1922 - the last genuinely communist Congress
The Fourth Congress of the Communist (Third) International opened in Petrograd in November 1922. It met for most of its sessions in Moscow, attended by 408 delegates, of whom 343 had a full vote. These represented 58 Communist organisations from various countries, along with delegations from various other non-affiliated organisations.
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| The rally in Red Square, 7 November 1922. |
On the fifth anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, a mass rally welcoming the Congress was held in Moscow's Red Square.Trotsky gave the main platform speech, which was greeted with 'thunderous cheers'. Looking back in 1936 at this Fourth Congress, a document written for the First International Conference of the Fourth International, where the genuine forces of Marxism - Trotsky and his supporters - were now gathered, noted that:
"The Third Congress [had] condemned ultra-left adventures and issued the slogan, 'To the masses', recognising that the first great post-war wave (1917-1920) was now ebbing, and that a breathing space had occurred which it was necessary to utilize by preparing better and more thoroughly for the coming struggles ... The Fourth Congress reaffirmed the lessons of the Third Congress and dealt with them more thoroughly and concretely [and] was able to look back on tremendous organisational results. In the course of three years [since the First Congress in 1919], in all continents and in practically all countries, sections had been created, and apart from this, the Red International of Trade Unions and the Young Communist International had been built up. The Communist parties in a number of countries were at that time leading mighty revolutionary mass actions."
However, this proved to be the last genuinely communist congress of the Third International. By the time that the Fifth Congress was held, in 1924, Stalinist reaction had taken its hold.
The 'New Economic Policy' (which the Congress agreed had been necessarily applied to the Soviet economy as discussed in a separate post) had always risked a strengthening of the wealthier 'kulak' peasant layer and the speculators and middlemen, the so-called 'NEP-men'. In turn, and especially with the loss of so many of the experienced working-class cadres needed to provide the check of genuine workers' democracy, owing to the civil war, there was a growing danger of control being handed over to an unchecked party officialdom and state bureaucracy, a danger that Lenin had warned of before he died in January 1924. But the NEP was not the key factor in the rise of Stalinism. That was the ongoing isolation of the embattled workers' state following the defeat of the 1923 German revolution.
The defeat of the German revolution signalled the point where the necessary risks inherent in the NEP became ones that could not be kept in check. As the 1936 document quoted above put it in summary, its defeat "weakened the positions of the international proletariat and of its vanguard" while, at the same time, "acted to strengthen the tendencies of the Soviet bureaucracy to become an independent force. This accounts for the fact that the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern signifies above all the subjection of the Comintern to the yoke of the Russian bureaucracy. The Comintern itself became bureaucratised and was brought into complete dependence on the bureaucratic centre in Moscow. The theory of 'socialism in one country,' advanced by Stalin, the head of the bureaucracy, in the autumn of 1924 in glaring contradiction to the entire theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism, became for the newly formed social layers (bureaucracy, kulaks, specialists etc.) the ideological expression of their nationally-limited interests".
Applying the Decisions of the Fourth Congress today
However, the records of the Fourth (1922) Congress remain principled guidance for genuine revolutionaries to re-read and apply today.
On this blog, I have attempted to faithfully but concisely summarise the main debates and decisions under the following headings (click to open each post):
1) The NEP and the Transition to a Socialist Economy
2) The Rise of Fascism in Italy
October 10th 2025
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