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Основание Коммунистического Интернационала в советской политической коммуникации, 1917-1919 годы.
The foundation of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919, as well as its first years, have been predominantly analysed from the perspective of political and organisational history. The foundation of the Comintern in Moscow and its initiation by the Bolsheviks is the common starting point in the history of the “Bolshevisation” of international communism. In this article, we propose a different analytical angle on the Comintern’s foundation period. Using contemporary sources such as diaries, greeting telegrams and the press, we attempt to reconstruct the impact of the Comintern in its host country, Soviet Russia, and its society. As we will show, the discourse of a “Third International” was older than 1919, and played not only a role in top-down agitprop, but also in the aspirations of rank and file activists, who could attach individual meanings to this vague concept. Thus, the foundation of the Comintern by the Bolsheviks was not just aimed at the international revolutionary movement, but also was an important symbolic gesture directed at their supporters within Soviet Russia. Furthermore, by looking at the rank and file Bolshevik discourse around the Comintern’s foundation in 1919, one can see how popular political rhetoric in the early Soviet state had yet to stabilize itself – which was not just a top-down process.