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 united broad masses of workers, peasants, and lower-level employees regardless of their party affiliation.
In reality, MOPR was a tool for popularizing communist ideology worldwide and also served as cover for the activities of Soviet security 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. Therefore, the initially voluntary membership in the organization quickly gave way to “voluntary-compulsory” enrollment. Following the example of the “most politically conscious” workers who had joined became necessary for everyone else as well—not out of solidarity or compassion, but in order to avoid complaints.
In March 1923, the MOPR Central Committee declared the Day of the Paris Commune (18 March) to be its holiday. By 1924, the organization had sections in 19 countries. By 1932, MOPR united 70 national sections comprising about 14 million people (of these, 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 to enter 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 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 possible way 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 fire of world revolution.
It is believed that the name MOPR was coined by the head of the Polish communist section of the Comintern, Julian Marchlewski. 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, read 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 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 became the organization’s leader after Marchlewski’s death in 1925. Her deputy was appointed a Russian, the prominent scientist 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 forced in certain places, 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 stated with confidence that it was precisely 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 if in the first years of MOPR’s existence absolutely all collected money went to support prisoners, then 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 unbelievable proportions. And although assistance to revolutionary fighters in 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 countries where the communist movement was known only from newspapers.
Soviet MOPR activists came up with ever more 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, and postcards; held auctions; organized voluntary Saturday labor days; and sold charitable magazines of foreign sections. By the way, it was a bundle of precisely such magazines that the head of the cultural department of the building, Comrade Vyazemskaya, insistently offered to Professor Preobrazhensky 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 Red Aid of the USSR resolved to dissolve the Soviet section. All MOPR property and valuables were transferred to the Alliance of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. However, the reason for liquidation was not only waning enthusiasm. The dissolution of MOPR was driven by the need to unite all anti-fascist forces. National and class-based approaches to friendship, as World War II showed, were mortally dangerous. MOPR dissolved completely painlessly, without in the least drawing attention to the fact that the world proletarian revolution for which it had been created never happened.