Anti-Racism and the Racial Question in Comintern Debates of the 1920s

This article examines how the Comintern in the 1920s addressed the “racial question” and broader forms of cultural otherness within the framework of its universalist project of global revolution. While explicitly rejecting bourgeois racial doctrines and presenting itself as a radically anti-racist force in a world structured by colonial and racial discrimination, the Comintern had to confront the profound heterogeneity of the political subjects it sought to mobilize. Through four main areas of inquiry—the Baku Congress and the “Eastern question,” the Jewish question, the debates on indigeneity in Latin America, and the issue of Black self-determination in the United States and South Africa—the article highlights the tensions between revolutionary universalism and the nationalization of subaltern subjects. Although the Comintern forcefully promoted the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and colonial oppression, the growing centrality of the Leninist paradigm of national self-determination—culminating in the Sixth Congress of 1928—tended to subsume racial issues within a rigid national framework. This “national turn,” consistent with the Soviet policy of korenizatsiya, ultimately marginalized alternative approaches grounded in multiethnic, diasporic, and transnational political subjectivities. The article argues that this evolution constrained the original anti-racist potential of the Bolshevik Revolution and alienated some of those who had looked to the Comintern as a vehicle for global emancipation.