Forging Unity: Nationalist and Socialist Forces in the Eastern Struggles

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, they did more than overthrow a monarchy. They handed colonised peoples across Asia a powerful new idea: that an oppressed nation could defeat an empire, and that the fight for political freedom could be fused with the fight for economic justice. Until then, anti-colonial movements were largely led by educated elites demanding self-rule. After 1917, a new question entered the conversation. Independence for whom, and to what end? This blending of nationalist aspiration with socialist ambition reshaped liberation struggles from Calcutta to Canton, and its effects are still visible in the politics of the region today.

Why the Bolshevik Revolution mattered to the colonies 🔗

The appeal of the Russian Revolution to colonised societies rested on a simple but radical proposition. The Bolsheviks had shown that a determined movement of workers and peasants could topple an entrenched imperial order. For nations living under foreign domination, this was electrifying proof that empires were not invincible.

Equally important was the theory the Bolsheviks brought with them. Lenin argued that imperialism was not an accident or a moral failing of individual rulers, but the highest stage of capitalism, a system in which advanced industrial powers exploited colonies for raw materials, cheap labour, and captive markets. This analysis allowed activists in the colonies to connect their local struggles to a global system of exploitation. The freedom fighter in Bengal and the striking worker in Manchester were, in this view, fighting the same enemy.

The new Soviet state also broke sharply with the older socialist tradition. The Second International, dominated by European parties, had largely ignored the colonial question. The Bolsheviks reversed this. They declared the national liberation of oppressed peoples to be an integral part of the world revolution, and they backed words with organisation.

Lenin’s theses and the alliance strategy 🔗

The intellectual foundation for this alliance was laid at the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920. There, Lenin presented his Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, which insisted on a crucial distinction between oppressed and oppressor nations. He argued that communists in colonised countries should support “national-revolutionary” movements against imperialism, even when those movements were led by the middle classes rather than workers.

This is where an Indian revolutionary entered history. Manabendra Nath Roy, a young Bengali attending his first international gathering, challenged Lenin and was invited to draft an alternative set of supplementary theses. Roy worried that tying the communist movement too closely to bourgeois nationalist leaders would betray the workers and peasants. He argued that the real strength of the liberation movement should rest on the masses, not on a narrow circle of nationalist elites. After lively debate, the Congress adopted both Lenin’s theses and Roy’s supplement. The compromise captured a tension that would define the entire era: how to unite with nationalists without being swallowed by them.

Building institutions of unity 🔗

Ideas alone do not change history. What gave the nationalist-socialist alliance lasting force was the creation of concrete organisations that trained activists, spread propaganda, and linked scattered movements into a network.

The Baku Congress of 1920 🔗

In September 1920, the Comintern convened the First Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan. It was, in effect, the first anti-colonial congress in history. Around 2,000 delegates drawn from dozens of Asian and Muslim peoples gathered to proclaim a global struggle for colonial freedom. Delegates travelled at considerable personal risk, with British naval vessels reportedly patrolling the Black Sea to stop representatives from Turkey and Persia from reaching the city.

The significance of Baku lay in its central message. The historian E. H. Carr famously described it as “calling in the East to redress the balance of the West.” The Congress formulated the Comintern’s task as the fusion of the workers’ struggle in advanced countries with the national liberation struggle of oppressed peoples into a single anti-imperialist movement. For the first time, anti-colonial activists from across Asia had a platform that treated their struggles not as isolated rebellions but as part of one worldwide cause.

The birth of communist parties 🔗

The most enduring product of this period was the founding of communist parties across the colonised world. In October 1920, just weeks after Baku, M.N. Roy and a small group of fellow revolutionaries founded the Communist Party of India in Tashkent, then part of Soviet Central Asia. The founding members included Evelyn Trent-Roy, Abani Mukherji, Mohammad Shafiq, and others, and the meeting adopted the principles of the Comintern while resolving to design a programme suited to Indian conditions.

From 1921, small communist groups began emerging inside India itself, in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Lahore. These were later brought together at the Kanpur Communist Conference of December 1925, which the CPI treats as its formal foundation on Indian soil. The colonial government recognised the threat immediately, responding with prosecutions such as the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case in 1924 and the much larger Meerut Conspiracy Case in 1929.

The Indian experience: socialism enters the freedom struggle 🔗

The influence of socialist ideas extended far beyond the small communist parties. It reshaped the mainstream nationalist movement itself. The Indian National Congress had long been driven by the demand for self-government, but the question of what kind of society would follow independence grew louder after 1917.

The clearest example is Jawaharlal Nehru. During his travels in Europe in the late 1920s, Nehru engaged with leftist intellectuals and was deeply impressed by what he saw of the Soviet experiment. He came to believe that political independence alone was insufficient, and that India’s future required economic and social transformation alongside national self-determination. While Gandhi emphasised spiritual and non-violent resistance, Nehru pushed the movement toward questions of poverty, land reform, and industrial planning.

This convergence had practical consequences. The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of workers’ and peasants’ parties, the growth of the All India Trade Union Congress, and the eventual formation of the Congress Socialist Party within the wider nationalist movement. The struggle for freedom increasingly became a struggle over the shape of the future state, not merely the removal of foreign rulers.

The Chinese experience: a formal united front 🔗

If India saw a gradual blending of ideas, China produced the most dramatic institutional alliance of all. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in July 1921, growing out of Marxist study groups led by Peking University intellectuals Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, with significant guidance from Comintern agents who had arrived to help organise the new party.

The young CCP was small and weak. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), sought to unify a China fragmented by warlords but lacked military strength and Western support. The Soviet Union saw an opportunity to bring the two together.

The First United Front 🔗

Through the Sun-Joffe Manifesto of January 1923, Sun Yat-sen and a Soviet envoy agreed that conditions in China were not yet ripe for communism, clearing the way for cooperation. At the Comintern’s urging, CCP members were permitted to join the KMT as individuals while keeping their own party intact. This arrangement, formally launched at the KMT’s First National Congress in 1924, became known as the First United Front.

Soviet involvement was hands-on. The Comintern adviser Mikhail Borodin helped reorganise the KMT along disciplined Leninist lines, transforming it from a loose coalition into an effective political machine, and Soviet help established the Whampoa Military Academy to train a revolutionary army. The alliance directed its energy against both the warlords who divided the country and the imperialist powers who held special privileges in Chinese cities.

The Front did not last. After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek consolidated power and turned violently against the communists in 1927, ending the alliance in bloodshed. Yet the experience proved decisive for the CCP. It learned the value of mass mobilisation, gained organisational experience, and was pushed toward the rural strategy that would eventually carry it to power in 1949.

What made this unity so powerful 🔗

The merging of nationalist and socialist forces gave anti-colonial movements three advantages that purely elite-led nationalism had lacked.

A broader social base. By framing independence as a struggle of workers and peasants, not just educated professionals, these movements could mobilise the vast majority of colonised populations. Land reform and workers’ rights gave ordinary people a concrete stake in liberation.

A coherent global framework. Lenin’s theory of imperialism allowed activists to see their local fight as part of a worldwide struggle, which built morale and created practical networks of solidarity, training, and material support that spanned continents.

A more radical horizon. Where earlier nationalists often sought only a transfer of power to local elites, the socialist influence pushed movements to question the entire economic and social order, making liberation about transforming society rather than simply changing who governed it.

It is worth remembering that this unity was always tense. The Roy-Lenin debate of 1920 anticipated a problem that recurred everywhere: should communists subordinate themselves to nationalist leaders for the sake of unity, or guard their independence at the risk of isolation? China’s broken United Front showed how dangerous the alliance could become. Yet even in failure, the fusion of nationalism and socialism left a permanent mark, shaping the ideologies, institutions, and policy debates of independent Asian states for decades to come.

What do you think? Did the alliance between nationalist and socialist forces ultimately strengthen anti-colonial movements, or did the tension between the two goals weaken them at crucial moments? And how much of the social and economic agenda of post-independence states can be traced back to the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution?

References

1. https://mronline.org/2017/10/20/the-bolshevik-revolution-and-the-legacy-of-anti-imperialism/
2. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch04.htm
3. https://redsails.org/theses-on-the-national-and-colonial-questions/
4. https://jacobin.com/2020/09/baku-congress-azerbaijan-1920
5. https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/the-congress-of-the-peoples-of-the-east-september-1920
6. https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2019/1013_pd/formation-cpi-tashkent
7. https://prepp.in/news/e-492-formation-of-communist-party-of-india-1920-modern-india-history-notes
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_United_Front