The International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR) was a charitable organization established in 1922 by a decision of the 4th Congress of the Comintern as an analogue of the Red Cross. MOPR was non-partisan and set itself the task of providing legal, moral, and material assistance to imprisoned fighters of the revolution, their families and children, as well as the families of fallen comrades. MOPR brought together broad masses of workers, peasants, and minor employees regardless of their party affiliation.
In reality, MOPR was an instrument for popularizing communist ideology worldwide, and also served as a cover for the activities of Soviet intelligence services. From a propaganda standpoint, however, the idea of creating MOPR was very successful. The theme of rescuing unjustly accused workers from imprisonment seemed extremely noble to the global public, so the number of MOPR members around the world began to grow rapidly from the very first days of the organization’s existence. It is obvious that the “creator” of MOPR—the Soviet Union—had to remain an example for all fraternal communist parties in this matter. Therefore, the initially voluntary membership in the organization quickly turned into “voluntary-compulsory” membership. Others had to follow the example of the “most politically conscious” workers who joined—yet not out of solidarity or humanitarianism, but in order not to attract criticism.
In March 1923, the MOPR Central Committee declared the Day of the Paris Commune (18 March) its holiday. By 1924, the organization had sections in 19 countries. By 1932, MOPR united 70 national sections comprising about 14 million people (of whom 9.7 million were in MOPR USSR, whose contributions to the fund were the most significant). Until 1936, MOPR, like the NKVD, had the right to issue permits to enter the USSR.
The issue was not so much “terror” against revolutionaries as a fact that had become clear by the 1920s: the idea of a world revolution was still very far from realization. In order not to окончательно undermine the trust of the masses in the coming victory of the world proletariat, it was necessary, on the one hand, to develop in every way the thesis of the constant “persecution” of revolutionaries abroad, and on the other, to form a mechanism of material support for Western communist and other “left” organizations whose activities were aimed at “fanning” the flames of a global revolutionary fire.
It is believed that the name for MOPR was coined by the head of the Polish section of Comintern communists, Julian Marchlewski. A loyal comrade-in-arms of Rosa Luxemburg and Jan Tyszka, one of the founders of the German Spartacus League (read more about the German Spartacus League in the story “From Trumpeter to Drummer”), and head of the revolutionary committee of Poland, he became the first chairman of the Central Committee of the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution. The Executive Committee of MOPR was headed at the same time by one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany, Clara Zetkin, who, after Marchlewski’s death in 1925, became the leader of the organization. Her deputy was appointed a Russian, the prominent scientist Panteleimon Lepeshinsky.
Of course, the USSR transferred the most significant sums of donations “for the prisoners of capital,” the main source of which was voluntary, in some places compulsory, and sometimes outright violent collections of money from the population. And if foreign sections of MOPR raised funds to help their own communists and political prisoners, in the USSR people were urged to “give the last shirt off their back” to help numerous foreign “brothers.” It can be stated with confidence that it was MOPR that laid the grim Soviet tradition of aiding fraternal communist parties, and later entire peoples, at the expense of its own citizens.
Over time, MOPR de facto turned from an international aid organization into a mechanism for distributing funds collected in the USSR to support fraternal communist parties.
Over time, MOPR turned into a gigantic “state within a state.” By 1940, i.e., over 18 years of work, about 180 million rubles had been collected “for the prisoners of capital”—a simply fabulous sum. But if in the early years of MOPR’s existence absolutely all the collected money went to support prisoners, from the second half of the 1920s about one third of the funds began to be retained for the needs of the organization itself, which had expanded to an incredible scale. And although aid to fighters of the revolution in capitalist countries formally remained MOPR’s main goal, in practice the organization was engaged not only in that, but also in attempts to create communist cells in those countries where people knew of the communist movement only from newspapers.
Soviet MOPR members came up with ever new ways to collect as much money as possible from the population for foreign “prisoners of capital.” For these purposes, MOPR USSR issued lottery tickets, postage stamps, postcards, held auctions, organized субботники, and sold charitable magazines from foreign sections. By the way, a bundle of exactly such magazines was insistently offered for purchase to Professor Preobrazhensky by Comrade Vyazemskaya, head of the cultural department of the house, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel Heart of a Dog.
On an international scale, it operated until World War II. On 12 April 1948, the Central Committee of the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution in the USSR decided to dissolve the Soviet section. All property and valuables of MOPR were transferred to the Union of Societies of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. However, the reason for the liquidation of the organization was not only waning enthusiasm. The dissolution of MOPR was driven by the need to unite all anti-fascist forces. And national and class-based approaches to friendship, as World War II showed, were смертельно dangerous. MOPR dissolved entirely painlessly, without in the least drawing attention to the fact that the world proletarian revolution for which it had been created never took place.