The '''Comintern''', or '''Communist International''', was an international [[Communist]] organization founded by and controlled by the [[Soviet Union]]. It was first established in 1919, as a way for the Soviet Union to "export revolution abroad" in its policy of overthrow legitimate [[government]] (or "bourgeois regimes" in [[Marxist]] parlance); to aid revolutionary Communist parties in other countries and to use foreign Communist parties for [[espionage]] and [[subversion]] to further Communist goals.
With his seizure of power in Russia, Soviet General Secretary [[V.I. Lenin]] turned immediately to his real goal, world revolution. He invited members of all the old socialist parties to join the Comintern. Many did, and new parties were formed—the Communist Party of France (CPF), the [[Communist Party of China]] (CCP), the [[Communist Party of the United States]] (CPUSA), the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and so on, all under the control of the mother party in Moscow ([[CPSU]]).
==Goals==
The openly proclaimed aim of the Comintern was the overthrow of all "[[capitalist]]" or "[[bourgeois]]" governments and the establishment of a universal state under Communist domination. The founding documents of the Comintern explicitly declared that the member parties and movements were to use whatever means, legal or illegal,<ref>[http://ciml.250x.com/archive/comintern/termsadm.html V.I. Lenin, ''Terms of Admission into Communist International'', (July 1920)] First published 1921, The Second Congress of the Communist International, Verbatum Report, Communist International, Petrograd.</ref> peaceful or violent, might be appropriate to their situations at any given time. It was a genuine, worldwide "[[Leftist]]" revolution.
This was the stark specter facing the non-Communist nations in the decades before World War II: a power covering one-sixth of the earth's surface had at its command a global movement that was fighting to wrest control of organized labor everywhere, fomenting revolutions in the colonial regions, vying for the allegiance of the western intelligentsia, and planting spies wherever it could—all with the goal of bringing about [[Bolshevism]] to the all of the world's peoples.<ref>Ralph Raico, [http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1468 ''FDR: The Man, the Leader, the Legacy''], Future of Freedom Foundation, April 1, 2001. Retrieved from The Independent Institute.org 06/17/07.</ref>