Gregory Zinoviev at his best

2012-06-28 · first published in ESSF · 208 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to europe-solidaire.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at ESSF: read it in full.

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A review by John Riddell of Zinoviev and Martov : Head to Head in Halle , edited by Ben Lewis and Lars T. Lih. From ESSF The Thrilla in Halle ! A ringside seat, just for you, as Gregory Zinoviev (in the red trunks) and Julius Martov (his are pale pink) duke it out before delegates of the 700,000-member Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The stakes : should the USPD join the Communist International (Comintern) ? Here at last, after 92 years, the full text of their historic speeches to the October 1920 USPD congress in Halle, Germany, translated and edited by Ben Lewis and Lars Lih. Zinoviev’s four-hour speech provides a unique view of how the Comintern, founded the previous year, explained its character and purpose to a sceptical audience. In addition, it helps us understand Zinoviev himself, a little-studied and much-criticised figure who was the Comintern’s central leader from 1919 to 1926. The speech captivated not only his supporters but his opponents, one of whom wrote that it showed Zinoviev to be “the first orator of our century.” His efforts contributed to convincing a majority of delegates to affiliate to the Comintern. As the congress ended, the anti-Comintern minority broke away, retaining the name USPD.