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LC Press Release
January 18, 2000
Contact: Helen Dalrymple (202) 707-1940
Public Affairs Public Contact: (202) 707-5387
Office
101 Independence Library of Congress Opens to Researchers the
Avenue SE Records of the Communist Party, USA
Washington DC Microfilm Includes 435,165 Frames on 326 Reels
20540-1610
tel (202) 707-2905 The Library of Congress has opened for research
fax (202) 707-9199 copies of the records of the Communist Party, USA
e-mail pao@loc.gov (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>
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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