The Comintern and Anticolonial Internationalism in the Middle East

Burak Sayim (University of Antwerp)

This piece is part of an attempt to rethink the Communist International from the perspective of its Middle Eastern anticolonialism. The Communist International itself, also known by its Russian acronym, the “Comintern,” or as the Third International, is the subject of ever-growing scholarly attention.[1] Founded under the aegis of the Bolshevik Party in Moscow in 1919, the Comintern was arguably the transnational entity par excellence in the interwar years, moving not only ideas but militants, publications, and arms across borders on a scale never seen before.[2]

The Baku Congress, Azerbaijan, 1920. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

A novelty of the Communist International, particularly in comparison to other “Internationals,” was its extensive reach in the colonial world. As the Comintern leadership made abundantly clear, they took great pride in the presence of militants from Mexico to Korea, to Egypt, and Indonesia in their ranks. They underlined, time and again, the contrast between the Communist International and its predecessor, the Second International, whose international congresses hosted almost exclusively European socialists.[3] This was, while hardly amounting to full equality, an attempt to organize across the color and colonial lines as one of the Comintern’s self-proclaimed distinctive points. The years between 1920 Baku Congress and the 1927 Brussels Conference, two occasions where non-communist anticolonial militants and groups came together on the initiative of the Communist International, marked the peak point of these efforts. As Grigorii Zinoviev, the Comintern’s chairman, put it in the 1920 Baku Congress: “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin; not only Europeans, whom the Second International was particularly concerned with. […] The Communist International is sure that under its flag will rally not only the proletarians of Europe but also […] the hundreds of millions of peasants who live in Asia, our Near and Far East.”[4] An eloquent sign of the novelty was the bold modification of Karl Marx’s famous slogan, “Workers of all countries, unite” in the Communist Manifesto into “Workers of all countries, and the oppressed peoples of the whole world unite” at the Baku Congress of 1920.[5]

Anti-colonial origins of the Comintern

However, I believe focusing exclusively on the Comintern as an anticolonial platform, without the other side of the coin, gives us an imperfect picture. Before examining the novelty of Comintern from an anticolonial perspective, it is worthwhile to begin with the anticolonial origins of the organization. Here, it is useful to ask the right kind of “why” questions before engaging with the “how” – i.e., how the Comintern represented a novel anticolonial platform and how anticolonial militants utilized this newly found tool. So, why would the Comintern make a deliberate effort to bridge the gap between “Eastern” anticolonialism and Western working-class militancy, whereas its socialist predecessors showed scant interest in it? Even the fact that the question can be posed in this manner, identifying two bridgeable units in the Western working class and Eastern anticolonialism, deserves attention. Here, an oft-neglected part of the equation is the collective agency asserted by the colonial world in the wake of the Soviet Revolution in 1917, both within and beyond the Russian Empire.

Somewhat provocatively, then, we can assert that 1916, in that regard, should be a central date in the (pre-)history of the Comintern, in addition to the Soviet Revolution in 1917, Comintern’s foundation in 1919, the Baku Congress in 1920, the Brussels Conference in 1927 and so on, to get a better sense of its novel anticolonialism. Famously, 1916 was the year when the colonial peripheries of at least three empires involved in World War I rose up in revolts. Russian Central Asia – then known as Turkestan – took up arms in that year against forced mobilization.[6] Not incidentally, one of the participants of the Baku Congress mentioned above, Turar Ryskulov, was a veteran of the 1916 rebellion. He would join the communist party a year later, before becoming the future chairman of Soviet Turkestan, showing direct continuity between anticolonial uprising and the emerging communist tradition, beyond intellectual influence on individual leaders.[7] In Ireland, it was the year of the Easter Rising.[8] Just a few months later, the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule would launch with British backing.[9] The intellectual history of the Bolshevik leadership’s responses to these almost-simultaneous events deserves to be explored as part of a fully developed research agenda. However, for my purposes here, it is sufficient to note that a whole array of political actors, including the Bolshevik leadership and Vladimir Lenin himself, took good note of this novel factor of international politics. It is notable that following the Easter Rising, he would update his earlier draft on national self-determination with a sub-section dedicated to Easter Rising.”[10] It is also worth recalling that his oft-quoted point that “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it” (emphasis in the original text) was written on that occasion, as part of his defense of the Easter Rising in Ireland, particularly against Karl Radek.[11] It was this context, created by the collective agency of colonized peoples, that catapulted anticolonialism, not simply as a knee-jerk reaction to European colonization, but rather as a political force in its own right. Thus, in the context of the post-WWI conjectural crisis, any challenger of the imperialist-capitalist order had to account for the potentiality of anticolonial agents as the makers and breakers of international politics. The Comintern’s anticolonial turn should be understood as informed by this broader context.

Comintern’s anti-colonialism

After establishing the anticolonial origins of the Comintern, now a few words about how, in turn, the organization contributed to global anticolonialism. The Comintern’s history offers ample room to reframe the narrative around anticolonial militants themselves. Thus, I wish to ask if we can reconstrue the history of the Communist International, not from its Moscow center, but from the perspective of its anticolonial supporters as a project of anticolonial internationalism. Put differently, I want to understand why the Communist International was relevant for Middle Eastern anticolonial militants – both those who ended up within the ranks of the Comintern and those who forged uneasy alliances with this global communist polity, without ever adhering to it.

Hence, when taking anticolonial agency as the focal point, we can argue that the Communist International appeared utterly different from a Middle Eastern vantage point: it may have been the potential harbinger of a social revolution for European and North American communist parties. However, at the same time, for many anticolonial militants and organizations drifting towards its orbit, the Communist International was a global entity capable of bringing about their national liberation. Yet, this was not merely an opportunistic alliance, and the promise of social revolution in “the West” was not irrelevant to those who adhered to this project in the colonial world. Rather, the social upheaval in the West and the new geopolitical order it could have entailed was a necessary–but not sufficient–condition for the emergence and survival of the post-colonial world they imagined. Hence, the global vision of the International was central to making it tempting for the colonial world.

Additionally, these new optics would enable us to view Comintern-anticolonialist interaction in the 1920s not merely as a diplomatic move by the Soviet Union, but as part of the broader continuum of anticolonial politics. As I argue in my forthcoming book, The Making of Communism in the Middle East, the majority of the first generation of communist militants in the Middle East and North Africa cut their political teeth in national liberation politics before turning to communism, from the 1919 Egyptian Revolution to the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925. This was no mere coincidence: they often came to the Comintern and its parties with their national liberation aspirations intact, and in turn, feeding this orientation into the nascent global communist movement. If the Comintern represented an anticolonial orientation in global politics, even with all its imperfections, the center of this story should be this generation of anticolonial militants and the collective agency asserted in the preceding anticolonial rebellions. On this basis, we can step back to understand the Comintern not simply within the continuum of European socialism, but as an attempt to sublate socialist and anticolonial politics of the pre-war years. Yet, it also remains true that, particularly in the Middle Eastern case, the gravitation from anticolonialism to Comintern politics was important yet not massive to the extent of making the Comintern the main proponent of the anticolonial politics – unlike, say, what would later happen in Indonesia or Vietnam. Hence, the emergence of the Comintern in the Middle East could be seen as an imperfect sublation of various anticolonial traditions.

… and its afterlives

The emergence of the communist movement as a new anticolonial actor in the Middle East not only had an effect on those militants who continued their anticolonial militancy using this platform: In the time period between the Baku Congress in 1920 and the Brussels Congress in 1927 almost every major non-communist anticolonial movement in the region collaborated with the Communist International. Ironically, the Brussels Congress in 1927 and the formation of the League against Imperialism, which arguably constituted the zenith of the anticolonial-communist alliance, were also the swan song of the period where the Comintern served as the privileged platform of anticolonial internationalism. Particularly after the 6^th Comintern Congress in 1928, world communism underwent a shift in orientation, marked by the emergence of the so-called “Third Period” and “Class against Class” politics in the late 1920s, which led to the abandonment of alliances with non-communist anticolonial groups. This change, and the ensuing disenchantment with the Comintern as a potential ally/platform for the anticolonial project, spelled the end of this particular rapprochement – but not that of anticolonial efforts to find European allies, which could help them bring about the post-colonial regional order they sought. Put differently, a Comintern-shaped political vacuum emerged in the alliances of Middle Eastern anticolonial politics. The vacuum would soon be filled: Mussolini replaced Lenin, Rome and Berlin replaced Moscow.

Take the case of Ottoman-born Lebanese notable Amir Shakib Arslan. He was one of the most prominent spokespeople of pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism in the wake of the First World War and had been in contact with the Communist International throughout the 1920s. According to Comintern accounts, in 1921, Shakib Arslan contacted them to give a speech at the Comintern Congress that year.[12] Although he never took the floor at a Comintern congress, he visited Moscow in 1921.[13] In a few years, he was reportedly in discussions with Palestinian and French communist parties in Geneva.[14] Consequently, as the Syrian representative, Arslan took part in the founding congress of the Comintern-linked League against Imperialism in Brussels.[15] He was also present at the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution in Moscow.[16] However, after that point, Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy replaced the World Communist Party as Arslan’s privileged interlocutor.[17] In the heat of the Second World War, he became one of the contributors of Barid al-Sharq (The Eastern Post), the Arabic mouthpiece of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, published in Berlin.

Arslan’s case was perhaps extreme – not all went from the Comintern-linked events to an alliance with world fascism. But it was telltale, as it symbolized how, while the anticolonial nationalists of the region drifted towards the Comintern and Moscow in the 1920s, as of the 1930s, Rome and, most of all, Berlin replaced it.[18] In the 1920s, Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, Mirza Kuchek Khan in Iran, Shakib Arslan in Syria/Lebanon, Emir Khaled in Algeria, Hizb al-Watani in Egypt, or Destour Party in Tunisia, and its leader Sheikh Abdelaziz Taalbi were in touch with the Comintern or the Soviet Union to varying extents. A decade later, the most prominent anticolonialists (including Amin al-Husayni from Palestine and Fawzi al-Qawuqji from Lebanon) would start to actively collaborate with the fascist bloc. However, this shift indicates something more than spurious arguments about an inherent affinity between Middle Eastern anticolonialism and European fascism.

The volte-face of the late 1920s brought a premature end to the still not fully-fledged alliances between revolutionary nationalists of the region and global communism. Colonial archives of the 1920s are replete with expressions of – often overblown – fears of a possible convergence between the communists and anticolonial groups. Was this ever a possibility? Or could there be a historical bloc, in Gramscian terms, between communism and anticolonialism? As attested by historiography, the post-Second World War era indeed saw a rekindling of affection between two global movements. However, before the demise of world fascism, at least in the 1930s, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy increasingly became the privileged partners of Middle Eastern anticolonialism, more than Soviet communism. Was this inevitable? I do not wish to enter the realm of historical speculation. However, there is a case to be made that reframing the “Middle Eastern” Communist International, as a platform of anticolonial internationalism could offer us a better understanding of the region’s history in the interwar years, including the increasing fascination with fascism in the 1930s.

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[1] For some of the most impressive and innovative works in the last decade or so, see Serge Wolikow, L’Internationale communiste: le Komintern ou le rêve déchu du parti mondial de la révolution (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2010); Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Aleksandr Vatlin, Vtoroĭ Kongress Kominterna: Tochka Otscheta Istorii Mirovogo Kommunizma (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2018).

[2] Holger Weiss, A Global Radical Waterfront: The International Propaganda Committee of Transport Workers and the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, 1921-1937 (Leiden: Brill, 2021); Burak Sayim, “Transregional by Design: The Early Communist Press in the Middle East and Global Revolutionary Networks,” Journal of Global History 18, no. 2 (July 2023): 216–35; Brigitte Studer, Travelers of the World Revolution: Hope, Struggle and Defeat: The Communist International and the Global Fight for Freedom (London: Verso Books, 2023).

[3] Mike Taber, ed., Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889-1912 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).

[4] John Riddell, ed., To See the Dawn : Baku, 1920 - First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1993), 50.

[5] Riddell, 219, emphasis is mine.

[6] For a comprehensive compliation with a somewhat apologist line for the Russian empire, see IU A. Petrov, ed., Turkestanskoe Vosstanie 1916 g. Fakty i Interpretatsii (Moscow: Institut Rossiĭskoĭ Istorii, 2016); Also; Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu, and Alexander Morrison, eds., The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

[7] Riddell, To See the Dawn, 332.

[8] Riddell, 332.

[9] Jonathan Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 78–88.

[10] V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up”, July 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm, compare it with V. I. Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination", January-February 1916, “https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jan/x01.htm,

[11] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/irishmr/vol04/no14/lenin.html

[12] Rüstem Aziz, Mustafa Suphi’ler: şahsî dosyası, değerlendirmeler, anmalar (Istanbul: TÜSTAV, 2009), 18.

[13] William L. Cleveland, Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 41–44.

[14] For the French take on Arslan-Comintern connection: Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de La Courneuve, Paris, hereafter CADC, Afrique 1917-1940, Affaires Musulmans, Bobine 534, Folder 20, Documents 235-238, “La propagande communiste dans les pays musulmans”, February 16, 1925; for the communist account of the discussion between Arslan and communists; RGASPI, f. 495, op. 84, d. 13, ll. 2, Report by Joseph Berger, June 26, 1925.

[15] RGASPI, f. 542, op. 1, d. 14, ll. 31 and 57-59, “Emir Chekib Arslan”, December 10-11, 1927.

[16] Cleveland, Islam Against the West, 76.

[17] Ibid, 135–59.

[18] David Motadel, “The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire,” The American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (June 2019): 843–77.