Lenin's death at the beginning of 1924 coincided with an exhaustive search by the USSR for a modus vivendi with the capitalist world. In laying the foundations of peaceful co-existence, priority was given to the cultivation of relations with Britain. This study examines the British government's various responses to the Soviet overtures. The scope of the work ranges from Labour's de jure recognition of the Soviet Union at the beginning of 1924 to the Conservatives' severance of relations in May 1927. The bulk of the study is set against the background of rapidly deteriorating relations and traces the unsparing measures employed by the Russians to forestall an open breach. Equal attention is paid to the Soviet government's straightforward diplomatic moves and to activities under the auspices of Comintern and the Soviet trade unions which rallied support without regard to frontiers or international protocol. The main aim was to strengthen the security and economic recovery of the Soviet Union, but revolutionary aspirations remain on the agenda.

The book concerns the Soviet effort during the 1920s to make contact with - and if possible revolutionize - the European labour movement, by first establishing a special relationship with the British Trades Union Congress. The ultimate failure of that effort, after the collapse of the general strike in 1926, inspired Trotsky to try one last time to oust Stalin, a confrontation that led to utter collapse of the Trotskyite opposition in 1927-28. The author suggests the failure of this particular 'united front' effort was a major factor in the sectarianism and isolationism of the Communist movement from 1928 to 1934, and thus had a significant affect on the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

The 'Red International of Labour Unions' (RILU, Russian abbreviation Profintern) was a central instrument for the spreading of international communism during the inter-war period. This comprehensive and scholarly history of the organisation, based on extensive research in the former communist archives in Moscow and East Berlin, sheds significant light on the international trade union movement of the period. Tosstorff shows how the RILU began as a revolutionary alliance of syndicalists and communists in defiance of the social democratic International Federation of Trade Unions. His text presents a full account of the organisation’s main stages: the decline of the revolutionary wave after World War One, after which many syndicalists left, and others were integrated into the communist parties; the continuation of the RILU as an international communist apparatus; and its dissolution in 1936–7 as part of communism's popular front policy. First published in German as Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920-1937 by Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, in 2004.