Activities of the Polish-Baltic Land Secretariat of the Comintern in 1926—1933 and Interaction with Social Democratic Parties

This study uses documentary materials from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) to reveal the nature and features of the implementation of the soviet foreign policy in the second half of the 1920s through the Comintern, which was tasked with preventing the creation of an anti-Soviet military-political association of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland on the western borders of the USSR. The Soviet Union compensated for the shortcomings of official diplomacy in the region by creating in the structure of the Comintern the Polish-Baltic Lender Secretariat, designed to coordinate the activities of the Communist parties in these countries. The Lender Secretariat has been actively working on a number of key foreign policy areas, such as preventing the threat of a possible war in the region, countering the Social Democrats, and fighting for the leadership of the trade union movement. However, the weakness of the leadership and disunity in the ranks of the local Communist parties, as well as the lack of experienced personnel, who were forced to act mostly illegally, did not allow achieving the desired results and bringing the work of the land secretariat to a higher level. As a result, in the early 1930s, the activity of the Polish-Baltic Land Secretariat in these areas began to decline, and since the end of 1933, its main task, following the decisions of the XIII Plenum of the Comintern, has been the struggle for the creation of a unified anti-fascist popular front.