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Comintern Archives: Files of the Communist Party of USA (CPUSA)

  

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Comintern Archives: Files of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA)


Comintern Archives
The Comintern archive consists of all the records created under the authority of the Executive Committee (ECCI) of the Third Communist International. It contains original documents in more than thirty languages from seven Congresses and thirteen ECCI Plenums, by more than seventy Communist and Left Socialist parties, together with different international organizations, often with personal corrections by famous figures in the communist movement.
The CPUSA collection
The CPUSA collection in the Comintern Archives (fond 515) includes 4,313 numbered files (dela). The material in the collection, largely the original headquarters records of the CPUSA shipped to Moscow many decades ago, spans the period from 1912 to 1944 with the bulk in the period from 1922 to 1936.

Many of the documents in this collection are unique; the records are very detailed regarding the history of the CPUSA, particularly its origins in the 1920s and the early and middle 1930s. IDC Publishers makes this very important resource available for research. This collection provides a strong basis for reconstructing an accurate picture of American communism and anticommunism.
'General staff of the world revolution'
Formally, the Communist International, (Comintern), which was founded in March 1919, was an independent international organization of communists from various countries of Europe, Asia, and America. In practice, it was a Soviet-sponsored agency responsible for coordinating the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism worldwide. Even today, traces of this organization can still be found in countries throughout the world. As with all such semi-secretive organizations, the Comintern became surrounded by rumor, conjecture and myth. In the past, being unable to reliably distinguish between fact and fantasy, historians had to resort to guesswork. This was because the archives of the Comintern were hidden away in the inaccessible repositories of the central archive of the Central Committee of the USSR.

‘Hidden’ files
The files cover the whole period of the activity of the Communist International, that is, from 1919 to 1943. In 1943, after the disbanding of the Comintern, its archive was transferred for storage to the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Today, the Comintern Archives are held by the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. The Communist Party of USA (CPUSA) has always been a secretive organization. While occasional government raids, subpoenas, search warrants, and congressional investigations made some documentation part of the public record, the quantity was never large because of the party's practice of hiding or destroying records.

Until 1992, the archives of the Soviet Union dealing with Communist activity in American were closed to everyone except a few Soviet Communist party researchers. The dissolution of the Soviet Union has led to an opening of some of these archives. In 1992 Dr. John Haynes from the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress learned of their existence and in 1993 became the first American scholar to examine them. On December 17, 1998, the Library of Congress and the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDNI) signed an agreement for the microfilming of fond 515, the records of the CPUSA, held by RTsKhIDNI. The archive was subsequently reorganized and is now entitled the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI).

The CPUSA collection
 The files contain the original incoming mail, carbons of outgoing correspondence, reports from regional and local organizers, and internal memoranda produced by officials and offices of the national headquarters. For the first time, it is possible to document the functioning of the local party, its relationship to the international, and the importance of individual members in shaping the party's program. These materials also provide information about the ways in which ordinary people experienced communism. In addition to CPUSA records produced in America, these files contain documents created or gathered in Moscow by CPUSA representatives to the Comintern. The extensive files on the various immigrant/ethnic affiliates of the CPUSA (such as the Finnish Workers Federation) have material in both English and the language of the particular immigrant group being dealt with: Finish, Italian, Hungarian, german, Chinese, Serbian, Croation, Polish, Yiddish and so on.