The Comintern and the National and Colonial Question: the Roots of Soviet Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Racism Reconsidered
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract With Russia’s escalation in Ukraine, many long-standing positions and relationships have become much more complicated. Many nations in the Global South have elected to remain neutral to avoid damaging their long-standing relations with Russia, which they rely on for political or economic stability. The Russian government has instrumentalized this history of Russian and Soviet support for anti-imperialism to buoy its own relations with the Global South. This support has its roots in the Comintern period when the Communist International promoted anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and self-determination of nations. These efforts, in turn, helped develop the image of the Soviet Union as an anti-imperial bulwark, while also providing an alternate path in which many nations in the Global South found inspiration following the Second World War. This thought piece reconsiders the history of the Comintern to ask fresh questions about its role in anti-imperial and anti-racist movements. In doing so, it calls for a greater attention to the limitations of the Soviet regime during the interwar period, and a reconsideration of the imperial actions of the Soviet Union as relates to this history. It also explores how the history of the Comintern and the complicated history of Soviet support for global decolonization in the interwar period remains relevant to contextualizing present-day reactions to Russian aggression in Ukraine and why, despite the correctives of the post-Cold War period, historians now need to ensure further complexities in this history are not overlooked in the instrumentalization of this history promoted by Russia following February 2022.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".