Philippe Alcoy
Find bellow the “Manifesto of the Congress to
the Peoples of the East” that took place in September 1920, in Baku
(Azerbaijan), just after the second congress of the Communist International.
The congress of Baku (Azerbaijan), held in September 1920, was a
major attempt on the part of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union to help
organize peoples of colonial and semi-colonial countries to fight
against class and national oppression; to help them in their struggle
against imperialist countries, especially Great Britain, the main
imperialist power at that time. Of course, it was a really difficult and
complex task; but at the same time a crucial task for the international
workers’ movement and the cause of international revolution.
The Baku Congress wasn’t just a symbolic meeting where only a small
number of people participated. Almost 1900 delegates from diverse
countries from Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula, from Anatolia,
from Central Asia and the Caucasus, but also from Far-East countries
like Japan and China took part in the Congress. Delegates from
imperialist nations such as the UK, France, Netherlands, Austria and the
USA participated as well.
The Congress of Baku may be one of the most internationalist events
in the history of the workers’ and revolutionary movement. It was an
attempt to unify the revolutionary struggle of workers and peasants of
the colonial nations with the struggle of those in the imperialist
countries. That was all in a context in which countries had been
destroyed by several years of war; but also in a revolutionary context
following the October Revolution of 1917.
Aware of the potential danger of this alliance between the exploited
and oppressed masses from the East and the West, the imperialists tried
to prevent delegates from colonial countries from reaching the place of
the Congress. And capitalists did it in the imperialist way,
barbarically: for instance, the British air force bombed the ship of the
Persian delegation in the Caspian Sea, killing two delegates and
wounding several people.
But the Congress of Baku took place and was a great internationalist
event. Peoples of very different cultures, languages, religions and
experiences, peoples from some of the most backward parts of the world
were debating on revolution, national liberation but also on women’s
rights. All that under the banner of the Communist International.
The Manifesto issued from the Congress was steeped in the
denunciation and the struggle against colonialism and imperialism but
also against local (weak) bourgeoisies, Emirs, Sultans, Shahs and all
the imperialist local clients. Just as importantly, the Manifesto
asserted that the main ally of the peoples of the East was the working
class in the imperialist countries.
We can read: “Peoples of the East! You have often heard the call
to holy war, from your governments, you have marched under the green
banner of the Prophet, but all those holy wars were fraudulent, serving
only the interests of your self-seeking rulers, and you, the peasants
and workers, remained in slavery and want after these wars. You
conquered the good things of life for others, but you yourselves never
enjoyed any of them. (…) We summon you to a holy war for your own
well-being, for your own freedom, for your own life! (…) Save
yourselves, peoples of the East! (…) This is a holy war for the
liberation of the Peoples of the East, for the ending of the division of
mankind into oppressor peoples and oppressed peoples, for complete
equality of all peoples and races, whatever language they may speak,
whatever the color of their skin and whatever the religion they profess.
Into the holy war to end the division of countries into advanced and
backward, dependent and independent, metropolitan and colonial!”
Of
course, this all proved far more easily said than done. But what is
interesting in studying the Baku Congress’ documents and discussions is
the method and political intentions of Bolsheviks and the Soviet
government toward the struggle of oppressed peoples of the colonial
world, before Stalinization struck. When Stalinist bureaucracy took
power in the USSR the political conclusions of the Baku Congress were
obscured. Thus Stalinism not only developed the anti-internationalist
theory of “socialism in one country”, it not only imposed to Communist
Parties of colonized countries alliances with local bourgeoisies and
reactionary forces in their struggle for national liberation, but
Stalinism was also a deeply Russian nationalist current that transformed
the Soviet Union into an agent of oppression both outside its
borders—in Eastern Europe and Central Asia—and in the USSR itself.
Nowadays we live in a context of divisions between peoples of
different parts of the world; of divisions between workers of different
origins, race or religion in a same country; of reactionary wars like
those in Syria or Yemen; of reinforcement of authoritarian, racist,
xenophobic and Islamophobic political tendencies. We live at a time when
the hatred of Muslims and other immigrants moves many western countries
rightward, while in Asia and Africa fundamentalist movements tell the
proletariat and the poor that their natural allies against imperialism
are their bourgeois co-religionists, not the working class of other
nations. In that context, the political lessons of the “forgotten”
Congress of Baku could be of great help and inspiration for those who
are resisting, fighting against reactionary forces. Studying the Baku
Congress could be inspiring for the international working class, for the
oppressed and precarious youth through the world, for revolutionary
organizations in their struggle against capitalism, its exploitation and
its oppressions.
As the Manifesto says: “Long live the unity of all the peasants
and workers of the East and of the West, the unity of all the toilers,
all the oppressed and exploited”.
***
Manifesto of the Congress to the Peoples of the East
On September 1, 1920, in the city of Baku, the
capital of Azerbaidzhan, a congress of representatives of the peoples of the
East was held. Our congress was attended by 1,891 delegates from the following
countries: Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Kashgar,
China, japan, Korea, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Bukhara, Khiva, Daghestan,
Northern Caucasia, Azerbaidzhan, Armenia, Georgia, Turkestan, Ferghana, the
Kalmuck Autonomous Region, the Tatar Republic, and the Far Eastern District.
The Congress of the Peoples of the East was
convened by the Communist International. Every peasant, every toiler, needs to
know what the Communist International is. It is a union of workers and
peasants, of the Communists of the whole world, which has set itself the aim of
smashing the power of the rich and bringing about the complete equality of all.
At the Second World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in
August 1920, the following countries were represented: America, Britain,
France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Poland, Bohemia,’ 07 Yugoslavia, Hungary,
Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Persia, India, China, japan,
Korea, Indochina, Georgia, Azerbaidzhan, Armenia, Khiva, Bukhara, Afghanistan,
Argentina, Russia, the Ukraine.
The Communist International wants to put an end
not only to the power of the rich over the poor but also to the power of some
peoples over others. For this purpose the workers of Europe and America must
unite with the peasants and other working elements of the peoples of the East.
The Congress of representatives of the Peoples
of the East calls on these peoples to realise such unity, which is needed for
the liberation of all the oppressed and all the exploited.
Peoples of the East! Six years ago there broke out in Europe a colossal, monstrous slaughter, a
world war in which 3 5 million human beings were killed, in which hundreds of
big towns and thousands of other centres of population were devastated, a war
which ruined all the countries of Europe and subjected all its peoples to the
torment of unheard-of want and unprecedented starvation.
This colossal conflict has hitherto been carried
on mainly in Europe, affecting Asia and Africa only partially. The war was
fought between European peoples, with the peoples of the East participating in
it only to a relatively small extent. Some hundreds of thousands of Turkish
peasants, deceived by their rulers, who acted for the benefit of the German
imperialists: two or three million Indians and Negroes, bought like slaves by
the British and French capitalists and, like slaves, hurled to their deaths on
the fields of France, far-distant and strange to them, in the service of the
interests, alien and unintelligible to them, of the British and French bankers
and industrialists.
But although the countries of the East remained
aloof from this gigantic conflict and the Eastern peoples played only an
insignificant part in it, nevertheless this war was fought not only for the
countries of Europe, not only for the countries and peoples of the West, but
also for the countries and peoples of the East. It was fought for the partition
of the world, and chiefly for the partition of Asia, of the East. It was fought
to decide who was to rule over the countries of Asia and whose slaves the
peoples of the East should be. It was fought to decide whether the British or
the German capitalists should skin the peasants and workers of Turkey, Persia
and Egypt.
The monstrous four-year carnage ended in victory
for France and Britain. The German capitalists were crushed, and along with
them the German people were crushed, destroyed and doomed to starvation.
Victorious France, almost all of whose adult population had been wiped out by
the war and all of whose industrial areas had been devastated, was bled white
by the struggle and left quite powerless after its victory. As a result of the
colossal, barbarous slaughter, imperialist Britain emerged as the sole and
omnipotent master of Europe and Asia. Britain alone in all Europe was still
able to muster sufficient strength, for it had waged the war with other
peoples’ hands, those of the enslaved peoples, the Indians and Negroes, it had
waged the war at the expense of the colonies it oppressed.
Being left the victor and the omnipotent master
of half the world, the British Government proceeded to carry out the objectives
for which it had waged the war — to consolidate its hold on all the countries
of Asia and to enslave, fully and finally, all the peoples of the East.
With no-one to hinder them, and fearing no-one,
the handful of greedy banker-capitalists who are at the head of the British
state, casting aside all shame, set about openly and brazenly reducing to
slavery the peasants and workers of the Eastern countries.
Peoples of the East! You know what Britain has done in India, you know how it has turned the
many-millioned masses of the Indian peasants and workers into dumb beasts of
burden without any rights.
The Indian peasant has to hand over to the
British Government a proportion of his crop so large that what remains is not
enough to sustain him for even a few months. The Indian worker has to work in
the British capitalist’s factory for such a miserable pittance that he cannot
even buy the daily handful of rice he needs for subsistence. Every year
millions of Indians die of hunger and millions perish in the jungles and swamps
where they are engaged in heavy labour undertaken by the British capitalists
for their own enrichment.
Millions of Indians, unable to find a crust of
bread in their own very rich and fertile homeland, are obliged to join the
British armed forces, to leave their homeland and spend their whole lives
enduring the hard lot of the soldier, fighting endless wars in all corners of
the world, against all the peoples of the world, upholding everywhere the
ruthless dominion of Britain. While paying with their lives and their blood for
the unceasing expansion of the wealth of the British capitalists, securing
monstrous profits for them, the Indians themselves enjoy no human rights: the
British officers who rule over them, insolent sons of the British bourgeoisie
which has grown fat on Indian corpses, do not regard them as human.
An Indian dares not sit at the same table with a
Britisher, use the same quarters, enter the same railway carriage, attend the
same school. In the eyes of the British bourgeois every Indian is a pariah, a
slave, a beast of burden, an animal which dare not have any human feelings or
put forward any demands. Every demand, every expression of anger by the Indian
peasants and workers when driven to extremities is met by ruthless mass
shootings. Hundreds of corpses of those shot cover the streets of revolted
Indian villages, and British officers force the survivors to crawl on their
bellies, to amuse them, and to lick the boots of their enslavers.
Peoples of the East! You know what Britain has done in Turkey. Britain offered Turkey a peace by
which three-quarters of Asia Minor, inhabited exclusively by Ottoman Turks,
with all the country’s industrial cities, was to pass into the possession of
Britain, France, Italy and Greece, while what remained of Turkish territory was
to be burdened with such payments that the Ottomans would become permanent
undischarged debtors of Britain.
When the Turkish people refused to accept such a
peace, which would have destroyed them, the British occupied Constantinople, a
holy place to Moslems, dispersed the Turkish Parliament, arrested all the
popular leaders, shot the best of them, and exiled hundreds of others to the
island of Malta, where they were imprisoned in the dark and damp dungeons of an
ancient fortress. Now the British rule the roost in Constantinople: they have
taken from the Turks everything that could be taken. They have taken banks,
money, factories, railways, ships, they have closed all the approaches to Asia
Minor, thereby depriving the Turks, who are without factories of their own, of
the possibility of receiving any goods from Europe. There is now in the whole
of Asia Minor not one piece of material, not one fragment of metal. The Turkish
peasant is obliged to go about without a shirt and to plough the soil with a
wooden plough.
The British used the Greek army to occupy the
vilayet of Smyrna, the French to take Adana and colonial troops to take Brussa
and Izmid. They have beleaguered the Turks on all sides, and are steadily
pushing into Turkish territory, trying to reduce to complete exhaustion the
Turkish people who have already been as tormented and ruined as they can be by
decades of continuous war.
In those parts of Turkey which the British have
already occupied, they scoff and jeer intolerably at the Turkish people, in
their usual way. In Constantinople the British have taken all the schools and
universities for use as barracks, stopped all Turkish educational activity,
closed down all Turkish newspapers, broken up all workers’ organisations,
filled the prisons with Turkish patriots and placed the entire population under
the uncontrolled authority of British police who consider themselves
authorised, in broad daylight in the streets of Constantinople, and without any
excuse, to hit over the head any persons wearing a fez. As the British see it,
if a man wears the fez, if he is a Turk, then he is a creature of an inferior
species, a pariah, a slave, a beast of burden, who can be treated like a dog.
In the places they have occupied in Turkey the
British treat the Turks like dogs, subjecting them to forced labour and
punishing them with blows, and endeavouring by means of all sorts of tricks,
base methods and violence to turn Turkey into a conquered country, so that all
the Turks may by blows be made beasts of burden to work for the enrichment of
the British.
Peoples of the East! What has Britain done to Persia? After crushing a peasants’ revolt against
the Shah and the landlords, shooting or hanging thousands of Persian peasants,
the British capitalists have restored the overthrown rule of the Shah and the
landlords, taken from the peasants the landlords’ land they had seized and
thrust the peasants back into serfdom, making them once again rayats, slaves
without rights of the mulkadars.
Then, having bribed the Shah’s venal government,
the British capitalists have by means of a base, traitorous treaty acquired all
Persia and the entire Persian people as their absolute property. They have laid
hands on all the wealth of Persia, they have installed in all the cities of
Persia their garrisons of deceived Indian sepoys, bought into slavery, and have
begun to behave in Persia as though in a conquered country, treating the
nominally independent Persian people as a people who have become slaves.
Peoples of the East! What has Britain done to Mesopotamia and Arabia? It has, without any ado,
proclaimed these independent Moslem countries to be its colonies, driven from
the land the Arabs who have owned it for centuries, taken from them the best,
most fertile valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, taken the best pasture —
land, which the people need in order to survive, taken the very rich oilfields
of Mosul and Basra [sic], and, stripping the Arabs of all means of
livelihood, is trying to force them through hunger to become its slaves and its
workers.
What has Britain done to Palestine? There, at
first, acting for the benefit of Anglo-Jewish capitalists, it drove Arabs from
the land in order to give the latter to Jewish settlers; then, trying to
appease the discontent of the Arabs, it incited them against these same Jewish
settlers, sowing discord, enmity and hatred between all the communities,
weakening both [sic] in order that it may itself rule and command.
What has Britain done to Egypt? There the entire
native population has for eight decades groaned beneath the heavy yoke of the
British capitalists, a yoke even heavier and more ruinous for the people than
was that of the Egyptian Pharaohs who built their huge pyramids with slave
labour.
What has Britain done to China? That enormous
country, Britain, together with its partner, imperialist Japan, turned into a
colony and, exploiting and oppressing its 300 million people and poisoning them
with opium, it is with its own and Japanese troops putting down with unheard-of
cruelty the revolutionary ferment which has begun there. Restoring the old
despots whom the people had overthrown, it strives with all its strength to
prevent the many-millioned Chinese people from winning their freedom, and keeps
them as before under its yoke of despotism, oppression and poverty, so as the
better to be able to exploit them.
What has Britain done to Korea, to that
flourishing land with a thousand-years-old culture? It has handed over Korea to
the Japanese imperialists for them to tear to pieces, and they are now with
fire and sword making the Korean people submit to the British and Japanese
capitalists.
What is Britain doing to Afghanistan? By bribing
the Emir’s government it has kept the people in maximum subjection, in the
greatest poverty and ignorance, trying to reduce this country to a desert, in
order that this desert may guard India, which Britain oppresses, from any
incursion from without.
What is Britain doing with Armenia and Georgia?
There by means of its gold it keeps the peasant and worker masses under the
yoke of the hated Dashnak and Menshevik governments it has bought, which
terrorise and oppress their own peoples and drive them to fight against the
peoples of Azerbaidzhan and Russia who have freed themselves from the bourgeois
yoke.
Imperialist Britain penetrates even into
Turkestan, Khiva, Bukhara, Azerbaidzhan, Daghestan and Northern Caucasia, its
agents dart about everywhere, generously scattering, as bribes, British gold
which has been extorted from the blood and sweat of the oppressed peoples. Everywhere
these agents seek to uphold the tyrants and despots, the khans and landlords,
to combat the incipient revolutionary movements, to keep all the peoples, at
any cost, in a state of oppression and ruin, in want and ignorance.
Oppression and ruin, want and ignorance among
the Eastern peoples serve as sources of enrichment for imperialist Britain.
Peoples of the East! To you belong the richest, most fertile, most extensive lands in the whole
world; these lands, which were once the cradle of all mankind, could feed not
only their inhabitants but the entire population of the world, and yet now,
every year, ten million Turkish, Persian and Indian peasants and workers are
unable to find a crust of bread or any employment in their wide and fertile
homelands, and are obliged to go abroad and seek a livelihood in alien lands.
They have to do this because in their homelands
everything — land, money, banks, factories, workshops — belongs to British
capitalists. They are not masters in their own homelands, they dare not give
orders there — on the contrary they themselves are ordered about by foreigners,
the British capitalists.
This is how it has been up to now, this is how
it was also before the war, when imperialist Britain still had rivals in the
shape of the German, French and Russian imperialist predators, when it still
hesitated to stretch out its paw over all the countries of the East, for fear
of receiving a blow on this paw from some rival beast of prey. But now, when
imperialist Britain has beaten and rendered powerless an of its rivals, when it
has become the omnipotent master of Europe and Asia, now the capitalists who
rule Britain are giving free rein to their wolfish appetites and without
restraint or shame are sinking voracious teeth and claws into the bleeding body
of the peoples of the East.
British capital feels cramped in Europe, it has
grown, and cannot find places for investment: besides, the European workers,
enlightened by revolutionary consciousness, have become bad slaves: they are
not willing to work for nothing, they want good wages. In order that capital
may have elbow-room, in order that it may bring in a good profit, in order that
the European workers may be thrown a sop so as to hold back the growth of their
revolutionary mood, in order that it may be possible to bribe the leading
strata of the worker masses, British capital needs fresh land, fresh workers —
rightless and unenfranchised slaves.
And the British capitalists think they have
found these fresh lands in the Eastern countries, and these rightless and
voiceless slaveworkers in the peoples of the East.
The British capitalists are trying to grab
Turkey and Persia, Mesopotamia and Arabia, Afghanistan and Egypt, so as to
drive all the peasants from the land, after buying from these ruined and
indebted peasants, for trivial sums, all their holdings, which they want to
merge into huge estates and plantations, on to which will then be driven to
work as slave-labourers the Eastern peasants reduced to landlessness. They
want, in Turkey, Persia and Mesopotamia, using the cheap labour of the hungry
Turkish, Persian and Arab labourers, to build factories, lay out railways and
work mines. They want, by means of the cheap goods produced by factory
industry, to destroy the handicrafts and the millions of local craftsmen with
whom the cities of the East are filled, to throw them into the street,
unemployed. They want, by setting up huge trading firms, to ruin the petty
local merchants, throwing them too into the street, into the ranks of the
proletariat which has only its labour-power to sell.
The British capitalists want to proletarianise
completely the peoples of the East, to ruin the economic activity of all the
peasants, craftsmen and merchants and to force them all to work as hungry
slaves on their plantations and in their factories and mines. And when they
have so forced them, they intend to ruin their health with unbearable labour
and starve them to death on wretched pay, squeezing sweat and blood out of the
enslaved peoples of the East. And this sweat of the workers, this blood of the
peasants, they mean to turn into surplus value, into profit, into pure, ringing
gold! This is the future which imperialist Britain is preparing for the peoples
of the East.
Britain, which is a country of barely forty million
people, only one-fortieth of whom constitute the group of oppressors and
exploiters, while the remaining 39 million are oppressed and exploited workers
and farmers, wants to rule over half the world and to hold in slavery the 800
millions of the peoples of the East. One British bourgeois capitalist, having
already forced 39 British workers to work for him, wants to force to work for
him, in addition, 2,000 workers and peasants in Persia, Turkey, Mesopotamia and
Egypt. Thus, 2,040 hungry and tortured people, enjoying none of the good things
of life, are to work all their fives long for one idle parasite, a British
capitalist. One million such exploiters, British bankers and industrialists,
want to reduce 800 millions of the peoples of the East to slavery. And it must
be said that they know how to achieve their aim — they have neither shame, nor
conscience, nor fear; they have nothing but savage greed and unlimited thirst
for gain. The ruin, hunger, blood, suffering and groans of 800 million people
mean nothing to them. All that matters is profit, all that counts is gain! And
in pursuit of this profit and gain the British imperialists have taken a
tenacious grip on the throat of the peoples of the East, and are preparing a
dark future for them. A future of utter ruin, permanent slavery, rightlessness,
oppression and unlimited exploitation — this is what is in store for the
peoples of the East if the present government remains in power in Britain, if
imperialist Britain keeps its strength and stabilises its rule over the Eastern
countries. A miserable handful of British bankers devour hundreds of millions
of peasants and workers in the East.
But this shall not be!
In face of the British capitalists, the rulers
of imperialist Britain, there is rising up the organised might of the peasants
and workers of the East, united under the red banner of the Communist
International, under the red banner of the union of revolutionary workers, who
have made it their aim to liberate the whole world and all mankind from every
form of exploitation and oppression.
The First Congress of representatives of the
Peoples of the East loudly proclaims to the whole world, to the capitalist
rulers of Britain: This shall not be! You dogs shall not devour the peoples of
the East, you wretched handful of oppressors shall not reduce to everlasting
serfdom hundreds of millions of Eastern workers and peasants. You have bitten
off too big a piece, more than you can chew, and it will choke you!
The peoples of the East have long stagnated in
the darkness of ignorance under the despotic yoke of their own tyrant rulers,
and under that of foreign capitalist conquerors. But the roar of the world-wide
conflict, and the thunder of the Russian workers’ revolution, which has
released the Eastern people of Russia from the century-old chains of
capitalist slavery, has awakened them, and now aroused from their sleep of
centuries, they are rising to their feet.
They are waking up and are hearing the call to a
holy war, to a ghazavat: this is our call! It is the call of the First
Congress of representatives of the Peoples of the East, united with the
revolutionary proletariat of the West under the banner of the Communist
International. Thus we — representatives of the toiling masses of all the
peoples of the East: India, Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Baluchistan,
Kashgar, China, Indochina, Japan, Korea, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaidzhan,
Daghestan, Northern Caucasia, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Khiva,
Bukhara, Turkestan, Ferghana, Tataria, Bashkiria, Kirghizia, etc., united in
unbreakable union among ourselves and with the revolutionary workers of the
West summon our peoples to a holy war. We say:
Peoples of the East! You have often heard the call to holy war, from your governments, you have
marched under the green banner of the Prophet, but all those holy wars were
fraudulent, serving only the interests of your self-seeking rulers, and you,
the peasants and workers, remained in slavery and want after these wars. You
conquered the good things of life for others, but yourselves never enjoyed any
of them.
Now we summon you to the first real holy war,
under the red banner of the Communist International. We summon you to a holy
war for your own well-being, for your own freedom, for your own life!
Britain, the last powerful imperialist predator
left in Europe, has spread its dark wings over the Eastern Moslem countries,
and is trying to turn the peoples of the East into its slaves, into its booty.
Slavery! Frightful slavery, ruin, oppression and exploitation is being brought
by Britain to the peoples of the East. Save yourselves, peoples of the East!
Arise and fight against this beast of prey! Go
forward as one man into a holy war against the British conquerors! Stand up,
Indian exhausted by hunger and unbearable slave labour! Stand up, Anatolian
peasant crushed by taxes and usury! Stand up, Persian rayat strangled by the
mulkadars! Stand up, Armenian toiler driven out into the barren hills! Stand
up, Arabs and Afghans, lost in sandy deserts and cut off by the British from
all the rest of the world! Stand up and fight against the common enemy,
imperialist Britain!
High waves the banner of the holy war ... This
is a holy war for the liberation of the Peoples of the East, for the ending of
the division of mankind into oppressor peoples and oppressed peoples, for
complete equality of all peoples and races, whatever language they may speak,
whatever the colour of their skin and whatever the religion they profess.
Into the holy war to end the division of
countries into advanced and backward, dependent and independent, metropolitan
and colonial!
Into the holy war for the liberation of all
mankind from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of
all forms of oppression of one people by another and of all forms of
exploitation of man by man!
Into the holy war against the last citadel of
capitalism and imperialism in Europe, against the nest of pirates and bandits
by sea and land, against the age-old oppressor of all the peoples of the East,
against imperialist Britain!
Into the holy war for freedom, independence and
happiness for all the peoples of the East, all the East’s millions of peasants
and workers enslaved by Britain!
Peoples of the East! In this holy war all
the revolutionary workers and all the oppressed peasants of the East will be
with you. They will help you, they will fight and die along with you.
It is the First Congress of representatives of
the Peoples of the East that tells you this. Long live the unity of all the
peasants and workers of the East and of the West, the unity of all the toilers,
all the oppressed and exploited. Long live the battle headquarters of this
united movement — the Communist International! May the holy war of the peoples
of the East and of the toilers of the whole world against imperialist Britain
burn with unquenchable fire!
Honorary members of the Presidium
Radek (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosmer
(France), Quelch (Britain), Reed (America), Steinhardt-Gruber (Austria), Jansen
(Holland), Shablin (Balkan Federation), Yoshiharo (Japan).
Zinoviev, Chairman of the Congress
Members of the Presidium
Ryskulov, Abdurashidov, Karriyev, (Turkestan);
Mustafa Sub'hi (Turkey; Wang (China); Karid (India); Mulabekdchan, Radhmanov
(Khiva); Mukhamedov (Bukhara); Korkmasov, (Daghestan); Digurov (Terek Region);
Aliyev (Northern Caucasia); Kostanyan (Armenia); Narimanov (Azerbaidzhan);
Yenikeyev (Tatar Republic); Amur-Sanan (Kalmuck Republic); Makharadze
(Georgia); Haidar Khan (Persia); Aga-Zade (Afghanistan); Narbutabekov (Tashkent);
Makhmudov (Ferghana); Takhsim-Baari, Kaavis-Mahomed (Anatolia); Kuleyev
(Transcaspia); Niyas Kuli (Turkmenia); Kari Tadzhi (Samarkand); Nazyr-Sedyki
(India); Sidadzheddin, Kardash-Ogly (Daghestan); Yelchiev, Musayev
(Azerbaidzhan); Azim (Afghanistan); Abdulayev (Khiva).
Ostrovsky, Secretary to the Congress.
(Kommunistichesky
Internatsional, no. 15, December 20, 1920)
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