”and “the beginning of Vietnamese Communism”. With the support of Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang Left,during the period of 1925-1927,the League managed to educate and train a considerable number of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries,preparing the prominent leadership for the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Vietnamese Revolution. At the time,Vietnam was part of colonial French Indochina.
The Chinese Communist Revolution was a social and political revolution that culminated in the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. For the preceding century,China had faced escalating social,economic,and political problems as a result of Western imperialism,Japanese imperialism,and the decline of the Qing dynasty. Cyclical famines and an oppressive landlord system kept the large mass of rural peasantry poor and politically disenfranchised. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed in 1921 by young urban intellectuals inspired by European socialist ideas and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The CCP originally allied itself with the nationalist Kuomintang party against the warlords and foreign imperialist forces,but the Shanghai Massacre of Communists ordered by Kuomintang (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 forced them into the Chinese Civil War spanning more than two decades.
Karl Berngardovich Radek was a Russian revolutionary and writer active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I and a Communist International leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution.
Sergei Ivanovich Gusev was a Russian revolutionary,a founding member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP),and Soviet politician.
