the late 1930s or early 1940s. The Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat (PPTUS) was set up in 1927 by the Profintern (the Comintern's trade union arm) with the mission of promoting communist trade unions in China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and other nations in the western Pacific. Trapeznik (2009) says the PPTUS was a "Communist-front organization" and "engaged in overt and covert political agitation in addition to a number of clandestine activities". There were numerous communist front organizations in Asia, many oriented to students and youth. According to one historian, in the labor union movement of the 1920s in Japan, the "Hyogikai never called itself a communist front but in effect, this was what it was". He points out it was repressed by the government "along with other communist front groups". In the 1950s, Scalapino argues: "The primary Communist-front organization was the Japan Peace Committee". It was founded in 1949. Stalinism In 1924, Joseph Stalin, a key Bolshevik follower of Lenin, took power in the Soviet Union. Stalin was supported in his leadership by Nikolai Bukharin, but he had various important opponents in the government, most notably Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, and Grigory Zinoviev. Stalin initiated his own process of building a communist society, creating a variant of communism known as Marxism–Leninism. As a part of this, he abandoned some of the capitalist, market policies that had been allowed to continue under Lenin such as the New Economic Policy. Stalinist policies radically altered much of the Soviet Union's agricultural production, modernising it by introducing tractors and other machinery, forced collectivisation of the farms and forced collection of grains from the peasants in accordance with predecided targets. There was food available for industrial workers, but those peasants who refused to move starved, especially in Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) targeted kulaks, who owned a little land. Stalin took control of the Comintern and introduced a policy in the international organisation of opposing all leftists who were not Marxist–Leninists, labelling them to be social fascists, although many communists such as Jules Humbert-Droz disagreed with him on this policy, believing that the left should unite against the rise of right-wing movements like fascism across Europe. In the early 1930s, Stalin reversed course and promoted popular front movements whereby communist parties would collaborate with socialists and other political forces. A high priority was mobilizing wide support for the Republican