Cominform
Kominform is the abbreviation for Communist Information Office (officially: Information Office of the Communist and Workers' Parties ), which was a supranational alliance of various communist parties from 1947 to 1956, dominated by the CPSU under Josef Stalin . It replaced the Comintern , which was dissolved in 1943 and whose apparatus had been unofficially continued.
Members
The seat of the Cominform was initially Belgrade , after the exclusion of Yugoslavia in 1948 the seat was moved to Bucharest .
history
From 1946 on, Stalin tried to consolidate the Soviet Union's sphere of influence in Eastern and Southern Europe into a solid unit and to enforce the CPSU's claim to leadership in ideological and political terms. After several months of consultations, with the exception of Albania, but with the participation of the Communist parties from France and Italy, the leaders of the Eastern European parties were invited to the founding conference of the Cominform in the Polish city of Szklarska Poreba on September 22-27, 1947 .
The Soviet side took the view that the world had split into two large camps and that relations between the communist parties had to be made even closer in the interests of self-assertion.
The Cominform was officially founded on September 30, 1947, not least as a reaction of the Soviet Union to the Marshall Plan of the United States of America . The Cominform was supposed to organize the cooperation of all Moscow-owned so-called communist and workers parties worldwide. In this respect, it was the successor organization to the Comintern founded in 1919 on Lenin's initiative , which was dissolved in 1943 in the course of the Second World War , to a certain extent as a gesture of the willingness of the USSR to cooperate with the West as part of the anti-Hitler coalition . The Cominform did not have a large apparatus like the Comintern did. It actually only consisted of the editorial staff, initially in Belgrade and since 1948 in Bucharest , with around 50 employees , of the central organ for lasting peace, for people's democracy, which was published in various languages .
During the war, the Soviet Union was militarily allied with the basically ideological opponents USA and Great Britain in the so-called anti-Hitler coalition and together with them and other states formed Germany's allied war opponents . After the war, the conflicting economic, social and political interests intensified again, especially between the great powers USA and USSR, which culminated in the Cold War from 1946 . The establishment of the Cominform was a Soviet reaction to this development. During the founding debate, Andrei Zhdanov gave his speech on the view of the two camps previously represented by US President Harry S. Truman . As an inter-party institution, the Cominform was de facto a command center of the CPSU, through which extensive conformity of the nine member parties was to be achieved, as was the case in the Comintern from 1924/25 at the latest, after Joseph Stalin took over power in the Soviet Union would have. Albania also applied for membership on October 26, 1947.
However, the body did not meet the expectations cherished in Moscow. Yugoslavia's party leader Josip Broz Tito was vehemently opposed to the attempt to structure the organization in line with Stalin's ideas . He insisted on the principle of equal rights for allied parties. On June 28, 1948, a Cominform conference decided, on a Soviet proposal, to expel the Yugoslav communists . The value of the Cominform fell after the failure of Yugoslavia to return to the authority of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1948 and the failure to join the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong . A SED delegation in Moscow in December 1948 applied to join the Cominform. However, this was rejected by Stalin on the grounds that the SED was not yet mature enough.
On November 29, 1949, the Cominform openly called on its members to overthrow the Yugoslav head of state Tito and to fight against Titoism . After Stalin's death (1953), in the course of de-Stalinization under the new Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, the Cominform was dissolved.
At least since the victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 under Mao Zedong and the founding of the People's Republic of China , the influence of other communist social designs besides that of the Soviet Union and also in competition with it had increased. The determining influence of the Cominform could no longer be maintained in its previous form.
In Eastern Europe and some other communist states, other alliances between those states formed more convenient alternatives for the Soviet Union. Even before the dissolution of the Cominform in 1949, the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon) was established as an economic alliance and in 1955 the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance of the respective states. These foundings were also reactions to similar developments and mergers in the political West, for example in the economic context the Western European Coal and Steel Community , from which the European Economic Community (EEC) later emerged, or - in a military context - NATO .
When the Kominform newspaper "For lasting peace, for people's democracy" announced the dissolution of the organization in Bucharest on April 17, 1956, the end of the communist party alliance no longer affected the general public very much.
See also
literature
- Karl-Heinz Gräfe: Kominform - the conferences in 1947 and 1948 . (PDF; 73 kB) In: UTOPIE Kreativ , H. 84, October 1997, pp. 51-60
Individual evidence
- ↑ Manfred Görtemaker, in: Information on political education , 245/1994, p. 20.
- ↑ Leo Schwarz : Two Camps , Young World, September 23, 2017
- ↑ Thomas Schreiber: Enver Hodja, Le sultan rouge. Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1994, p. 109.
- ↑ Calendar sheet from June 28, 2008 ( Memento from October 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) MDR; accessed on June 1, 2016
- ↑ Wilfriede Otto, in: Views of the GDR , Volume VII. 1997, p. 328.
- ^ Spearhead in the Cold War Deutschlandradio Kultur, calendar sheet from April 17, 2006c on April 16, 2011