On 4/11/21 1:56 PM, abraham Weizfeld PhD wrote:
Both Zinoviev and Trotsky (Bronstein) brought down the International with mistaken policies. Bronstein was so much of a democratic centralist he sought to relegate the personal lives of French comrades even.
It wasn't his personality that dictated this behavior. Every one of these leading Bolsheviks were bullheaded. You had to be in order to withstand Czarist repression. It was more a function of how they were organized. From a post <http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm> about the 1923 German CP screw-up that led directly to the 1924 Bolshevization Comintern:
The Bolshevik leaders finally wore Brandler down and he agreed to their plans, which involved the following:
1) The Communists would join Zeigner's government in Saxony as coalition partners and arm the workers. The state of Saxony would then provide a base for a military and political offensive in the rest of Germany.
2) A date would be set for the seizure of power. Trotsky was the main advocate of setting a date. Over the objections of Brandler, Trotsky insisted that the date be November 9th. This was meant to coincide closely with the Bolshevik revolution of November 7th, 1917. Trotsky said, "Let us take our own October Revolution as an example...From the moment that the Bolsheviks were in the majority in the Petrograd Soviet...our party was faced with the question--not of the struggle for power in general, but of preparing for the seizure of power according to a definite plan, and at a fixed date. The chosen day, as it is well known, was the day upon which the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets was to convene..." Trotsky simply could not perceive that Russian revolutionaries setting a date for themselves is much different than setting a date for revolutionaries in another country. This distinction would have been lost on Trotsky who had gotten in the habit of laying down tactics for other Communist Parties in his capacity as Comintern official. He had the audacity to tell the French Communist Party, for example, what should go on the front page of their newspaper L'Humanite.
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