SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The adoption of the Internationale as the anthem of the newborn Russian Soviet Republic in 1917, and then for the Soviet Federation, the union of republics it would soon become, announced to the world that the revolution was only accidentally national but essentially international. It was launched from the ruins of one international movement (the Second Socialist International) and immediately established another (the Third Socialist International, the Comintern). The Comintern gave the movement and the project a national home for the first time, as well as national leadership and control, but the project remained international in its scope and programme. The Bolshevik project was world-historical, international in its very self-imagining, and it embraced and embodied the international in its subsequent self-fashioning. It sprang from an internationalist commitment and aspired to realise an internationalist vision in its constitutional architecture. In 1917 Russia became the capital of socialist internationalism and over the next several years set the stage for a new mode of socialist governance internationality corresponding to it.