Notes and References Note: The presence of an asterisk at the end of a note indicates that the relevant quotation was originally in English, but has had to be translated back into English from the author's French text. 1 Communism and Youth I. Ralph Talcott Fisher Jr, Pattern for Soviet Youth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 12. 2. The International Union of Socialist Youth Organizations (IUSYO) had been founded in Stuttgart in August 1907. It had been taken over by Miinzenberg during the First World War, while its leaders were absent. Under his direc­ tion, the IUS YO, renamed The International Centre of the Organizations of Socialist Youth (CIOJS), was to undergo profound structural changes. 3. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917 to 1923 (London: Macmillan, 1952), p. 448. 4. His departure completed the total sovietization of the KIM. According to Margarete Huber-Neumann, from that time onwards Miinzenberg became aware of the danger the sovereign claims of the Russian party created for the international working-class movement. Cf. La revolution mondiale. L'his­ toire du Komintern ( 1919-1943), racontee par l'un de ses principaux temoins (Tournai: Casterman 1971). 5. Miinzenberg had all the talents of a captain of industry. Within a very short time he built up, independently of the international socialist organization, a chain of publishing houses, magazines, daily papers, a film company - in short a giant conglomerate that those within the Party called the 'Konzern Miinzenberg'. Heading this enormous financial empire, he devoted himself selflessly to the promotion of communism. Through his network of organiza­ tions, which stretched from England to Japan, he controlled a large number of periodicals (in Japan alone he edited, directly or indirectly, 19 publications in the 1930s), staged theatrical productions and produced films. It was through him that the products of the young Soviet film industry were distri­ buted in Europe. He arranged for masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin, Mother, Storm over Asia and other famous films of great directors such as Eisenstein, Poudovkine, Ozep and so on, to be shown in Berlin and thus revealed to an enthusiastic Western public. 6. R. H. Carew-Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1957), p. 180. 7. 3rd Congress of the Comintern, Theses on the Structure, Methods, and Actions of the Communist Party, cited on p. 114 in Harmel, La C.G.T., 1947-1981 (Paris: PUF, 1982), p. 20. 8. Richard Cornell, Youth and Communism (New York: Walker, 1965). 9. Ibid., p. 57. 10. Jacques Varin, Jeunes comme JC, vol. 1, 1920-1939 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1975) p. 181. 225 226 Notes and References to pp. 7-11 II. Henri Barbusse, You are the Pioneers, Being a Report of the World Youth Congress Against Fascism and War (London: Utopia Press, 1933). 12. Jacques Varin in Jeunes comme JC, op. cit., records only the anti-fascist aspect of the Congress, systematically erasing all the antidemocratic, anti­ socialist and anti-League of Nations rhetoric. 13. In his work, Varin describes the Paris meeting as having taken place under the aegis of the League of Nations! 14. 'Build the united front of democratic countries against dictatorship? This is the most up-to-date manoeuvre of democratic imperialism: in reality it means the setting of one group against another, huge business wars, a flag covering a vast commercial bargaining, which will end as always in the crushing of the masses (Barbusse You are the Pioneers, op. cit., pp. II, 12). Note the slightly peculiar English of Barbusse. 15. 'The enemy is not a foreign one. It [sic] is not found in a distant land. The enemy attacks the workers' wages and conditions. It is here. It sits in man­ sions and in counting houses, in palaces and in directors' board rooms. It sits in government offices', Twenty Years After. The real story of the War in Pictures (London, 1934 }, 17 pp. 16. Ibid. p. 16. 17. 'We will fight, but not for capitalism. Now we can see that the enemy is our own country. The question is to organize the fight. We reject the slogan of the Defence of the Fatherland. The fatherland of Vickers and Baldwin is not our Fatherland. We have no quarrels with the youth of foreign countries, but on the contrary we will fight in common with them', Hit Back - & Win: A call from the national youth against War and Fascism held at Sheffield on August 4th and 5th, 1934 (London: Youth Anti-War Council), p. 7. 18. I say 'seemed' because it has popularly been assumed (not least by Ribbentrop, then the obtuse German ambassador to the Court of StJames, who reported back to Hitler that the elite of British youth was riddled with pacifism) that all those who voted for that resolution were indeed pacifists. But some of those present at the debate recall that many supporters of the motion argued that 'King and Country' were indeed jingoistic and outdated concepts for which they would refuse to fight: but they would be prepared to fight for a noble cause- as indeed many of them would do when the war broke out. 19 Varin, Jeunes comme JC, op. cit., p. 153. 20. Ibid. 2 The Young Communists and the Popular Front, 1935-39 I. Annie Kriegel, Les communistes fran~ais, (Point/Poche: Seuil, 1970), p. 62. 2. See for instance the conclusion of an article on the Conference on Colonial Problems, organized in April 1939 by the World Student Organization, in World Youth Review (a monthly supplement of World News and Views) no. 6 (June 1939), p. 125. 3. Arthur Koestler, Hieroglyphics, vol. I, p. 285, quoted in Alain Brossat, Agents de Moscou (Gallimard, 1988). 4. 6th World Congress of the Young Communist International. The Day is Ours. Report of Comrade M. Woolf, October 1935 (London), 36pp, p. 8. Notes and References to pp. 11-16 227 During the Congress Michael Woolf (or Wolf) had been elected General Secretary. Michael Farkas (the name means 'Wolf in Hungarian) was a Jew born in Kosice. He had been General Secretary of the Czech Young Communists before fleeing to Moscow. He would become Hungarian Defence Minister under Rakosi. 5. Ibid. p. 9 and INPRECORR (International Press Correspondence, the organ of the Comintern, to be re-named World News and Views in 1938), 5 October 1935, p. 1271 6. INPRECORR, 17 August, 1936, p. 135. 7. Ibid. pp. 14-15. 8. INPRECORR, 12 October 1935, p. 1359. 9. Membership of the French Young Communists grew spectacularly: 4198 in February 1934, 12 430 at the begining of 1935, 23 000 in July 1935, 30 000 in December 1935, 40 000 in May 1936, 72 000 in August 1936, I 00 000 in December 1936. 10. World Youth Review, the monthly supplement of the Comintern organ World News and Views, vol. 2, no. I (January 1939), p. 2. II. At its executive meeting in Liege, it felt obliged to allow its national sections the freedom to make agreements with communist groups; but the IUSY itself refused all cooperation with the KIM. 12. See Pierre Boisson, Second Anniversary of the United Socialist Youth of Belgium, in World Youth Review, no. I (January 1939), p. 17. 13. Heinrich Eppe, The Power of Solidarity: Eighty Years of Socialist Youth International (Bonn/Vienna: IUSY, 1987), p. 62. 14. Ibid., p. 64, and Radomir Luza, History of the International Socialist Movement (Leyden: Sijhoff, 1970), p. 53. 15. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (London: Gollancz, 1941), p. 95. 16. Full name: the National Union of Students of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scottish students had their own organization, the Student Union of Scotland (SUS). 17. Philip Toynbee, then one of the most conspicuous communists at Oxford, was at the time secretary of the university section of the party. According to Andrew Lewis, 'he was the very archetype of the Marxist dandy, having an aristocratic life-style and a romantic identification with the masses'.* Cf. Le Rouge et le Bleu, La manufacture, 1986, pp. 91-2. 18. A film made in 1934 by Serge and Georges Vassiliev. 19. Interview with the author. 20. Activist on the Spanish Aid Committee, then Secretary of the International Youth Congress, which would be formed in London in 1941. In an interview with the author, Mrs Williams denied that she had been more than a fellow traveller. 21. General Secretary of the World Congress of Youth ( 193~2). She was the wife of the young activist Michael Wallace (son of the crime novelist Edgar Wallace), who would be killed in the Italian campaign. Her second husband was Dudley Collard, a lawyer who had taken part in the Moscow Trials and who had subsequently won further notoriety in Britain by publicly insisting that the accused had been guilty. 22. Interview with the author. 23. See note 30 on p. 228. 228 Notes and References to pp. 17-22 24. 22 March, 1932. Comintern Archives, Moscow, 533/10/341, p. 2. 25. Ibid., p. 13. 26. See the letter of Alex Massie of the London YCL to Lewis Powey at the KIM in Moscow, 4 July 1939 Comintern Archives, Moscow, 533/10/352, pp. 86 to 96. 27. Ibid., pp. 91-6. 28. Interview with the author, London, 25 February 1988. 29. Report by the Secretary to the London Labour Party Executive. Agenda for the Executive meeting of 11/6/36. Item no. 5, EC 29 (35/6). Youth Advisory Committee and London Youth Peace Assembly. 30. See Marian (Wilbraham) Slingova, Truth will Prevail, (London, Merlin Press 1968); and interview with the author.