The International Red Aid (MOPR) was a charitable organization created in 1922 by 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 revolutionaries, their families and children, as well as the families of fallen comrades. MOPR united 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 a cover for the activities of Soviet special 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 world public, so the number of MOPR members worldwide 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, initially voluntary membership in the organization quickly gave way to “voluntary-compulsory” membership. Following the example of the “most class-conscious” workers who had joined the organization became necessary for everyone else as well—not out of solidarity or humanitarian concern, but in order to avoid attracting 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 belonged to MOPR of the USSR, whose contributions to the fund were the most significant). 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 obvious by the 1920s: the idea of a world revolution was still very far from realization. In order not to finally undermine the masses’ confidence in the coming victory of the world proletariat, it was necessary, on the one hand, to develop by all means the thesis of 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 global revolutionary blaze.
It is believed that the name MOPR was coined by the head of the Polish communist section of the Comintern, Julian Marchlewski. A loyal comrade-in-arms of Rosa Luxemburg and Jan Tyszka, one of the founders of the German Spartacus League (for more about the German Spartacus League, see the story “From Trumpeter to Drummer”), and the head of the Revolutionary Committee of Poland, he became the first chairman of the Central Committee of the International Red Aid. The MOPR Executive Committee 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 largest sums of donations for the benefit of the “prisoners of capital,” the main source of which was voluntary—sometimes compulsory, and at times outright coercive—collections from the population. And if foreign MOPR sections raised funds to help their own communists and political prisoners, in the USSR people were urged to “give the shirt off their backs” to help numerous foreign “brothers.” It can be said 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—that is, after 18 years of work—about 180 million rubles had been collected “for the prisoners of capital,” a simply fabulous sum. But while 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 масштабы. And although aid to the revolutionary fighters of capitalist countries formally remained MOPR’s main goal, in reality the organization was engaged not only in this, but also in attempts to create communist cells in those countries where the communist movement was known only from newspapers.
Soviet MOPR members came up with more and more new 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, postcards, held auctions, organized субботники, and sold charitable magazines of foreign sections. By the way, it was a bundle of precisely such magazines that Comrade Vyazemskaya, the head of the cultural department of the building, persistently suggested that Professor Preobrazhensky purchase in Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel “Heart of a Dog.”
Internationally, 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 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 approaches to friendship, as the Second World War showed, were смертельно dangerous. MOPR disbanded completely painlessly, without emphasizing at all the fact that the world proletarian revolution for which it had been created never took place.