The International Red Aid (MOPR) was a charitable organization established in 1922 by a 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 for 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 promoting 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 workers unjustly accused and imprisoned 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 was obvious that the “creator” of MOPR, the Soviet Union, had to remain an example in this matter for all fraternal communist parties. Therefore, membership in the organization, voluntary at first, quickly became “voluntary-compulsory.” 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 philanthropy, but in order not to attract criticism.
In March 1923, the MOPR Central Committee declared Paris Commune Day (March 18) 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 substantial). Until 1936, MOPR, like the NKVD, had the right to issue permits for entry into the USSR.
The point was not so much “terror” against revolutionaries as the fact that had become obvious by the 1920s: the idea of a world revolution was still very far from being realized. In order not to finally undermine the masses’ trust in the coming victory of the world proletariat, it was necessary, on the one hand, to develop in every possible way the thesis of the constant “persecution” of revolutionaries abroad, and on the other, to create a mechanism of material support for Western communist and other “left-wing” organizations whose activity was aimed at “fanning” the global revolutionary blaze.
It is assumed that the name for MOPR was coined by the head of the Polish section of the Comintern communists, Julian Marchlewski. This loyal associate of Rosa Luxemburg and Jan Tyszka, one of the founders of the German Spartacus League (for more about the German Spartacus League, read the story “From Bugler to Drummer”), and head of Poland’s Revolutionary Committee, 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 scientist Panteleimon Lepeshinsky.
Naturally, the USSR transferred the largest sums of donations “for the prisoners of capital,” the main source of which was voluntary, in some places compulsory, and sometimes outright violent collections 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 up their last shirt” to help numerous foreign “brothers.” One can state with confidence that it was precisely MOPR that laid the grim Soviet tradition of helping 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 the funds collected in the USSR to support fraternal communist parties.
Over time, MOPR became 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,” an simply fabulous 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 one third of the funds began to be kept for the needs of the organization itself, which had expanded to incredible масштабы. And although aid to the fighters for revolution in capitalist countries formally remained MOPR’s main goal, in reality the organization was engaged not only in that, but also in attempts to create communist cells in those countries where people knew about the communist movement only from newspapers.
Soviet MOPR members devised ever new ways to extract 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 volunteer Saturday workdays, and sold charitable magazines from foreign sections. By the way, a bundle of precisely such magazines was insistently offered for purchase by Comrade Vyazemskaya, the head of the cultural department of the building, to Professor Preobrazhensky in Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel Heart of a Dog.
On an international scale, it operated until World War II. On April 12, 1948, the Central Committee of the International Red Aid of the USSR resolved 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 the liquidation of the organization was not only the waning enthusiasm. The dissolution of MOPR was driven by the need to unite all antifascist forces. National and class-based approaches to friendship, as World War II showed, were mortally dangerous. MOPR dissolved entirely painlessly, without in the least emphasizing the fact that the global proletarian revolution for which it had been created never took place.