Comintern

The Comintern, or Communist International, was an international Communist organization founded by and controlled by the Soviet Union. It was first established in 1919, as a way for the Soviet Union to "export revolution abroad" in its policy of overthrow legitimate regimes; to aid revolutionary Communist parties in other countries and to use foreign Communist parties for espionage and subversion (political) to further Communist goals.

With his seizure of power in Russia, Soviet General Secretary V.I. Lenin turned immediately to his real goal, world revolution. He invited members of all the old socialist parties to join the Comintern. Many did, and new parties were formed—the Communist Party of France (CPF), the Communist Party of China (CCP), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and so on, all under the control of the mother party in Moscow (CPSU).

The openly proclaimed aim of the Comintern was the overthrow of all “capitalist” governments and the establishment of a universal state under Communist dominion. The founding documents of the Comintern explicitly declared that the member parties and movements were to use whatever means, legal or illegal, peaceful or violent, might be appropriate to their situations at any given time.

This was the stark specter facing the non-Communist nations in the decades before World War II: a power covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface had at its command a global movement that was fighting to wrest control of organized labor everywhere, fomenting revolutions in the colonial regions, vying for the allegiance of the western intelligentsia, and planting spies wherever it could—all with the goal of bringing about Bolshevism to the all of the world’s peoples.

The Comintern was publicly disbanded in 1943, however its underground apparatus remained active throughout World War II and into the Cold War era.