Reference Library
Stalin, 'The Foundations of Leninism' (1924)
Stalin's lectures at Sverdlov University, serialised in Pravda three months after Lenin's death. Defining Leninism as 'Marxism of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution', it systematises Lenin's thought in nine chapters — historical roots, method, theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasant question, the national question, strategy and tactics, the party, style of work. The first textbook that turned Lenin's writings into an '-ism', and the document by which Stalin, in the middle of the succession struggle, claimed the authority to interpret Lenin. The Works text (revised after December 1924), with the editors' notes.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, 'The Results of the Work of the Fourteenth Conference of the RCP(B)' (1925)
Stalin's report to Moscow party activists just after the Fourteenth Party Conference had for the first time adopted 'socialism in one country' as a resolution. It covers the 'two stabilisations', the tasks of communist parties in capitalist and colonial countries, rural policy and the metal industry, but its core is the fourth section, which separates the 'complete victory' of socialism (possible by one country's own forces) from its 'final victory' (requiring revolution in several countries) — the formula that became the basic proposition of Soviet ideology.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, Political Report of the Central Committee to the 14th Party Congress, with the Reply to the Discussion
Two documents from the 14th Party Congress of December 1925, the first at which the post-Lenin leadership split openly on the congress floor. Stalin's political report for the Central Committee covers the international situation (the 'temporary stabilisation' of capitalism, Locarno, the Dawes Plan), the domestic situation (industrialisation, stratification in the countryside, the argument over state capitalism under NEP) and the state of the party; his reply five days later answers Zinoviev, Kamenev and Sokolnikov of the 'New Opposition' by name. The starting point of the fight over socialism in one country and peasant policy.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesBukharin, 'On the Character of Our Revolution and the Possibility of Victorious Socialist Construction in the USSR' (1926)
Bukharin's pamphlet, written after the defeat of the New Opposition, giving the possibility of building socialism in one country its theoretical grounding: the character of the Russian revolution, the 'maturity' of world capitalism, the theory of state capitalism, the passage from restoration to reconstruction, and the sources of socialist accumulation. Maslov, Sukhanov, Bogdanov, Kautsky and Trotsky are placed in a single Menshevik lineage as variations on 'Russia is not ripe for socialism'. The theoretical counterpart of Stalin's 1925 formula and the starting point of the 1928 'Notes of an Economist'.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesTwo Documents of the United Opposition: the 'Declaration of the Thirteen' (1926) and the 'Platform of the Bolshevik-Leninists (Opposition)' (1927)
The declaration that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krupskaya and nine others submitted to the joint plenum of July 1926 — defining party bureaucratism as the source of factionalism and summarising the Opposition's positions on wages, industrialisation, the countryside and the Comintern in twelve sections — with the supplementary statement against Zinoviev's removal from the Politburo; and the twelve-chapter draft Platform submitted before the Fifteenth Congress in September 1927 (the condition of the workers, the growth of the kulak, the pace of industrialisation, the bureaucratisation of the soviets, the party regime, the danger of war, the defeat of the Chinese revolution). The banned Platform became the ground for expelling the Opposition.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, '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 → Writings & speechesBukharin, '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 → Party & government documentsThree Documents of the Fascist Grand Council (1928–1943)
The law of 9 December 1928 that made the Fascist Grand Council a state organ, 'the supreme body coordinating and integrating all activities of the regime'; the Grandi resolution the Council carried 19 to 8 on the night of 24–25 July 1943, the trigger of Mussolini's fall; and the armistice proclamation Badoglio read over the radio on the evening of 8 September. Three documents of a regime undone by the institution it had built.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesStalin, '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 → Party & government documentsOn 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 → Party & government documentsHolodomor Documents: two letters, two decrees, two decisions (1932–1933)
The two letters of June 1932 in which Chubar and Petrovsky told Stalin and Molotov of hunger in the Ukrainian countryside; the 'law of three ears of grain' of 7 August, the Ukrainian Politburo resolution of 18 November that codified fines in kind and the 'black board' system, and the secret procurement decision of 14 December; and the Politburo decision of 1 January 1933 applying that law to anyone still hiding grain. Six documents, from warning to decision, on the road to the Holodomor, in chronological order.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesZhdanov, Soviet Literature: The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature
A complete translation of the speech Zhdanov delivered in the name of the Central Committee and Sovnarkom on the opening day of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 17 August 1934. The official definition of socialist realism (truthful depiction of reality in its revolutionary development, combined with the ideological remolding and education of the toilers), the exegesis of Stalin's phrase 'engineers of human souls', and the doctrine of revolutionary romanticism were all formulated here, and the congress wrote the method into the Writers' Union charter. A decade later this aesthetic program became the theoretical yardstick of the Zhdanovshchina. Translated from the 1935 English edition, with the key formulations checked against the Russian original.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesDimitrov'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 → Party & government documentsThe Programme of the Rassemblement Populaire
The full January 1936 common programme of the French Popular Front that produced the 'bread, peace, liberty' election: dissolution of the fascist leagues, press reform, collective security and nationalization of war industries, the shorter week, the Wheat Office, and making the Bank of France the bank of France.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesTwo 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 → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 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 → Intelligence & investigation recordsThree 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 → Constitutions, laws & ordersNKVD 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 → Writings & speechesStalin, 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 → Constitutions, laws & ordersPeople's Commissar of Defence Order No. 0040 on the Lake Khasan events (1938)
Voroshilov's secret order of 4 September 1938, three weeks after the fighting at Lake Khasan. Behind a battle recorded as a victory it itemises the unreadiness of the Far Eastern troops, lays the blame on Marshal Blyukher in the language of 'defeatism' and 'sabotage', and dissolves the Far Eastern Front into two Separate Red Banner Armies under Shtern and Konev. Blyukher was arrested soon after and died under interrogation.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsOn 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 → Intelligence & investigation recordsFrinovsky'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 → Intelligence & investigation recordsInterrogations 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 → Treaties & agreementsThe Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, its Secret Protocol, and the 1989 assessment
The non-aggression treaty signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop on 23 August 1939 and the secret additional protocol of the same day that divided the Baltic region, Poland and Bessarabia into 'spheres of interest' — together with Resolution 979-1 of 24 December 1989, in which the Congress of People's Deputies first officially acknowledged the protocol's existence and declared it 'legally void from the moment of signing'.
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