The Communist International.—Another factor, however, hampered not only financial but political relations between the Soviet and the rest of the world. It was interference in the inter nal affairs of foreign countries by the Third or Communist Inter national, known as the "Comintern." The Third International was founded by Lenin in March 1919 as a successor to the First Inter national of Marx. It was pledged to the cause Revolution which had, Lenin declared, been betrayed by the Second Interna tional of Amsterdam.
The Soviet Government maintained that the choice of Moscow as the headquarters of the Comintern involved no closer connec tion between it and the Third International than Amsterdam made between the Second International and the Government of the Netherlands. The Comintern was an aggregation of Communist Parties, and in theory, at least, the successful Communist Party of Russia was no more than Primus inter pares. The avowed pur poses of the Comintern to overthrow their regimes and institu tions by violence caused foreign Powers to take a different point of view. Declining to regard casuistic distinctions, they consid ered the Comintern and the Soviet Government as vassals of one lord, the Russian Communist Party. While power in Russia remained in Communist hands, it was impossible for foreigners to reconcile the action of the Comintern in any country with friendly relations between that country and the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the Comintern extended its activities to the colonies of foreign Powers and to semi-colonial countries or spheres of influence, such as China. This caused ill-feeling between Russia and the foremost colonial Power, Great Britain, and in May 1923, Lord Curzon, as foreign secretary of a Conservative Government, addressed to Moscow a note on the subject, so sharply worded as to be the equivalent of an ultimatum. There were a number of points at issue, but the question of Communist "propaganda" in Britain and her colonies was the principal grievance. The Soviet Government acceded to the British demands, under protest ; but the propaganda ghost was not laid, and it continued to trouble Anglo-Russian relations.
The British Labour Government of 1924 took steps towards a friendly settlement with the Soviet Union. An agreement was reached in the autumn of 1924 whereby the Soviet promised to repay old debts over a long term of years in return for immediate financial aid. Before the accord could be signed there was a general election in England, in which no small role was played by a letter said to have been written by Zinoviev, president of the Communist International, to a member of the English Communist Party, giving instructions about Communist propaganda in the British Isles. The Labour Party was decisively beaten and the
Conservatives returned to power. The agreement with the Soviet was shelved and the new Government accepted the Zinoviev letter, whose authenticity was denied by Moscow, as proof of the "nefarious interference" of the Bolsheviks in British affairs. The stir caused by this incident might have been forgotten but for events in Asia and other colonial regions, where the distinction between Soviet Government policy and Comintern activities at times became a subtle one.
Three years later, however, the Soviet had signed treaties of friendship with Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan as States inde pendent of external influence, and established a virtual protecto rate over outer Mongolia. The central Asian principalities of Khiva and Bokhara were firmly under Soviet rule, and the new Russian republic was now ready to challenge Britain in China.
The Soviet Government and the Comintern achieved this result jointly, under Lenin's guidance. The former disavowed unequal treaties, capitulations, treaty ports, protected areas and unilateral tariffs; while the latter devoted its energies to fostering not Com munism but nationalism, by virtue of the Leninist doctrine of colonial slaves. This doctrine was Lenin's answer to the question which had long perplexed orthodox Marxists, namely, why the working masses of western Europe had failed to revolt, as Marx had predicted, against their capitalist masters. Lenin argued that the surplus profits from the exploitation of colonies and semi colonial countries such as China had enabled the European capi talists to maintain their "wage slaves" above the starvation level which would make revolution inevitable. To free such countries from capitalist exploitation would therefore be a long step towards the proletarian world revolution. Lenin thus reconciled three ap parently contradictory forces, the nationalist aspirations of colo nial and semi-colonial countries, the spirit of Marxist Communism, and the reborn desire of new Russia for expansion, a desire which was expressed in the absorption of Khiva, Bokhara and Outer Mongolia.