It was surely because ofthe potential of France as an ally that Stalin permitted the PCF to go far beyond Comintern orthodoxy in declaring not merely for a united front of workers' parties against Fascism, but also a united front of all parties against Fascism: the so-called Front Populaire, declared by Maurice Thorez on 24 October 1934 at Nantes. Acting for the Comintern the Italian party leader Palmiro Togliatti and other comrades had tried to dissuade Thorez from delivering the speech, but to no avail.[149] In Moscow Thorez's call for unity with not only peasant parties but also, implicitly, the Roman Catholic Church and bourgeois parties against the common enemy created uproar within the Comintern. One of the most vigorous of several severe critics of the Comintern's new line was the Hungarian revolutionary, Bela Kun: once subject to Trotsky's caustic wit after a particularly nasty ad hominem outburst in the late 1920s - 'la maniera di Bela, non e una bella maniera', quipped the leader of the opposition. On 14 November 1934 Kun wrote a letter to members of the Comintern political secretariat condemning Thorez's position. He objected to the absence from Thorez's statements of any reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat and all power to the soviets in France. 'I once again point out the danger that the PCF is misrepresenting united front tactics. Turning them into a vulgar [coalition] policy, and I propose that such misrepresentation of the tactics of the united front be immediately refuted by a detailed rebuttal.'[150]
The fact that no such rebuttal was issued meant that Thorez read the runes in Moscow better than Kun. And in late July 1935 the Seventh Congress of the Comintern placed a firm seal of approval on the entire venture by generalising it across the world movement.
The anti-Japanese front
The Popular Front against Fascism, as we have seen, had indigenous roots and did not result merely from instructions issued in Moscow. The Anti- Imperialist Front in the East, however, fits more closely the preconceived pattern of Moscow dictating policy. Yet its implementation, at the hands of Mao Zedung, actually meant that while the letter of policy was observed, the spirit was broken with such consistency that the results Stalin desired - a solid anti-Japanese front - were never forthcoming. This mattered, because although France had reluctantly agreed a mutual assistance pact, it precluded - at French insistence - any undertaking with respect to the Far East. Moscow's concern was quite clearly lest the threat from the East joined the threat from the West. And Stalin well knew that Poland and Finland both had military contacts with Japan. The prospect of creating a firm united front on the ground in China against the Japanese was therefore high priority as compensation for the lack of alliances in the region to secure Siberia from Japanese attack. The most Litvinov had been able to secure from the United States had been diplomatic recognition (1933); any talk of an anti-Japanese alliance was firmly quashed by President Roosevelt. The underlying contradiction in outlook between Moscow and China remained, however: Stalin saw the best hope in a bourgeois anti-imperialist China led by a coalition including a minority of Communists, who had no immediate hope of a workers' revolution in a peasant country; Mao, undeterred by Moscow preferences and prejudices, and too distant for any sustained exertion of Comintern discipline, was looking for a fully-fledged Communist revolution via the peasantry.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria from 18 September 1931 had long necessitated the unification of resistance in victim China. But the CCP and the Guomindang had long resisted any attempt to draw them back into alliance, not least because of the disastrous experience of the 1920s. Moscow had one major instrument at its disposal - the supply of munitions. The problem was to ensure that these, sent to the Guomindang as the recognised government of China, were used against Japan and not against the CCP. Only an optimist could take a generous view of Chiang Kai-shek. From 1934 to 1935 the Chinese Communists sought escape from encirclement and destruction by the Guomindang through a long march to the north-west of China, an area distant from Chiang's deadly reach and much closer to potential Soviet support from Outer Mongolia. Not surprisingly, therefore, even Stalin's pet Chinese Communist Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu) had held common cause with Dim- itrov's opponents and spoke at the Comintern Congress of Chiang as one of the 'traitors of the nation' - not an encouraging indicator for the prospects of a united front against Japanese imperialism.[151] Mao was still out of reach. Radio contact was not re-established with Moscow until the onset of winter and even then the CCP still lacked reliable codes for transmission. With the party at Wayaobao in northern Shaanxi province, emissaries flew in from Moscow with news of the Comintern Congress and its decisions.[152]
When Chiang came shopping for arms from Moscow, the Russians insisted that agreement must be reached with the Communists for an anti-Japanese front.[153] The Comintern simultaneously now emphasised the need to include Chiang in any united front.[154] But Mao held out against implementing the spirit of the new line and this state of affairs continued even as the Soviet ambassador to the Chiang regime pressed for what amounted to total subjugation of the Chinese Communists to the Guomindang.33 The signing of the German- Japanese anti-Comintern pact on 25 November 1936, effectively an anti-Soviet alliance, represented precisely the danger Moscow had long feared. Yet CCP policy was to 'force the Guomindang Nanzhing Government and its army to take part in a war of resistance against Japan'.34 The effective result that December was Chiang's kidnapping in Xian by warlord of Manchuria Zhang Xueliang - then under the influence of pro-Communist advice. 'Some comrades', former CCP Politburo member Zhang Guotao later reported, 'were opposed to a peaceful settlement ofthe Incident.'35 The urge on the part ofthe Communists to do away with their hated enemy had to be restrained. 'When Chou En-lai first came to Sian', Chang's main adviser is quoted as having said, 'he wanted a people's assembly to try Chiang Kai-shek, but a wire came from the Comintern and Chou changed his mind'.36
At Moscow's insistence Chiang was permitted to negotiate his freedom, having made some concession to the need for a united front. These concessions remained mere verbiage, however, until 7 July 1937 when the Japanese finally embarked on all-out war across the face of China. Chiang Kai-shek immediately pressed the Russians to come to his aid. Stalin was not in any haste to oblige. The month before, in an act of supreme folly borne of deep- seated insecurity, Stalin had the cream of his most senior officers shot, though it is interesting that he avoided decapitating the Far Eastern army until later. By the end of August, however, he was persuaded into conceding the Chinese 200 planes and 200 tanks on the basis of $500 million in credit. But getting the equipment into China was no easy task. Planes came in via Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia. Otherwise armaments had to come by sea until the French closed the routes through Indochina, or via a perilous 3,000-mile journey to Lanzhou by road from the end of the Turksib railway.[155] Thus between 1937 and 1941 Chiang received a total of 904 planes, nearly half of which were bombers, but only 82 tanks and a mass of automobiles, heavy and light arms, plus thousands of bombs and some 2 million shells.38 In May 1938 Deputy Commissar Vladimir Potemkin told the French ambassador that the Soviet government was 'counting on resistance by this country for several years, after which Japan will be too enfeebled to be capable of attacking the USSR'.39
150
Letter to the political secretariat of the Comintern executive committee, 14 Nov. 1934: Anderson and Chubar'ian
151
Jonathan Haslam,