Agnes Smedley was an American writer, journalist, activist, and spy who traveled North America, Europe, and Asia in pursuit of her anti-imperialist and communist agendas. She came to anticolonial transnationalism through her personal and often intimate ties to India’s diasporic revolutionaries in the US (1912–1919) and Germany (1920–1929), as well as Chinese communists and Soviet spies in Shanghai (1929–1937). The chapter traces Smedley’s global crossings as a prism for exploring the power of intimacy in the making (and unmaking) of transnational solidarities, while also considering the gendered experiences of revolutionary women like her who were critical to shaping transnational anticolonialism. The chapter argues that Smedley’s most revolutionary acts were often intimate and private ones, including interracial marriage and romantic ties to leading luminaries of transnational anticolonialism during the interwar period.

The expansion of empires in the late nineteenth century prompted leftists to invent a new kind of internationalism targeting what they called “imperialism.” Although there were many ways to combat imperialism, one approach soon came to dominate: the Leninist problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. The ideas that formed the basis of this problematic grew out of highly contingent debates in the twentieth century, but after Lenin’s death in 1924 were codified as the only radical way to change the world on a global scale. It was embraced by millions across the globe, especially by Vietnamese revolutionaries, who soon distinguished themselves as the leading force in the larger anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam. In fact, Vietnam emerged as a kind of test case for the Leninist problematic. It helped Vietnamese revolutionaries score many victories, but the experience of revolution in Vietnam revealed some of Leninism’s core tensions, the most important of which was the contradiction between nation-building on the one hand and universal communist emancipation on the other.

Chapter 18 analyses how the principal western policy- and decision-makers of 1919 sought to deal with the Bolshevik challenge or, more precisely, the political challenge posed by Lenin’s regime and the political and ideological challenge posed by what they regarded as the threat of a transnational spread of Bolshevism across and beyond Europe. It also reassesses the overall significance of the Bolshevik threat for the making of the nascent Atlantic order after the First World War, underscoring that it affected the peacemaking process but was not as decisive as generations of cold war historians have claimed and highlighting that this process was by no means shaped by a struggle between Wilsonianism and Leninism. It then examines how Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks interpreted the western powers’ pursuits and sought to expand the communist revolution westwards, also through the Communist International. And, finally, it illuminates how difficult it proved for Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and their advisers to agree on a common approach both towards the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik regime – and how they eventually concentrated on isolating it and preventing a German-Bolshevik alliance, ensuring that subsequently the Soviet Union would remain outside the nascent Atlantic system.

This chapter explains the circumstances surrounding Ho Chi Minh's arrival in Hong Kong from Thailand in December 1929.He went on to launch the Vietnamese Communist Party at a meeting held in Hong Kong in February 1930 dubbed the Unification Conference. The following October he further superintended the creation of the Indochinese Communist Party (thus bringing in Cambodia and Laos in addition to Vietnam), albeit with Moscow-returnee Tran Phu stepping into the leadership. If this was all that Ho Chi Minh accomplished in Hong Kong then it would still be significant. Operating out of his base in Kowloon City, Ho Chi Minh then took charge of communist party organization in Malaya and Thailand. As described with reference to French archival documents, his misplaced efforts in sending coded messages to contacts in Singapore backfired, leading to sweeping arrests of the communist underground from Vietnam to Shanghai as well as his own apprehension along with a female comrade in Hong Kong on June 6, 1931.

The Sumatra-born revolutionary, Tan Malaka, shared prison time in Hong Kong with Ho Chi Minh. In this chapter we see the then twenty-six-year-old Tan Malaka setting up in revolutionary Guangzhou under Communist International auspices. There, he networked with leading Sun Yat-sen government officials, co-hosted an important Asian trade union conference, and assumed a new role as editor and publisher. Known to Ho Chi Minh from Moscow days, the two would also meet in Guangzhou. Somewhat adrift in the Philippines prior to deportation to China, it could well have been Ho Chi Minh who summoned him to Hong Kong with a view to clarifying the status of the communist movement in Singapore/Malaya in the wake of a failed rebellion on Java. Tan Malaka was treated differently from his Vietnamese counterpart. He was arrested in the British colony, denied legal assistance, did not make a court appearance or gain media attention, although he did evade extradition to his homeland. Tan Malaka bequeathed a rich description of his experience in Victoria Prison and this chapter adds fresh detail on this episode, otherwise little acknowledged in Hong Kong writing.

The third chapter, ‘Break with the Old World’ uses memoirs, intelligence accounts, and hitherto unused sources from the Comintern archives, to follow the journeys of Indian revolutionaries to and through Moscow. For revolutionaries from the colonized world, Moscow offered support, sustenance, and a vision for a liberated future. It was also a site of wonder and amazement, where a new world and a new human was being inaugurated. For those who learnt their communism in the Soviet Union, Moscow was both a physical embodiment of a break with History and a vision of a utopic world within reach. Through the lifeworlds (Lebenswelt) of ‘Moscow graduates’, I trace the history of the varied and multilayered engagements between the Communist International (Comintern) and communist groups in India from the heady and millenarian days of the Leninist moment to its calamitous Stalinist successor.