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For a time the Comintern was the main force backing colonial liberation, training a generation from Ho Chi Minh to Kenyatta, until many broke with Moscow and 'anti-communism' became the pretext to crush them.
For a time the Comintern was the main force backing colonial liberation, training a generation from Ho Chi Minh to Kenyatta, until many broke with Moscow and 'anti-communism' became the pretext to crush them.
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Lenin's pamphlet argued that the rich nations had grown wealthy by carving up the world into colonies and spheres of profit, tying capitalism directly to empire. The book gave colonized readers a theory that named their poverty as the flip side of Europe's wealth. Historians point to it as a main reason Marxism-Leninism appealed to anti-colonial thinkers, whatever they made of Soviet politics.
also in Communism: rise and fall, The Internationals
At a congress in Moscow convened by Lenin, revolutionaries from around the world vote to establish the Third International, the Comintern, to promote world revolution under Bolshevik leadership.
At the Second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin presented draft theses arguing that communists in the colonies should support movements for national liberation as a step against imperialism. The document tied the workers' cause to the freedom of colonized peoples and was read closely by a generation of anti-colonial figures. It committed the movement, on paper, to backing the struggles of the colonized world.
The Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy challenged Lenin at the Second Congress, warning that communists should not simply follow middle-class nationalist leaders who might drop the workers once independence was won. Lenin defended alliances with what he called national-revolutionary movements, and the congress adopted wording that reflected the compromise. The exchange set out a tension, whether to lead or to ally, that would run through communist policy in the colonies for decades.
The Comintern gathered nearly two thousand delegates from Asia and the Middle East in Baku to rally the colonized against European empire. Speakers called for a struggle against British and French rule, and the meeting mixed communist appeals with the language of anti-colonial revolt. Historians see it as an early, and largely symbolic, attempt by Moscow to place itself at the head of the colonial world's grievances.
Ho Chi Minh, then a young Vietnamese in France, read Lenin's theses on the colonial question and said they answered the problem of his country's freedom. At the Congress of Tours he joined those who broke away to found the French Communist Party. He later wrote that it was the colonial argument, not abstract theory, that won him over.
Moscow opened the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, known as KUTV, to train revolutionaries from Asia, Africa, and the Soviet east. Over the following years it schooled a stream of anti-colonial activists in Marxist theory and organizing. The school became one of the main channels through which Soviet ideas reached the colonized world.
The Vietnamese activist Ho Chi Minh arrived in Moscow, worked for the Comintern, and attended its Fifth Congress in 1924, where he pressed the movement to take colonial questions seriously. He studied and taught within the Soviet training network before returning to organize in Asia. His path shows how Moscow linked scattered anti-colonial figures into a single movement.
A congress in Brussels founded the League Against Imperialism, drawing anti-colonial figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Mohammad Hatta of Indonesia, Messali Hadj of Algeria, and Lamine Senghor of Senegal. The body was organized through Comintern networks under Willi Munzenberg but brought together nationalists well beyond the communist movement. For many attendees it was a first taste of an organized, worldwide anti-colonial platform, though the League later split as Moscow's line shifted.
The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, tied to the Communist movement's labor bodies, held its first international conference in Hamburg. Led by the Trinidadian activist George Padmore, it drew Black workers and organizers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The committee aimed to link the labor and anti-colonial struggles of the African diaspora.
George Padmore edited The Negro Worker, a journal put out from Hamburg through the Communist labor network to reach Black workers and colonial subjects across the empires. It carried news of strikes, colonial abuses, and anti-imperialist argument, and was smuggled into ports around the Atlantic. The paper spread a shared anti-colonial politics before most colonies had a press of their own.
The Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta spent time in 1932 and 1933 studying at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. He later moved away from the communist movement and led Kenya to independence as a firmly non-communist figure. His stay shows both the reach of Soviet training and how many of those it schooled would later part ways with Moscow.
George Padmore left the Communist movement after Moscow dissolved the Negro workers' organization he led, a step he saw as selling out Black liberation to court the imperial powers. He turned to Pan-Africanism and later mentored figures who would lead African states to independence. His break, set out in his book Pan-Africanism or Communism?, became a landmark case of a colonial radical abandoning Moscow.
At its Seventh Congress the Comintern adopted the Popular Front line, seeking alliances with Britain and France against fascism. To avoid antagonizing those imperial powers, it softened its anti-colonial agitation and wound down bodies like the Negro workers' committee. Historians describe this as the moment Moscow put its own security ahead of the colonial cause, exposing the limits of Soviet support.
Mao set out a model of revolution led by a communist party but rooted in the peasantry and aimed first at foreign domination and landlordism. His stress on rural guerrilla struggle in a poor, mostly agrarian country spoke to conditions across the colonized world more directly than Soviet industrial doctrine. Historians credit the Maoist model with shaping liberation movements from Asia to Africa.
Iran's elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist who had taken the British-run oil industry into state hands, was toppled in a coup backed by the American and British intelligence services. Mossadegh was not a communist, and historians argue the fear of communism served mainly as cover for a fight over oil. The case is often cited as an early model of anti-communism used to justify removing an inconvenient nationalist.
President Eisenhower told a press conference that if one country fell to communism its neighbors would topple like a row of dominoes. The idea became a standing justification for intervening against nationalist and left-wing movements in the decolonizing world. Historians note how it let Washington treat local reformers as pieces in a global communist advance, whatever their actual aims.
Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reform threatened the holdings of the American-owned United Fruit Company, was removed in a coup organized by the CIA. A small communist party did back his reforms, but historians describe the charge that he served Moscow as a pretext for protecting corporate and strategic interests. The intervention became a template for casting Latin American reform as a communist threat.
also in Co-opt the moderate, bury the militant: the pattern of managed decolonization
In The Wretched of the Earth, the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued that the 'national bourgeoisie' that inherits the colonial state tends to act as an intermediary for the former colonizer rather than transform society. In the chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness he called this class a transmission line between the old empire and its former colony. This is Fanon's argument, offered here as the reading of a named thinker, not as a settled account of any single country.
Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's first elected prime minister, was captured and killed months after Belgian and American officials came to see him as a communist danger, partly because he had asked the Soviets for help against a Western-backed secession. Lumumba was a nationalist rather than a communist. Investigations later documented Belgian and American roles in his removal, making his death a stark case of the anti-communist label turned deadly.
After a failed coup blamed on the communists, the army under General Suharto led a campaign that killed an estimated half a million to a million people accused of communist ties, and sidelined President Sukarno. The Indonesian Communist Party was genuinely large and allied with Sukarno, so the communist presence was real. Historians and declassified records nonetheless show the scale of the killing and foreign support for the army, marking one of the century's worst uses of anti-communism as a warrant for slaughter.
Amilcar Cabral, leader of the guerrilla movement in Portuguese Guinea, gave his address The Weapon of Theory at the first Tricontinental Conference in Havana. He argued for a Marxist analysis fitted to African conditions rather than copied from Europe. The speech marked how liberation leaders now took Marxist tools and reworked them for their own wars, outside Moscow's control.
Chile's elected president Salvador Allende, a Marxist who nationalized industry, was overthrown in a military coup led by General Pinochet after years of American efforts to undermine his government. Allende was genuinely a socialist, so his case is not one of a false label. It stands instead as an example of a great power moving against an elected left-wing leader in the name of anti-communism, documented in later United States records.
As Portugal's empire collapsed, the MPLA in Angola and Frelimo in Mozambique won power and declared Marxist-Leninist states, while Ethiopia's Derg turned to Marxism-Leninism after 1974. These governments were genuinely communist in outlook and often took Soviet or Cuban aid. Their rise shows that the appeal of Marxism to the colonized was real and not only a Cold War label pinned on them from outside.
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