Reference Library
Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto
A complete Korean translation of the programme Marx and Engels wrote for the Communist League, published in London in February 1848. Includes the four chapters, the 1848 preamble, and the three German prefaces of Engels's lifetime (1872, 1883, 1890), with the author's, editor's and translator's notes of the source edition. The translation is the public-domain Korean version from Wikisource.
Read the full text → Guided readingMarx, Value, Price and Profit: A Guided Reading
A guided reading of the address Marx delivered to the General Council of the International in 1865, answering John Weston's claim that wage rises are futile. It follows all fourteen sections in order, taking Weston's two premises apart, building up the theory of value, labour-power and surplus value, and showing why wage struggle is both necessary and insufficient, down to the closing watchword: abolition of the wages system.
Read the full text → Guided readingMarx, Critique of the Gotha Programme: A Guided Reading
A guided reading of the notes Marx wrote on the draft Gotha unity programme in 1875. Each clause is quoted in order, Marx's reply translated, and a beginner's commentary added, covering the undiminished proceeds of labour and the deductions, the two phases of communism, the iron law of wages, state-aided co-operatives, and the free state and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Read the full text → Full translationRosa Luxemburg, The National Question and Autonomy
A Korean translation of the first five essays in Rosa Luxemburg's 1908–1909 series on the national question. It criticizes the self-determination clause in the RSDLP programme and examines the nation-state and the proletariat, federalism and centralization, and the history and conditions of local autonomy. It translates all five essays included in Horace B. Davis's 1976 English collection; the sixth essay, omitted from that collection, is not included. This is an indirect translation through Davis's English version of the Polish original.
Read the full text → Full translationStalin, Marxism and the National Question
A complete Korean translation of the essay Stalin wrote in Vienna in early 1913. It defines the nation by four common features (language, territory, economic life, psychological make-up), criticizes Austro-Marxist cultural-national autonomy and its Bundist and Caucasian followers, and advances self-determination, regional autonomy, minority equality and a single internationalist workers' organization. Translated from the Russian original, with the forty editorial notes of the Moscow English edition.
Read the full text → Full translationLenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
A complete Korean translation of Lenin's 1914 defence of the right of nations to self-determination. Answering Rosa Luxemburg's critique of clause 9 of the programme, it defines self-determination as the right to secede and form an independent national state, examining Norway's secession, the London Congress resolution of 1896, Marx on Ireland and the programme debate of 1903, against the national-liberalism of the Cadets and the Liquidators. Translated from the Russian original with the fifteen original footnotes.
Read the full text → Full translationLenin, The April Theses
A complete translation of the ten theses Lenin read the day after returning from exile in April 1917 and published in Pravda three days later: no support whatever for the Provisional Government; passage from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie, to the second, which must place it in the hands of the proletariat and poorest peasants; a republic of Soviets rather than a parliamentary republic, with the police, standing army and bureaucracy abolished; confiscation of landed estates and nationalisation of the land; the merger of all banks into one national bank; not the 'introduction' of socialism but soviet control of production and distribution; a change of the party's name to Communist and a new International. Lenin's reply to Plekhanov and other opponents follows the theses.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe First Decrees of the October Revolution
Five acts from the regime's first two months: the eight-hour day enacted by telegraph, the workers' control statute that abolished commercial secrecy, the Sovnarkom protocol that created the Cheka, and the marriage and divorce decrees that moved the family from church to state.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThree Documents of the Constituent Assembly Crisis
Lenin's Theses on the Constituent Assembly, the Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People as adopted by the Third Congress of Soviets, and the dissolution decree: one month in which the claim of class organs over national ones passed from theory to programme to accomplished fact.
Read the full text → Primary sourceDecree on the Emergency Powers of the People's Commissar for Food
The decree of 13 May 1918 that established the food dictatorship: compulsory declaration of grain surpluses, the enemy-of-the-people clause with informer rewards, and the Food Commissar's nine emergency powers including the use of armed force.
Read the full text → Full translationThe 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR
Complete Korean translation of the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on July 10, 1918. Opening with the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, its six parts and 90 articles set out the construction of Soviet power around the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, an electoral system weighted toward the working class with the disenfranchisement of exploiters, budgetary law, and the state emblem and flag. Translated from the Russian text as adopted.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Twenty-one Conditions of Admission to the Comintern
A complete Korean translation of the twenty-one conditions of admission set by the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. They require party control of the press, the removal of reformists and centrists, an illegal apparatus alongside the legal one, agitation in the army and countryside, a break with one's own imperialism in the colonies, subordination of parliamentary fractions, democratic centralism, and a change of name to Communist Party, with expulsion for members who reject them in principle. The splits they forced in the socialist parties drew the line between the Second and Third Internationals.
Read the full text → Full translationThe RSFSR-Ukrainian SSR union treaty of 1920
Signed two years before the USSR existed, this treaty has the Russian and Ukrainian republics recognise each other's independence and sovereignty while merging seven people's commissariats: military affairs, the Supreme Economic Council, foreign trade, finance, labour, transport and posts and telegraphs. The merged bodies sit inside the Russian republic's Council of People's Commissars, and Ukraine takes part through the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The declaration of equality and the fact that the joint organs stand in one capital are in the same document, which is what the 1922 'autonomisation' argument was about. Signed by Lenin, Chicherin and Rakovsky.
Read the full text → Primary sourceTwo Documents of Kronstadt 1921
The rising's programme and the party's answer: the fifteen-point resolution of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol crews, and the Tenth Congress resolution On Party Unity, secret point 7 included, which made Kronstadt the case for banning factions.
Read the full text → Full translationLenin, The Tax in Kind
The full Korean translation of the pamphlet Lenin wrote in April 1921 to explain the turn to the New Economic Policy. It divides the Russian economy into five forms, from patriarchal peasant farming to socialism, and argues that where small commodity production predominates state capitalism must be measured against the small-proprietor element rather than against socialism, and is a step forward by that measure.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Church Valuables Decree and Lenin's Shuya Letter
The public decree of 23 February 1922 ordering the confiscation of church valuables for famine relief, and the top-secret letter Lenin circulated to the Politburo after the bloodshed at Shuya: the public face of the operation and its inside, first published only in 1990.
Read the full text → Full translationLenin, 'On the Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation'
The note Lenin dictated from his sickbed in the week the USSR was founded. He calls the 'autonomisation' plan, which would have folded the Soviet republics into the Russian one as autonomous units, a case of administrative haste, and argues that internationalism from a member of an oppressor nation cannot stop at formal equality. He asks for Ordzhonikidze to be punished as an example over the violence in Georgia and for Dzerzhinsky's inquiry to be reopened, and proposes keeping the union for defence and foreign affairs while returning the other commissariats to the republics.
Read the full text → Full translationThe Declaration of the 46
Complete Korean translation of the statement submitted in secret to the Politburo of the RCP(b) Central Committee by forty-six party officials on 15 October 1923. It diagnoses the economic and financial crisis produced by unplanned leadership, argues that the regime of "factional dictatorship" formed after the Tenth Congress has split the party into a secretarial hierarchy and a laity, and demands a conference including comrades who differ with the majority. The reservations added by twelve signatories are translated with it.
Read the full text → Full translationThe 1924 Constitution of the USSR
A complete Korean translation of the first Soviet constitution, adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR on 31 January 1924. It binds the December 1922 Declaration and Treaty on the formation of the USSR into one basic law, defining in eleven chapters and seventy-two articles the powers of the Congress of Soviets, the two chambers of the Central Executive Committee (Soviet of the Union and Soviet of Nationalities), the Council of People's Commissars and the all-union commissariats, the Supreme Court and the OGPU. The reservation of republican sovereignty and the right of free secession are written down here for the first time. Translated from the Russian text as adopted.
Read the full text → Full translationStalin, 'Grain Procurements and the Prospects for Agricultural Development'
Stalin's remarks to local officials during his January 1928 tour of Siberia at the height of the grain procurement crisis. He orders Article 107 of the criminal code used against kulaks holding grain back for a better price, demands that prosecutors and judges unwilling to do so be replaced, and then argues that small individual peasant farming cannot carry the country, setting collective and state farms as the immediate task. The turn from buying grain on NEP's market terms to taking it by administrative force is visible inside a single document.
Read the full text → Full translationBukharin, 'Notes of an Economist'
The Right Opposition's direct answer, printed in Pravda on 30 September 1928. Without once naming Stalin, Bukharin works through the growth rates of industrial capital investment, the building-materials balance and the metals allocation tables to show that the plan contradicts its own control figures, that a tempo its raw materials cannot follow will stall industry itself, and that the grain crisis came from a broken balance between industry and agriculture rather than from kulak resistance. Complete text with its five statistical tables.
Read the full text → Full translationStalin, 'A Year of Great Change'
Printed in Pravda for the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, this is how the 1928 argument ended, in the winner's own words. Stalin tallies the year under labour productivity, industrial construction and agriculture; the third is the point. His claim that the middle peasant, not just the poor one, had come into the collective farms village by village becomes wholesale collectivisation two months later. The question of tempo Bukharin had raised is answered with results rather than argument.
Read the full text → Primary sourceOn the Tempo of Collectivization and State Assistance to Collective-Farm Construction
The Central Committee decision of 5 January 1930 that set the timetable of wholesale collectivization and formalized the passage to the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.
Read the full text → Primary sourceTwo Decrees of the 1932 Grain Procurements
The 'law of three ears of grain' of 7 August 1932 and the secret decision of 14 December that combined procurement deadlines and capital punishment with the deportation of a Cossack stanitsa and the reversal of Ukrainization in the North Caucasus: two core sources of the Holodomor debate.
Read the full text → Primary sourceDimitrov's Report to the Seventh Comintern Congress: The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International
Full text of the keynote report and closing speech of the Seventh Comintern Congress, August 1935: the Dimitrov definition of fascism and the turn to the united and popular fronts.
Read the full text → Full translationTwo lines on the Spanish Civil War: six documents, 1936-1937
The split inside the Republic over whether the war or the revolution came first, read in documents of the time: the telegrams Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party exchanged on 16 October 1936, two speeches in which the party's general secretary Jose Diaz argued for a regular army and set out what winning the war required, and two 1937 pieces by Trotsky attacking that line.
Read the full text → Full translationThe 1936 Constitution of the USSR
Complete Korean translation of the 1936 Soviet Constitution (the "Stalin Constitution"), adopted by the Extraordinary 8th Congress of Soviets on December 5, 1936. Its 13 chapters and 146 articles define the social and state structure, organs of power, citizens' rights and duties, and the electoral system. Translated from the English text incorporating amendments through the 8th session of the Supreme Soviet (Stalin, Works, Vol. 14).
Read the full text → Primary sourceThree Yezhov Documents of 1937
Korean translation of three documents issued under Yezhov's name during the Great Terror: the stenographic record of his report to the February-March 1937 Central Committee plenum, the NKVD secret letter on the “Polish Military Organization” that underpinned the Polish operation, and an excerpt from his special report to Stalin tallying the arrests of churchmen and sectarians. The operational orders circulated alongside it are collected in a separate document.
Read the full text → Primary sourceNKVD Operational Orders
Full Korean translation of eight NKVD operational orders and directives of 1937-38, in order of issue. Nos. 00439 (German), 00485 (Polish), 00593 (Harbin returnees), 49990 (Latvian) and 50215 (Greek) opened the national operations; No. 00447 launched the mass operation with per-republic execution and camp quotas; No. 00486 governed the wives and children of the convicted; No. 00606 set up the special troikas that judged the resulting cases. The quota figures are carried over from the source unchanged.
Read the full text → Full translationStalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Complete Korean translation of Stalin's September 1938 essay, published as Chapter 4, Section 2 of the Short Course history of the CPSU(B). It sets out four features of the Marxist dialectical method and three of philosophical materialism, then systematizes historical materialism around the mode of production. The text became the standard philosophical primer of the Soviet era.
Read the full text → Primary sourceOn Arrests, Procuratorial Supervision and the Conduct of Investigations
The secret resolution of 17 November 1938 that ended the mass operations of the Great Terror, banning mass arrests and abolishing the troikas while blaming the excesses on enemies who had crept into the NKVD itself.
Read the full text → Primary sourceFrinovsky's Statement to Beria (April 11, 1939)
Full text of the confession statement that Frinovsky, First Deputy People's Commissar of the NKVD, submitted to Beria after his arrest: the doctoring of interrogation records, rehearsed confrontations, and the conduct of the mass operations, described by their executor. Stalin's marginal notes are included as source-editor annotations.
Read the full text → Primary sourceInterrogations of Nikolai Yezhov (1939-1940)
Korean translation of Grover Furr's compilation of every published text from the Yezhov investigation, April 1939 to February 1940: interrogation records, confessions and confrontations, with Furr's editorial notes, Pavlyukov's summaries, the full April 26 and August 4 protocols, the last words at trial with textual apparatus, and the 1998 rehabilitation review, all in one document. Frinovsky's statement is a separate document.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its Secret Protocol
A complete translation of the non-aggression treaty signed in Moscow by Molotov and Ribbentrop on 23 August 1939 together with the secret additional protocol signed the same day. The treaty was published the next day and ratified by both parliaments; the protocol divided the Baltic region, Poland and Bessarabia into the two states' spheres of interest. The USSR denied the protocol's existence until 1989, when it acknowledged it and declared it void from the moment of signature; the surviving copy was published in 1990.
Read the full text → Primary sourceDaladier's Declaration to Parliament, 2 September 1939
Full Korean translation of the declaration read by Premier Daladier to the Chamber of Deputies the day after Germany invaded Poland, justifying French entry into the war, with the parliamentary applause markings of the Journal officiel.
Read the full text → Primary sourceConstitutional Law of 10 July 1940
The single-article law by which the National Assembly, 569 to 80, handed Pétain full constituent powers and ended the Third Republic; declared void ab initio by the ordinance of 9 August 1944.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Tripartite Pact
Full text of the Berlin pact of 27 September 1940 by which Germany, Italy and Japan recognized each other's 'new orders' and promised mutual assistance against attack by a power not yet in the war.
Read the full text → Primary sourceLaw of 3 October 1940 on the Status of Jews
Full text of Vichy's first antisemitic statute, enacted without German demand: the racial definition by grandparents, the exclusions from public office, the army, the judiciary, the press and cinema, and the list of signatories.
Read the full text → Primary sourceDirective No. 21: Case Barbarossa
Full text of the top-secret directive of 18 December 1940 ordering the Wehrmacht to prepare to crush the Soviet Union even before the war with England was over, translated from the Nuremberg trial version.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and the 1945 Declaration of War
The neutrality pact of April 1941 in full, and the statement Molotov handed the Japanese ambassador on 8 August 1945 declaring war from the next day: the treaty and its end in one document.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Hull Note
Full text of the 'Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement' handed to Japan eleven days before Pearl Harbor: the oral statement and the ten-point plan demanding full withdrawal from China and Indochina.
Read the full text → Primary sourceTwo White House Memoranda of the Molotov Conversations
Samuel Cross's memoranda of the White House conferences of 30 May and 1 June 1942: Molotov's blunt question about drawing off forty German divisions, Roosevelt's authorization to expect a second front that year, and the shipping bargain behind the promise.
Read the full text → Primary sourceMilitary Conclusions of the Tehran Conference
The five-point agreement signed by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill: Overlord in May 1944 with a southern France landing, a simultaneous Soviet offensive, a concerted deception plan, and support for the Yugoslav Partisans.
Read the full text → Primary sourceLes Jours Heureux: the CNR Programme
Full text of the common programme adopted unanimously by the National Council of the Resistance on 15 March 1944: the plan of immediate action against the occupier and the post-liberation measures of nationalization, social security and labour rights.
Read the full text → Primary sourceEisenhower's Two D-Day Documents
The Order of the Day distributed to the invasion force on 6 June, and the sixty-six-word in-case-of-failure note drafted on 5 June, placing the rhetoric of victory beside the sentence that takes sole blame.
Read the full text → Primary sourceOrdinance of 9 August 1944 on the Restoration of Republican Legality
The founding text of liberated France: 'in law, the Republic has never ceased to exist.' All eleven articles, voiding Vichy's constitutional acts while managing administrative continuity.
Read the full text → Full translationDeclaration on Liberated Europe (Yalta, 1945)
Two sections of the Crimean (Yalta) conference communiqué of 11 February 1945. The declaration states the right of liberated European peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live, and promises broadly based interim governments and free elections at the earliest possible date; the section after it pledges to carry the wartime unity of the three powers into peacetime. These are the sentences the long argument over whether Yalta handed away Eastern Europe turns on.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Potsdam Declaration
The thirteen-paragraph proclamation defining the terms for Japan's surrender: removal of the militarists, occupation, limitation of sovereignty, punishment of war criminals, revival of democracy, and the demand for unconditional surrender.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance
The treaty of friendship and alliance signed in Moscow the day before Japan's surrender announcement, the frame in which China accepted the Yalta Far Eastern terms; superseded by the 1950 treaty with the People's Republic.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Japanese Instrument of Surrender
Full text of the instrument signed aboard the Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945: the unconditional surrender of all Japanese forces, the subordination of the Emperor's and the government's authority to the Supreme Commander, and the twelve signatories.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Cominform Resolution on the Situation in the CPY
The full text of the resolution of 28 June 1948 that formalized the Tito-Stalin split: eight articles of indictment and a closing appeal to the 'healthy forces' of the Yugoslav party to replace their leaders.
Read the full text → Full translationThe USSR amnesty decree of 27 March 1953
The first amnesty after Stalin's death, three weeks later. It released prisoners serving up to five years, those convicted of official, economic and military offences regardless of term, women with small children, minors and the elderly, and halved sentences over five years; more than a million people left the camps. Article 7 explicitly excludes those serving more than five years for counter-revolutionary crimes: the criminal prisoners left and the political ones stayed, and the Norilsk and Vorkuta strikes that summer happened in the camps that remained.
Read the full text → Primary sourceThe Warsaw Treaty
The full text of the eight-nation treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance: the Article 4 mutual-assistance clause mirroring NATO's Article 5, the Joint Command and Political Consultative Committee, and Article 11's promise to dissolve into an all-European security treaty.
Read the full text → Primary sourceKhrushchev's Secret Speech, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
A complete Korean translation of the report Khrushchev delivered to the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU on 25 February 1956. Beginning with Lenin's proposal in his Letter to the Congress to remove Stalin, it moves through the mass repression that followed Kirov's murder, the execution of most of the Central Committee elected in 1934, confessions obtained by torture, the misjudgements of the first months of the war, the deportation of whole nationalities, the break with Yugoslavia, the Leningrad Affair and the Doctors' Plot, and the making of the cult itself. At its centre are the prison letters of Eikhe, Rudzutak and Kedrov, read out from the rostrum. Translated from the 1989 publication in the CPSU Central Committee Bulletin, with that edition's sixty-six editorial notes rendered as a separate section.
Read the full text → Full translationThe Nine Commentaries on the Open Letter of the CPSU Central Committee
The nine commentaries the Chinese party published between September 1963 and July 1964, answering the Soviet open letter: from the assessment of Stalin and peaceful coexistence to the class character of Soviet society itself.
Read the full text → Full translationThe 1977 Constitution of the USSR
Complete Korean translation of the Soviet Constitution adopted at an extraordinary session of the USSR Supreme Soviet on October 7, 1977 (the "Brezhnev Constitution"). A preamble proclaiming developed socialist society is followed by 174 articles in nine parts and 21 chapters covering the social system, citizens' rights and duties, the national-state structure, the Soviets of People's Deputies, the highest organs of state, justice and the procuracy, and state symbols; Article 6 enshrines the CPSU as the leading and guiding force of society. Translated from the Russian text as adopted in 1977.
Read the full text → Full translationGorbachev's Address to the UN General Assembly (1988)
A full translation of Gorbachev's address to the UN General Assembly on 7 December 1988: the summa of the New Thinking, from the primacy of universal human values to freedom of choice and de-ideologization, and the announcement of a unilateral cut of 500,000 troops that became a milestone of the Cold War's end. Translated from the English of the UN provisional verbatim record (A/43/PV.72).
Read the full text → Full translationAleksei Pavlyukov, Yezhov: A Biography
The full Korean translation of Aleksei Pavlyukov's biography Yezhov (2007), covering Yezhov's childhood and imperial army service, his rise in the party's personnel apparatus, his years as NKVD chief, and his fall and execution.
Read the full text → Translated monographNaumov, The "Bloody Dwarf" against the Leader of the Peoples: The Yezhov Conspiracy
A complete Korean translation of Leonid Naumov's 2009 study. It reconstructs the regional variation of the Great Terror of 1937-1938 from the operational statistics, examines the party's control over Yezhov's NKVD, and traces Yevdokimov's "North Caucasus" Chekist network. Appendices include letters of Yevdokimov and Yagoda, Sholokhov's letter to Stalin, and Frinovsky's 1939 statement to Beria.
Read the full text → Translated monographNaumov, Stalin and the NKVD
A complete Korean translation of Leonid Naumov's 2013 study of the relationship between the party and the security organs across the Stalin era: the formation of the "honorary Chekist" cohort, the Great Terror, the halt of 1938 and Beria's rise, the postwar reorganizations, and the denouement of 1953, including the Doctors' Plot and the fall of Beria.
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