Foreign Communists and the Mechanisms of Soviet Cadre Formation in the USSR

Abstract

According to their convictions, foreign communists in Stalin’s Russia should have felt at home in Soviet Party life. Although they shared the internationalist Weltanschauung of the world movement and consumed the Stalinist culture surrounding them, foreign cadres differed from their Soviet counterparts in how they lived, acted and thought. Adjusting to a strange and mystifying political environment also entailed coming to terms with expressions of ritualised Party life such as purge-sittings and lengthy sessions where “criticism and self-criticism” (kritika i samokritika) were on the agenda. For the perplexed foreigner, these meetings seemed to violate Western notions of individuality and ignore boundaries between what were private and public domains, for presenting oneself for intense scrutiny at a public forum was relatively unknown in Western communist parties (CPs) of the period. Apart from the expulsion of so-called oppositionists, the term “purge” (chistka) was a vague concept outside the VKP(b), especially in the form it was intended to take: the periodical “self-cleansing’’ of the Party rank-and-file. Moulding party cadres according to Soviet criteria had not established itself in an organised fashion within Western CPs by the mid-1930s, with the French and German Comintern sections providing possible exceptions to this general rule.¹