The International Red Aid (MOPR) was a charitable organization founded in 1922 by decision of the 4th Congress of the Comintern as an analogue to the Red Cross. MOPR was a non-party organization 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 lower-level employees regardless of their party affiliation.
In reality, MOPR was an instrument for popularizing communist ideology worldwide and also served as 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—was expected to remain an example for all fraternal communist parties in this matter. Therefore, the initially voluntary membership in the organization quickly gave way to “voluntary-compulsory” participation. The rest of the workforce also had to follow the example of the “most class-conscious” workers who had joined—though not out of solidarity or compassion, but to avoid criticism.
In March 1923, the Central Committee of MOPR declared Paris Commune Day (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 belonged to MOPR of the USSR, whose contributions to the fund were the largest). Until 1936, MOPR, like the NKVD, had the right to issue permits for entry into the USSR.
The issue was not so much “terror” against revolutionaries as the fact, which had become clear by the 1920s, that the idea of world revolution was still very far from realization. In order not to finally undermine the masses’ faith in the coming victory of the world proletariat, it was necessary, on the one hand, to promote in every way the thesis of constant “persecution” of revolutionaries abroad, and on the other hand, to create a mechanism of material support for Western communist and other “left” organizations whose activities were aimed at “fanning” the global revolutionary fire.
It is assumed that the name MOPR was coined by Julian Marchlewski, head of the Polish section of Comintern communists. A loyal associate of Rosa Luxemburg and Jan Tyszka, one of the founders of the German Spartacus League (for more on the German Spartacus League, see the story “From Trumpeter to Drummer”), and head of Poland’s revolutionary committee, he became the first chairman of the Central Committee of the International Red Aid. The executive committee of MOPR was headed at the same time by Clara Zetkin, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany, who, after Marchlewski’s death in 1925, became the organization’s leader. Her deputy was appointed a Russian, the prominent scholar Panteleimon Lepeshinsky.
Of course, the USSR transferred the most significant sums of donations for the benefit of the “prisoners of capital,” the main sources being voluntary collections from the population, compulsory in some places, and at times openly coercive. And if foreign MOPR sections 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 MOPR laid the foundation for 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 became a gigantic “state within a state.” By 1940, i.e., after 18 years of work, about 180 million rubles had been collected “for the prisoners of capital”—a truly staggering sum. But whereas in the first years of MOPR’s existence absolutely all collected money went to support prisoners, from the second half of the 1920s about a third of the funds began to be kept for the needs of the organization itself, which had grown to incredible proportions. And although assistance to revolutionary fighters in capitalist countries formally remained MOPR’s main goal, in practice the organization was engaged not only in this, but also in attempts to create communist cells in countries where the communist movement was known only from newspapers.
Soviet MOPR members kept inventing more and more ways to collect as much money as possible from the population for foreign prisoners of capital. For these purposes, MOPR of the USSR issued lottery tickets, postage stamps, and postcards, held auctions, organized volunteer workdays, and sold charity magazines from foreign sections. Incidentally, it was a bundle of precisely such magazines that Comrade Vyazemskaya, the head of the cultural department of the building committee, persistently tried to persuade Professor Preobrazhensky to buy in Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel “Heart of a Dog.”
On an international scale, it operated until the Second World War. On 12 April 1948, the Central Committee of the International Red Aid of the USSR decided to dissolve the Soviet section. All property and valuables of MOPR were transferred to the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. However, the reason for liquidation was not only exhausted 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 the Second World War showed, were mortally dangerous. MOPR dissolved entirely painlessly, without in any way emphasizing that the world proletarian revolution for which it had been created never took place.