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( Comintern)
The Communist International (shortened Comintern, also known as the Third International) was an international communist organization founded in Moscow in March 1919. The International intended to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State."[1] The Comintern was founded after the dissolution of the Second International in 1916, following the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference in which Vladimir Lenin had led the "Zimmerwald Left" against those who supported the "national union" governments in war with each other. The Comintern held seven World Congresses between 1919 and 1935. It also held 13 "Enlarged Plenums" of its governing Executive Committee, which had much the same function as the somewhat larger and more grandiose Congresses. The Comintern was officially dissolved in 1943. While the fissures had been evident for decades, World War I was to prove the issue that finally separated the revolutionary and reformist wings of the workers movement. The socialist movement had been historically antimilitarist and internationalist, and was therefore opposed to being used as "cannon fodder" for the "bourgeois" governments at war. This especially since the Triple Alliance (1882) comprised two empires, while the Triple Entente gathered the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland into an alliance with the Russian Empire. The Communist Manifesto had stated that "the working class has no country" and exclaimed "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the international working class to resist war if it was declared. Nevertheless, within hours of the declaration of war, almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for their own countries. The only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans, Russia, and tiny minorities in other countries. To Lenin's surprise, even the German SPD voted in favor of war credits. The assassination of French socialist Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, killed the last hope of peace, by removing one of the few leaders who possessed enough influence on the international socialist movement to prevent it from segmenting itself along national lines and supporting governments of National Unity.
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