>Library of Congress Finds Lost Communist Documents
>
>January 18, 2000
>Contact: Helen Dalrymple (202) 707-1940
>Public Contact: (202) 707-5387
>
>Library of Congress Opens to Researchers the Records of the Communist
>Party, USA
>
>Microfilm Includes 435,165 Frames on 326 Reels
>
>The Library of Congress has opened for research copies of the records
>of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) covering the period from the
>1920s to the 1940s. This collection of documents had long been
>thought destroyed. However, in late 1992, after the dissolution of
>the Soviet Union, a historian in the Manuscript Division of the
>Library of Congress, John Earl Haynes, learned that the CPUSA had
>secretly shipped these records to the Soviet Union more than 50 years
>ago, where they were kept in a closed Communist Party archives. In
>the post- Soviet era the new Russian government took control of these
>records and opened them for research.
>
>In January 1993, Dr. Haynes traveled to Moscow and was the first
>American scholar to examine this historically significant collection,
>housed in what is today known as the Russian State Archives of Social
>and Political History. Upon his return to the United States, he
>recommended that the Library of Congress propose to the Russian
>Archives that the collection be microfilmed and a set of the
>microfilm deposited in the Library to ensure their permanent
>availability.
>
>The Library of Congress opened negotiations with the Russian Archives
>in 1993 to microfilm the collection. The negotiations over the years
>that followed involved staff of the Library's Manuscript and European
>divisions as well as James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress.
>In late 1998, a formal agreement was signed by Winston Tabb,
>Associate Librarian for Library Services, on behalf of the Library,
>and Kyrill Anderson, director of the Russian Archives. The project
>has now been completed. In total, the film includes 435,165 frames on
>326 reels. The cost of filming was supported by a "Gift to the
>Nation" from John Kluge, chairman of the Library's Madison Council,
>and the Library's James B. Wilbur Fund for Foreign Copying.
>
>The previous paucity of the archival record has been a major obstacle
>to scholarship on the history of the American Communist movement.
>Accounts of the history of American communism and the related issue
>of anticommunism have been highly contentious, with the academic
>consensus varying widely over the decades in part due to the
>shallowness and resulting ambiguity of the evidential base. The 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. Although some party documents have also become available in
>the papers of various private individuals, the quantity is limited.
>
>Now any researcher can read microfilmed copies of the original
>documents in the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of Congress.
>Historians will, therefore, have a much stronger basis for
>reconstructing an accurate picture of American communism and
>anticommunism from the 1920s to the 1940s. A finding aid has been
>created to guide researchers through the collection.
>
>Many of the documents in this collection are unique; the records are
>very detailed regarding the history of the CPUSA, particularly for
>its origins in the 1920s and the early and middle 1930s. There are
>fewer records for the 1937-1944 period than for the earlier years,
>probably due to the difficulties of shipping large quantities of
>records once war started in 1939. The CPUSA collection at the Russian
>Archives has no material later than 1944.
>
>Among the items in the CPUSA collection are:
>
>* A 1919 letter from Nikolai Bukharin, head of the Communist
>International in Soviet Russia, to American radicals urging them to
>form an American Communist Party. The Comintern (as the Communist
>International was called) told American radicals that they should
>organize "Communist nuclei among soldiers and sailors...for the
>purpose of violent baiting of officers and generals, " recognize
>the "necessity of arming the proletariat," tell radical soldiers when
>demobilized from the army that they "must not give up their arms, "
>should expose President Woodrow Wilson "as a hypocrite and murderer,
>in order to discredit him with the masses," form "militant organs of
>the struggle for the conquest of the State power, for the
>dictatorship of the Workers" and adopt the slogan "Down with the
>Senate and Congress."
>
>* A 13-page application for admission to the Communist International
>from the newly organized Communist Party of America. The letter,
>dated November 24, 1919, ends with the declaration that "The
>Communist Party realizes the immensity of its task; it realizes that
>the final struggle of the Communist proletariat will be waged in the
>United States, our conquest of power alone assuring the world Soviet
>Republic. Realizing all this, the Communist Party prepares for the
>struggle. Long Live the Communist International! Long live the World
>Revolution."
>
>* A 1926 memo regarding Soviet subsidies to the American Communist
>movement. Different Soviet agencies subsidized different American
>Communist activities, and sometimes the funds, sent to the United
>States by surreptitious means, were delivered to the wrong recipient.
>In this memo, the head of the American Communist party attempts to
>reconcile who got which subsidies and which transfers were needed to
>ensure that the various activities received what Moscow intended.
>
>* Some documents illustrate the emphasis that the CPUSA placed on
>organizing African Americans. A 1924 letter from the Comintern, for
>example, confirms that it was providing a subsidy of $1,282 to send
>10 black Americans to the "Eastern University," a Comintern school in
>Moscow. Another document is a 15-page report on the party's work in
>Harlem in 1934.
>
>* There is a small collection of the letters of John Reed in the
>CPUSA collection. Reed, a well-known American journalist of the
>1910s, was a founder of the American Communist Party in 1919 and one
>of its early representatives to the Comintern. However, he died of
>typhus in the Soviet Union in 1920. This material is thought to have
>been in his possession at the time of his death and was added to the
>CPUSA collection by Comintern archivists. (Reed was the subject a
>successful 1981 Hollywood film, "Reds," in which Warren Beatty played
>Reed.) Reed reported on the Mexican Revolution, and in a 1915 letter
>in the collection, written from Mexico, he tells his editor in New
>York about his impressions of several of the leading Mexican
>Revolutionary generals: Francisco "Pancho" Villa, Emiliano Zapata,
>and Venustiano Carranza.
>
>* A six-page report discusses Communist attempts to organize
>sharecroppers in the agricultural South in 1934. It includes brief
>sketches of the sharecroppers the party attracted to a "farm school"
>it set up in St. Louis.
>
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