Communist Party of Indonesia

The Communist Party of Indonesia (Indonesian: Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) was a communist party in Indonesia. It was the largest non-ruling communist party in the world before its violent disbandment in 1965. The party had two million members in the 1955 elections, with 16 percent of the national vote and almost 30 percent of the vote in East Java. During most of the period immediately following the Indonesian Independence until the eradication of the PKI in 1965, it was a legal party operating openly in the country. The Indies Social Democratic Association (Dutch: Indische Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging, ISDV) was founded in 1914 by Dutch socialist Henk Sneevliet and another Indies socialist. The 85-member ISDV was a merger of the two Dutch socialist parties (the SDAP and the Socialist Party of the Netherlands), which would become the Communist Party of the Netherlands with Dutch East Indies leadership. The Dutch members of the ISDV introduced communist ideas to educated Indonesians looking for ways to oppose colonial rule. The ISDV began a Dutch-language publication, Het Vrije Woord (The Free Word, edited by Adolf Baars), in October 1915. It did not demand independence when the ISDV was formed. At this point, the association had about 100 members; only three were Indonesians, and it rapidly took a radically anti-capitalist direction. When Sneevliet moved ISDV's headquarters from Surabaya to Semarang, the ISDV began attracting many Indonesians from like-minded movements which had been growing throughout the Dutch Indies since 1900. The ISDV became increasingly incompatible with the SDAP leadership in the Netherlands, who distanced themselves from the association and began to equate them with Volksraad (People's Council). A reformist faction of the ISDV broke away and formed the Indies Social Democratic Party in 1917. The ISDV began Soeara Merdeka (The Voice of Freedom), its first Indonesian-language publication, that year. Later on, ISDV saw the events of the October Revolution in Russia as an inspiration for a similar uprising in Indonesia.