Popular Front, Part Two: Youth and the Origins of the Cold War

Popular Front, part two: Youth and the Origins of the Cold War

This paper argues against the idea that the Soviet Union invented four world “fronts” in 1945-1946. The minds behind at least two of them—the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), founded in London in November 1945, and the International Union of Students (IUS), founded in Prague in August 1946—belonged to the far left from farther west. Many of the founders were Communists, many were women, and almost all were between the ages of twenty and thirty. For the founders, as for the Soviets who subsidized them, the WFDY and IUS promised a more ambitious revival of the prewar Popular Front. Where the first Front divided anti-fascist alliances by nation, the second divided them by demographics: one for youth, another for students, another for women. The result would exercise inclusive, Popular Front tactics exercised on a global, Comintern scale. Drawing on a range of national archives, the paper contests the one-dimensional “front organization” title that WFDY and IUS carried for the length of the Cold War. In the mid-1940s, prior to the Stalinist about-face of late 1947, Soviet propagandists faced three principal obstacles. Some European Communists were too quick to speak against the West. Others were too quick to speak in “left-wing,” “infantile” terms, mistaking Marxism for a utopian doctrine. Finally, overarching the other two, was the matter of publicity. The early history of the WFDY and IUS casts fresh light on Western reservations toward Stalin’s perceived ambitions. The hostility and indifference shown toward WFDY’s founding conference in London—the first by British youth organizations and the second by the British state—took Soviets aback. Could it be that the world youth federations of 1945-1946 delivered the first feint, and Anglo-American states the first strike, of the cultural Cold War?