Opening of the Congress The Congress was scheduled to open on July 15, but owing to rampant transit difficulties, many delegates had not arrived in Soviet Russia by that date. ECCI decided to postpone the first working sessions by one week. ; 1924 painting by
Isaak Brodsky Following a meal in the Great Hall of
Smolny, the delegates, accompanied by thousands of Petrograd workers, marched to the Uritsky Theater where they heard a
keynote address on the international situation and the tasks of the Comintern delivered by Lenin. Four official languages were used at the convention — English, French, German, and Russian — with secretaries typing convention documents in each. Voting delegates were provided with red cards, non-voting "consultative" delegates blue cards, and guests green cards, with votes taken by means of counting cards. Two sessions were dedicated to discussion of the structure and role of Communist parties, with a summary report and theses delivered to the body by Comintern Chairman
Grigorii Zinoviev. On July 25, the Commission on Conditions for Admission voted 5–3 on a proposal by Lenin that only parties with a clear majority on their governing Central Committee favoring affiliation to the Comintern prior to the 2nd World Congress would be permitted membership in that organization.
The trade union question The 2nd World Congress dealt extensively with the relationship between the
trade union movement and the emerging international communist movement.
Left-wing communists were scornful of the "conservative" nature of the established union movement in many counties, exemplified by the
American Federation of Labor in the United States and the
reformist International Federation of Trade Unions, based in
Amsterdam. The limited horizons of such organizations, limited to matters of daily concern as wages, hours, and working conditions, were seen as a manifestation of
class collaboration and an impediment to the revolutionary transformation of society. Such unions were worthy only of expeditious destruction, the left-wing communists believed. Lenin and other Comintern leaders disagreed sharply with the demand of the left-wing communists that new explicitly revolutionary
dual unions should be established and supported, arguing the 25 million workers participating in unions affiliated with the Amsterdam International had already made their basic organizational decision. Meetings between Comintern officials and trade union leaders in Moscow in the summer of 1920 had led to the establishment of the International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions (Mezhsovprof), forerunner of the
Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) that was established the next year. The union question remained a matter of heated contention at the 2nd World Congress, with the representatives of the British
Shop Stewards Movement and
syndicalist delegates from Germany and the United States refusing to abandon their hostility to the strategy of "
boring from within" the established unions. Ultimately, the majority of the 2nd World Congress moved to support Lenin's policy, detailed at length in his recently published book
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. The colonial question The 2nd World Congress also for the first time paid serious attention to the national
liberation movements of the
colonies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. While Lenin drafted theses on colonial issues, supplementary theses were presented to the Congress by
Indian radical
M. N. Roy, formally a delegate from the fledgling
Communist Party of Mexico,
Avetis Sultan-Zade of
Persia, and Pak Chin-sun of
Korea, during the 4th Session of the Congress. The final resolution of the Congress directed communists in colonial countries to support the "national-revolutionary" movement in each, without regard to the fact that non-communist and non-
working class elements such as the
bourgeoisie and the
peasantry might be dominant. Particular attention was paid to formulating an alliance with the rural poor as a means of winning and holding power in a revolution. Russia's Bolsheviks did not apply any of this to non-Russian territories under Bolshevik control at the time—although non-Russian communist parties in those territories did. ==Cultural and sports activities==