The opening of the Comintern archives in Moscow in the 1990s, together with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Communist parties worldwide, promised a new dawn for the historiography of the Third International (Comintern).Footnote ¹ Handicapped by a lack of access to primary materials, its pioneers had much to be proud of. The scholarly analysis and political insight of Franz Borkenau, Fernando Claudin, and Isaac Deutscher, driven by personal experience and determination to make sense of it, and the monumental body of work of E.H. Carr, remain relevant to contemporary students of international Communism. With the availability of new documentation, the emphasis on political and institutional history was sustained and the decade witnessed the appearance of updated surveys of the Comintern from its inception in 1919 to its demise in 1943,Footnote ² as well as examination of the relationship between the Moscow centre and the national sections of the aspirant world party utilizing new archival findings.Footnote ³

Research in a similar vein continued to enrich the literature and provoke debate on issues such as the extent and nature of the subordination of national sections to Moscow, the development and role of Stalinism, the Stalinization of the parties, and the divisions within them between leaders, activists, and members in what has always been a controversial subject. The early twenty-first century saw consolidation of a turn towards social and cultural history, biographical studies, exploration of mentalités, and work that, in accordance with contemporary sensibilities, attempted to repair the Eurocentrism and accent on “high politics”, and compensate for the neglect of questions of gender, ethnicity, and experience that had characterized much earlier scholarship.Footnote ⁴

The Swiss historian Brigitte Studer was part of this trend. The Transnational World of the Cominternians made available to English-speaking readers a selection of her papers in French and German and some of her concerns are addressed and expanded on in her new book. The aim is to produce “a history of the Comintern as a place of work” (p. 14) by following the careers of its apparatchiks, its office holders, managers, propagandists, instructors, journalists, couriers, secretaries, and stenographers – although versatility was expected and individuals’ work roles were continually changing – from well-known occupants of senior positions to forgotten junior employees. Mikhail Borodin, Georgi Dimitrov, and Palmiro Togliatti rub shoulders in the text with the relatively unknown Hilde Kramer, Evelyn Trent, Ruth Oesterreich, and Luise Geissler. Studer offers what she describes as less a collective biography than a selection of life histories intermittently criss-crossing and “woven together in a single, contextually informed narrative” (p. 19).

The characterization is apposite. Demonstrating an extensive and only occasionally uncritical knowledge of the proliferating secondary literature in French, German, and English, she employs an impressive range of biographical and background sources, supplemented by her own research in the archives, to present a masterly synthesis of the lives, labours, relationships, and interconnections of a diverse cast of characters united by their existential commitment to the Communist cause, despite a high rate of attrition, defection, expulsion, and “liquidation”. The narrative is fluent, the transitions between actors, incidents, and locales expertly negotiated while an always readable text is illuminated by the photographs. A disappointment is the fairly rudimentary index to what is a densely packed volume.

This is not a prosopography. Out of an estimated 30,000 staff employed by the Comintern at some point, the book mentions 320 and focuses on around two dozen individuals. There is no statistical apparatus, no attempt to construct a representative sample of the workforce or distinguish in structured fashion between occupants of different positions in the hierarchy in relation to their careers and experience. Studer's selection of protagonists is based on the revolutionary “generation of 1920”. Her choice is premised on catering for diversity, highlighting women's oppression and anti-imperialist struggle, and privileging actors who experienced a lengthy transnational career that carried them to the global “political hotspots” of Communist endeavour and whose lives were well-documented in material accessible to the author's language skills.

Despite its commendable reach and the inclusion of China, the text tilts towards Europe, or at least continental Europe. There is hardly anything on South America, although parts of it were considered ripe for revolution and the Comintern's abortive putsch in Brazil in 1935 and its colourful dramatis personae are worthy of greater exploration, North America or Britain. The latter two, the General Strike of 1926 perhaps excepted, were far from “political hotspots”. But they were of considerable interest to the Comintern as the engine-rooms of global imperialism and, thus, the site of Soviet-directed intrigue and, particularly in the United States case, the machinations of fascinating Cominternians such as the mercurial Magyar Jószef Pogány – John Pepper – only touched on here and the old Bolshevik Sergei Gusev, and in Britain Richard Krebs, the subject of the romanticized Jan Vatlin legend, as well as the well-travelled, finally liquidated David Petróvsky.

Even in a big book it is impossible to cover all bases and Studer's canvas is broad. Introductory essays on the Second World Congress in Moscow in 1920, the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, and the launching of the Comintern's Central Asian Bureau in Tashkent announce key themes – the consolidation of the new internationalism, the excitements and rigours of clandestine global travel, the burgeoning sense of a confident if embattled community of the elect with shared values, languages, and codes – as well as key actors, some passing figures emblematic of the heady times like Louise Bryant and John Reed, others like Jules Humbert-Droz and M.N. Roy more significant in the longer term. Seven core chapters reconstruct the lives and missions of an array of operatives as the youthful Comintern sought to ignite revolution across Europe and Asia. Two chapters set in Berlin depict the transition from the freewheeling improvisation and urgency that characterized the early ethos of looming revolution, to the development of bureaucratic organization, greater cohesion and control, crystallized in the transition from the West European Secretariat to the Western European Bureau and “Bolshevization”. It is embodied here in the contrasting personalities and work methods of Jakov Reich, “Comrade Thomas”, and the very different figures of Osip Piatnitsky, Dimitri Manuilsky, and Humbert-Droz. The project to complement the creation of a political bridgehead by turning Berlin into a citadel of Communist culture is examined through the prism of the media empire of the dynamic Willi Münzenberg, his indefatigable partner Babette Gross and their circle, penetration of the Weimar avant-garde, and cameos of the lives of women like Trent and Geissler.

The success of these political workaholics in developing the Workers’ International Relief and creating a variety of anti-colonial networks culminating in the League Against Imperialism, together with African, Chinese, and Indian activists follows, before the scene shifts to China and the desperate attempts by Borodin, Roy, and Stalin's favourite German, Heinz Neumann – none of whom spoke Chinese – to salvage something from the complicated Soviet strategy of co-opting or subverting the Guomindang. A chapter on Shanghai in 1927–1936, in the aftermath of this disaster, highlights “conspiracy as an occupation” via an ensemble of Comintern operatives living daily with danger, with particular attention devoted to the American, Agnes Smedley, and the German, Ruth Werner (Kuczynski), their role and relationships and the convergence of Comintern activity and Soviet espionage evident in the career of a figure like Richard Sorge. Münzenberg returns to centre stage in an essay on the exodus from Germany in 1933, which terminates with the extinguishing of the residual vestiges of Comintern independence from the Russian state and the elimination of many of its workers in “the Great Terror”. The latter casts its shadow over the Comintern's “last big mission” and the familiar events of the Spanish tragedy emerge through the reconstructed experience of a panoply of audacious and ruthless Stalinist agents, which includes not only the relatively well-known André Marty, Luigi Longo, Vittorio Vidali, and Victorio Codovilla but the less familiar Berta Bickel-Schuler, Jacqueline Bureau, Olga Donini, Tina Modotti, and Teresa Noce.

Such bald summation does scant justice to Studer's vivid and frequently fine-grain restoration to life of the transnational travellers of the Comintern. Her rehabilitation of women activists and overlooked aspects of their lives, such as the varying but important roles they played in personal and political partnerships with male Communists is particularly noteworthy, although a little more light might have been shed on exactly what terms like “feminist” and “left feminist” used by the author (for example, pp. 5, 101, 160, 163) meant to these women, given the Bolsheviks, the Comintern, at least until 1935, and its female adherents’ antagonism to “the women's rightsters” and a “bourgeois feminism” that failed to confront capitalism as the root cause of women's oppression. Travellers of the World Revolution is an important addition to the historiography, whose virtues stem more from in-depth research and traditional scholarship than “the spatial turn in history” (p. 10) and “Bourdieusian sociology” (p. 29) invoked in the book's “Introduction”.

Few would quarrel with Studer's insistence on the need to address the subjective and emotional dimensions of the motivations and trajectories of historical actors if we are to properly understand the social and personal determinants of politics. In practice that can be a daunting prospect. The extent to which historians can act as cartographers of the private self is questionable. Personal materials beyond the Comintern and Soviet archives, letters, diaries, autobiographical writings, and testimonies – we need to control for context and purpose – which may provide an entry into the thoughts, feelings, and internal universe of activists, are not always at hand. Problems are compounded when we are dealing with secretive personalities engaged in “conspiracy”: their trade was dissimilation and they cloaked not only their work, but also their identity and interiority in clandestinity. We may reasonably maintain a degree of scepticism about the extent to which, at least in many such cases, historians can satisfactorily reconstruct subjectivity and decipher the mysteries of complex, shrouded minds. We learn a good deal in this book about their practice; less, beyond well-known general explanations, about the specific motivations and minds of individual Cominternians.

Finally, the Comintern was indeed, as Karl Schlögel suggests (p. 10), a cultural phenomenon. It was first and foremost a political phenomenon, a political institution par excellence whose politics infused the lives of Cominternians and Studer's concern that emphasis on its record of failure may obscure and lead us to lose sight of the complex experience and culture of its actors (p. 451), may, in today's historiographical climate, seem a little misplaced. Currently popular, cultural, and experiential approaches constitute a valuable increment to the historian's toolbox. But we should not disregard the centrality in this case of political history. Otherwise, we may come to learn more and more about what it meant to experience the failure of a political movement when the primary need is to understand the reasons why that movement, like so many transnational socialist initiatives, failed, and perhaps provide possible remedies that might turn past failure into future success.