Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 17:14:03 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
From: Michael Pugliese <michael098762001-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: Communists and Religious Movements?


http://www.internationalism.org/ir/109_islam.html
Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East

The first application of the 'Theses on the National and Colonial Question' was the so called Baku (Azerbaijan) Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in September 1920, more or less immediately after the conclusion of the Second Congress of the Comintern. At least one-quarter of the conference delegates were not communists, including open anti-communists, bourgeois nationalists and Pan-Islamists. Presided over by Zinoviev, it called repeatedly for a 'holy war' (Zinoviev's phrase) against foreign and domestic oppressors and for workers' and peasants' governments throughout the Middle East and Asia, as a means of weakening imperialism, especially British imperialism.


The Bolsheviks' scheme was to form an 'unbreakable alliance' with these disparate elements, with the principal aim of loosening the imperialist ring around Soviet Russia. The opportunist core of this policy was showed by Zinoviev at the opening session of the congress, when he described the conference delegates and the movements and states they represented as Russia's 'second sword', whom Russia was 'approaching as brothers, as comrades in struggle'.12 This was the first ever 'anti-imperialist' (i.e., inter-classist) conference held in the name of communism.


The pioneer US communist, John Reed, who attended the congress, was sickened by its proceedings. Angelica Balabanova relates (in My Life as a Rebel, p. 318) that "Jack spoke bitterly of the demagogy and display which had characterised the Baku Congress and the manner in which the native population and the Far Eastern delegates had been treated".13 An Appeal from the Communist Party of Netherlands to the Peoples of the East Represented in Baku appears in the French language edition of the Comintern's record of congress proceedings and was presumably distributed to the delegates. This asserted that 'thousands of Indonesians' had been 'united for the common struggle against the Dutch oppressors' by the Pan-Islamist Sarekat Islam, and the Appeal was certain that this Pan-Islamist organisation joined with it in greeting the congress.


At the congress, the Bolshevik Party's Radek openly evoked the image of the conquering army of the former Ottoman Muslim sultans, declaring: "We appeal, comrades [sic], to the warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of the East when those peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced upon Europe".14 Within three months of the Baku Congress, which had lauded the Turkish nationalist Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), the latter had murdered the entire leadership of the Turkish Communist Party.


By its Fourth Congress in 1922, the Comintern had revised its programme even further. Introducing the 'Theses on the Eastern Question' that were unanimously adopted by the congress, the Dutch delegate van Ravesteyn declared that 'the independence of the Eastern world as a whole, the independence of Asia, the independence of the Muslim peoples ... means in itself the end of Western imperialism'. Earlier at the same congress, Malaka, the delegate from the Dutch East Indies, had repeated that communists there had worked closely with Sarekat Islam, until the two groups quarrelled in 1921. Malaka declared that the hostility to Pan-Islam expressed in the theses adopted by the Second Congress had damaged the position of communists. Adding his own support for close collaboration with Pan-Islam, the delegate from Tunis argued that, unlike the British and French CPs, who were inactive on the colonial question, at least the Pan-Islamists united all Muslims against their oppressors.15

Michael Pugliese


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