Kommunist

Formation as a party organ

Kommunist was the theoretical and political journal of the CPSU Central Committee, published from 1924 to 1991. It began in April 1924 as Bolshevik, whose editorial board was approved with Bukharin, Vardin and Kamenev and which appeared once every two weeks. It covered Marxist-Leninist theory, the history of the international communist movement and the building of communist society in the USSR, and carried articles on philosophy, economics, literature and art. A negative assessment in Bolshevik did not always end a scholar's career: in 1945 a study by Yevgeny Tarle was criticized in its pages and he still kept a high position in Soviet science.

Renaming in 1952 and the journal's later work

After the 19th Party Congress renamed the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the journal was renamed Kommunist in November 1952. From then it appeared every 20 days in a print run of 600,000 copies. On 16 April 1974 a decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet awarded it the Order of Lenin for its active part in the party's ideological and theoretical life and for promoting Marxism-Leninism and the domestic and foreign policy of the party and the Soviet state. Issue No. 2 of 1982 carried a sharp attack on the writer Vladimir Soloukhin, accusing him of "flirting with dear God"; the campaign against the "religious-mystical views" of the party member Soloukhin led to a special July 1982 CPSU Central Committee decision on literature aimed at patriotic writers.

Three journals under the Kommunist title

The title Kommunist was used by two earlier publications. The 1915 Geneva emigre journal Kommunist was where Lenin argued over national self-determination with Bukharin and Pyatakov. In 1918 the Left Communists, who opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace, used the same title for their organ. The Left Communists were an intra-party opposition inside the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) formed in January 1918, which took its name from the fight against the Brest peace, which it regarded as fundamentally unacceptable with "imperialist" states. They argued that the revolution had to be exported to other countries at once or the socialist revolution in Russia would perish, and in domestic policy they demanded the complete abolition of banks, a forced abolition of money, decentralization of state and economic administration, and an end to employing "bourgeois" specialists.

Korean context

The Korean title 코무니스트 denotes this CPSU journal. Party publications in Korea, such as the Korean Workers' Party organ Rodong Sinmun and its theoretical journal Kulloja, belong to a different lineage; their bibliographic history requires separate checking.