Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Report of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (1921).pdf/5



Comrades, our Communist International has now been in existence for three years. The Executive Committee, however, as an international institution, has actually been in operation only one year, since the Second Congress. Between the First and Second Congresses ,our leading body consisted, in general merely of a group of Russian comrades. It was not an easy matter to get the parties at the end of the Second Congress to delegate their representatives to the Executive Committee for the entire year. The comrades who participated at the Second Congress will recall that the representatives of the German party, for example, and of other parties as well, opposed the appointment in Moscow of delegates of the various parties to the Executive Committee, and to have these delegates work here for an entire year. They preferred to leave the leadership, as it had been, in the hands of the Russian comrades. It was only when we protested and absolutely insisted on our demand that the Congress accepted our proposal, and then affiliated parties appointed their delegates to the Executive Committee. But we are compelled to declare that even during this one year not all the parties fulfilled their duty towards the International. Some of them did so only to a slight degree, and for that reason the connections were rather unsatisfactory. In this respect, no one is less satisfied with the work of the Executive Committee than that body itself. We demand that measures be taken at this Third Congress to establish a real Executive Committee, international in its make-up, an Executive