Bolshevisation, stalinisation and party ritual: The congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920-43

This paper examines the national congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period of the Communist International (1919-43). Both in Britain and internationally, communist party congresses in this period lost any independent decision-making role and became a mechanism activated and controlled from above. Not surprisingly, they have attracted little serious scholarly notice in their own right but this paper identifies three themes deserving consideration: first, that of the congress as a field of tension between inherited notions of delegatory democracy and the Comintern’s top-down version of democratic centralism; second, that of its growing importance as a site of symbolic demonstration and ritualised group action; and third, is that of bolshevisation and stalinisation as processes that can be traced through these changing conceptions of the congress’s role. Each theme is considered here in a separate section. These employ a three-party periodisation that supports an argument of the CPGB’s early but protracted bolshevisation. Further watershed moments in the late 1920s and mid-1930s can both in different ways be identified with stalinisation. These, however, did not so much resolve as displace the tensions with wider labour movement practices.