Cominform

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 5th of October 1947, nine communist parties across Europe signed their names to a new organization in Szklarska Poręba, Poland. They called it the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties. The world would know it as Cominform. Its lifespan was barely nine years. Its newspaper bore one of the most unwieldy titles in press history: For a Lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy! And it published articles from parties that were not even members. What was Cominform, exactly? Not quite a replacement for the old Communist International. Not a world communist party. Not a body with real power over its members. So what did it actually do, and why did Joseph Stalin call it into being in the summer of 1947? The answers lie in a diplomatic crisis over American money, a bitter personal falling-out between Stalin and Tito, and a long chain of show trials that claimed lives from Warsaw to Tirana.

• 2. Why Stalin Called the Meeting

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  In July 1947, a conference took place in Paris to discuss the Marshall Plan, America's program to rebuild Western Europe after the Second World War. The question of whether communist governments should attend split the movement. Stalin, watching allied parties drift toward independent decisions, moved quickly. He summoned delegates to a founding conference in Szklarska Poręba, Poland, that September. The stated mission of the new bureau was modest: to organize an exchange of experience and, where necessary, to coordinate the activity of the communist parties on the basis of mutual agreement. But the Zhdanov Doctrine, named for the Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov, framed the world in starker terms. It divided all nations into imperialist and anti-imperialist factions, and it tasked the French and Italian communist parties with a specific job: obstruct the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine in Western Europe. The Greek Communist Party was notably absent from the founding membership. The reason was fear that Western powers would use Greek membership to portray the KKE as foreign insurgents. China's Communist Party was likewise excluded, partly because of the ongoing Chinese Civil War, and it would remain outside the body even as it adhered to Cominform policy in practice.

• 3. The Founding Meeting

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  The founding conference ran on the 22nd and the 23rd of September 1947 in Jelenia Gora, Poland. Among the delegates were Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas for Yugoslavia, Andrei Zhdanov and Georgy Malenkov for the Soviet Union, and Wladyslaw Gomulka and Hilary Minc for Poland. Zhdanov was named chairman; Gomulka was appointed vice-chairman. Gomulka's opening report bore the title On the Interchange of Experience and Co-ordination. It included sharp criticism of the French and Italian parties for what the delegates saw as a failure to seize power at the end of the war, contrasting them unfavorably with Eastern European parties that had quickly secured their dominance in government. The French and Italian representatives expressed regret, and the final resolution recorded that the need for interchange and voluntary co-ordination of action between the various parties was particularly keenly felt at the present time. Zhdanov's own report took a wider view. He argued that the dissolution of the Communist International in May 1943 had been misunderstood by some as the end of all ties between parties, and that this isolation had led to a slackening of mutual understanding and at times even to serious blunders. The conference settled on five structural points: a bureau made up of two delegates from each of the nine parties, a journal to be published first every two weeks and then weekly, and a seat in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The first general strike action coordinated under this new framework was launched in France on the 18th of November 1947 and in Italy on the 12th of November. Both turned out to be quite violent, but the wave of attacks ended before the year was out after workers failed to carry out communist instructions and the parties declined to continue.

• 4. The Break With Yugoslavia

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  Cominform's headquarters opened in Belgrade, but the city would not hold them long. At the third meeting, held in Romania on the 28th of June 1948, the eight remaining parties passed a unanimous resolution expelling the Yugoslav Communist Party. The official charge was deviation from Marxism-Leninism, a line the resolution called Titoism and anti-Sovietism. The resolution accused Yugoslavia of pursuing an incorrect line on the main questions of home and foreign policy, a line appropriate only to nationalism. One of the underlying grievances was Yugoslavia's support for communist forces in the Greek Civil War, which put it in violation of the Percentages Agreement between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. Cominform publications, in a notable reversal, accused Yugoslavia of supporting the anti-communist insurgents in that same conflict. Belgrade lost not only its membership but also the Cominform's newspaper. The paper moved from Belgrade to Bucharest, as did the organization's seat. The ripple effects were violent and swift. On the 10th of June 1948, Koci Xoxe was hanged in Albania. On the 15th of June, Laszlo Rajk was arrested in Hungary. Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been vice-chairman at the founding conference, was summoned before a Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party on the 6th of July. He accepted responsibility for ideological wrongdoing, was replaced by Minc, then arrested, released, and arrested again. Rajk was later hanged. Traicho Kostov's indictment was published that autumn. These purges traced a line directly back to the conflict between Tito and the Soviet leadership.

• 5. Later Meetings and Slow Decline

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  The fourth and final recorded meeting was held in the Hungarian People's Republic on the 27th of November 1949. Three resolutions emerged from two reports. The Soviet delegate Mikhail Suslov presented a report urging the people of Western countries to oppose imperialist measures taken by their governments against the Eastern Bloc. Palmiro Togliatti's report on the working class directed particular attention to the mass of Catholic workers. The Romanian delegate Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej concluded that Tito's opposition inside Yugoslavia should be encouraged to start secret activity. By 1950, Cominform was losing ground fast. The victory of the People's Republic of China in the Chinese Civil War had shifted the center of global communism away from Europe, and Cominform, composed entirely of European parties, had no way to adapt. Stalin had begun pushing as early as 1950 to expand the body's functions toward something approaching the scale of the old Comintern, but that push stopped with his death in March 1953. The Soviets had already been replacing Cominform with more targeted instruments: Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in 1949, and the Warsaw Pact in 1955. The editorial leadership of the Cominform newspaper had also changed hands after Yugoslavia's expulsion, passing from Pavel Yudin to Mark Borisovich Mitin. On the 17th of April 1956, the Central Committee of the CPSU voted to dissolve the body entirely, a decision driven by Soviet rapprochement with Yugoslavia and by the de-Stalinization process under Nikita Khrushchev.