Seventh Congress of the Comintern Report of Arab Delegates
by Muhammad Abu Nasr / FAV Co-editor
The last Comintern Congress was held in 1935 and it was the first one with any major Arab participation.
One Lebanese, evidently Fu'ad al-Shimali, did take part in the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928 representing the Syrian Communist Party (which included Lebanon). The only thing in the Comintern Archives, pertaining to Syrian participation, however, was a report on the activity of Syrian CP between the 5th and 6th Congresses which was published at the time in a book that compiled similar documents from parties all over the world. Otherwise all that remains is one barely readable (unreadable in places) handwritten letter in French signed “Hussein” (possibly a party pseudonym for al-Shimali) but it seemed to be on peripheral issues related to his own status as a delegate.
The big wave of “Arabization” in the “Arab” CPs took place in the early 1930s, and was forced by Moscow on the minority leaderships of those parties. As a result, the first (and last) Comintern Congress with any real Arab presence was the 7th that took place in the summer of 1935.
The first speech below was delivered by “Comrade Yusuf” to that Seventh Congress of the Comintern. It has been retrieved from the archives of the Comintern and translated from Russian. “Comrade Yusuf” or “Yusuf Ibrahim” was the pseudonym of Ridwan al-Hilw (who sometimes was also called Musa), then General Secretary of the Communist Party of Palestine.
According to his biographical questionnaire in the archives of the Congress, Ridwan al-Hilw was born in 1909, joined the Communist Party in 1927, came from a working class background and worked for 11 years in construction. He indicated that he had been arrested four times. He had an elementary school education. In addition, however, he states that he had studied in the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (“KUTV” is the Russian abbreviation) and he said that he knew the Arabic and Russian languages.
It is noteworthy that when they answered the question, “Nationality?” on that questionnaire, all the Arab delegates responded with “Arab” i.e., none said Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi, etc. (Of course, the one Armenian from Lebanon answered “Armenian”).
The notes at the beginning of this and other speeches, such as -- fond, opis’, delo -- are the cataloging designations of these documents within the Soviet archives. Fond 494 included all the materials from the Comintern’s 7th Congress, for example. Since these are unpublished, a reference to these materials in an academic publication is expected to contain these references. (plus page number, which here is difficult to reproduce in an on-line format).
The archives contain only a Russian text for this speech of “Yusuf&# 148;’s although the minutes indicate its language was “Arabic”. It appears that “Yusuf” also signed off on this Russian version because the top of the front page of the speech also has in large, awkward, handwritten Cyrillic letters “Yusef” -- in a handwriting that suggests the writer was unaccustomed to writing in Russian.
Records in the Comintern appear to have been kept in one or more of the following European languages: Russian, German, French, English, and Spanish. Even delegates from Italy had to address the Congress in one of those languages. We know, however, that thanks to his study in the Communist University of the Peoples of the East, Ridwan al-Hilw spoke Russian well. His fellow delegate from Lebanon, Yusuf Khattar al-Hilw, attested to this in his article: “al-Mu’tamar al-Sabi` lil-Umamiyah al-Shuyu`iyah: tajdid wa-taghyir wa-tashih wa-taswib” ["The Seventh Congress of the Communist International: renewal, change, correction, and redirection"] in “al-Nahj”, No. 19, 1988, p.223.).
An interesting feature of this speech is that it opens with several paragraphs devoted to criticism of a talk by “Comrade Ferdi”. “Comrade Ferdi” apparently was the pseudonym of Sefik Husnu Degmer (b. 1890), a Communist from Turkey. The Comintern archives contain a press photo of “Ferdi” seated on stage with the top Comintern leaders, at least at one point in the proceedings, so he was presumably a person of some importance in the Comintern.
“Ferdi” delivered a long speech in French on 31 July 1935 in which he not only discussed the situation in Turkey but also talked about the situation in the neighboring Arab countries to the south.
In reply, several Arab delegates began their respective speeches with criticisms of Ferdi. Ridwan al-Hilw in this speech calls attention to “mistakes” made by Ferdi in a rather general way. In the second speech below, that of the Iraqi delegate, Qasim Hasan (pseud. “Nazim”), we find an eloquent and specific criticism of several points made by the Turkish Communist delegate.
This exchange is in itself interesting just for being there. Standard historians are unaware of any differences of opinion or any debates at all at this very Stalinist Seventh Comintern Congress, and indeed there was much less free discussion in 1935 than there had been in the early Congresses in Lenin’s time. Nevertheless as we see from these speeches, the Arab delegates, at least, kept some sort of debate alive. .
Below the address by Ridwan al-Hilw is the full text of the speech and the declaration by the Iraqi delegate to the Comintern, Qasim Hasan, pseudonym “Nazim”, which he delivered on 1 August 1935. Hasan attended the Congress as a non-voting delegate because the Iraqi Communist Party apparently obtained accreditation to the Comintern only at that 7th Congress. Hasan’s speech contains a very interesting review of the anti-colonial struggle waged by the Iraqi people between World War I and 1935
One note on the speech by Nazim. This is a transcription of the original English text from the Comintern Archives. It retains, therefore, all the spelling and usage of the original. The word “shaykh”, for example is spelled “sheik”. In keeping with common English usage of the 1930s and the word “Arabian” is consistently used where modern usage requires “Arab” or “Arabic”. (In modern usage, “Arabian” is an adjectival form for “Arabia” and therefore refers strictly to the Arabian Peninsula only; “Arab” refers to Arabic speaking people and their culture, etc., wherever they might be.)
Information from Qasim Hasan’s personal questionnaire from the Congress is as follows: He was born in 1910, was of Arab nationality, he listed his class background as “petty-bourgeois, intellectual”. He listed his educational level as “incomplete higher education”, and said he'd worked for three years as a journalist. At the time of the Congress he had spent four months in prison for political activities in Iraq. As to the languages he spoke, he replied, “Arabic, English, and a little Persian.”
Hanna Batatu in his book “The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq” refers several times to the career of Qasim Hasan. A founder of the Iraqi CP, he was a friend and lawschool classmate of Yunus as-Sab`awi. He and Sab`awi worked together with Fu'ad Nassar (later of the Jordanian CP) at smuggling arms into Palestine. (Batatu, p. 457-458). Batatu says (p. 460) that Khalid Bakdash met Hasan at the 7th Comintern Congress and found Hasan to be “too fond of luxury”. Zaki Khayri also seems to have developed a negative opinion of Qasim Hasan.
In the Iraqi police files that Batatu used in his research, he found a Communist Party notice from December 1935 saying that Qasim Hasan “was a traitor and a spy” ready to betray revolutionaries to the police. Yet the police files that Batatu used indicate that the police didn’t trust Hasan either. It is likely that Hasan fell prey to some sort of internal struggle within the Iraqi CP, possibly sparked by Khalid Bakdash’s views, because despite that notice in the police files, Hasan remained a part of the Communist movement through the Rashid ‘Ali al-Gilani revolt in 1941, a strange fact if the Iraqi Communist Party really did think he was a traitor and spy.
When the Rashid ‘Ali al-Gailani uprising was suppressed, Hasan he traveled to Moscow and stayed in the USSR until 1944 when he returned to Iraq. After 1958 Abd al-Karim Qasim named him ambassador to India and later to Czechoslovakia. By that time, however, he seems to have drifted away from the Communist movement.
But wherever life was to lead Qasim Hasan later on, this document should be read as a reflection of the struggles and thinking of Iraqi Communists in the summer of 1935.
THE FREE ARAB VOICE