The year 1935 is significant not only for the Latin American Communists and not only because of the Brazilian events. Perhaps the most important year in the history of the Comintern since its foundation in 1919 was 1935. After 1935, what can be called the ‘institutional’ life of the Comintern was so reduced that it might be tempting for the historian to desist from any further analysis of the world organization as a whole. What Lenin had called ‘the most important principles’ of the Comintern, that is, ‘the proletarian dictatorship and the Soviet power’ were relinquished in 1935 to be replaced by the defence of bourgeois democracy and power, not for the proletariat, but for an alliance of the proletarian parties (the Communists and the previously despised Social- Democrats) with the ‘anti-fascist’ bourgeoisie, aimed generally at backing the latter's power. The rigid centralism of the International was also replaced, at least formally, by what Zinoviev would have considered in 1920 as something close to ‘a loose propaganda association’. In fact, it was the idea of world revolution which fell apart. Thus, of course, the need for an international party to hasten it became superfluous.

Two events served to strengthen the will of the Comintern towards self-dissolution. The first was the dismantling in 1933 of the most powerful section of the Third International, the Communist Party of Germany.