International Lenin School

Founding and purpose

The International Lenin School was a cadre institute established in line with the resolutions of the Comintern's Fifth World Congress of 1924. Its purpose was to raise the qualifications of leading Party workers by combining general Marxist-Leninist theory with direct study of the organisational and political experience of the Russian Communist Party and of communist parties in capitalist and colonial countries. The intensive one-year course included economics and history, Marxist theory, and the strategy and tactics of the world communist movement. Its teachers were leading Comintern and Soviet intellectuals; its first director was Nikolai Bukharin, followed by Béla Kun, and students were hand-picked by the various communist parties.

The opening date is recorded in two ways. Russian Wikipedia places the school's operation from September 1925 to May 1938, while English Wikipedia dates its founding to 1926 and its first class to May 1926. Either way it was a product of the Bolshevisation line of the mid-1920s.

Teaching and curriculum

The first class began instruction in May 1926 with 70 students from around the world. The variety of languages spoken was a major difficulty requiring extensive use of interpreters; four languages were used: Russian, German, English and French. First-year courses included political economy, the history of the Russian Communist Party, the history of the world labour movement, party construction and the Russian language, taught largely through intensive directed reading followed by individual discussion with lecturers. To make contact with the Soviet working class, the inaugural class was divided into groups of three to five and sent to perform manual labour at the Orekhovo-Zuyevo textile mill and the Kolomna locomotive and railcar works, about eight hours a week.

According to the graduate Joseph Zack Kornfeder, courses covered economics, philosophy, politics, trade union organisation, party organisation, military organisation and the agrarian problem, with particular attention to the history of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), including its policies, organisational structure and procedures. Each semester students had to write a paper of their own choosing to demonstrate mastery of the subject; successful students were sent home to take executive or editorial posts or were placed in the Comintern's service in other countries.

Scale and composition

Between May 1926 and its termination in mid-1938 the school provided academic, practical and ideological training to some 3,500 communist students from 59 countries. The great majority came from Europe and North America; the Communist University of the Toilers of the East catered to most students from colonial countries.

The largest contingents came from Germany (370), followed by Czechoslovakia (320), with France, Poland, Italy, the United States and China each supplying between 200 and 225, Austria about 180, Great Britain about 150, and Spain and Finland about 135 each. Other countries sending more than 60 students included the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Ireland and Canada. Instruction was delivered by exiled veteran communists living in Moscow, notably exiles from Germany, Italy and Hungary, together with Russian instructors. From 1925 to 1938 the school occupied a building at 25a Vorovsky Street (now Povarskaya Street) in Moscow.

Closure and afterlife

After the closure, the Comintern ran a cadre school camouflaged as an agricultural school at Kushnarenkovo in the Bashkir ASSR from 1941 to 1943. After the Second World War the name revived as a semi-clandestine institution under the International Department of the CPSU, lasting until the dissolution of the USSR. Also called the Institute of Social Sciences, it occupied a purpose-built complex at 49 Leningradsky Prospekt with lecture halls, cinemas, a library, shops, restaurants and residences; because many students belonged to parties that were then illegal, they often used pseudonyms for security. After the end of the Soviet Union the premises were given to the Gorbachev Foundation for a time and later transferred to a Financial University.

Graduates and political significance

Graduates can be traced exercising significant responsibilities as late as the 1960s and beyond: heads of communist governments such as Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, Poland's Bolesław Bierut and Władysław Gomułka, and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, and leaders of significant oppositional parties such as Ho Chi Minh and the general secretaries of the United States, French, Greek, Irish and South African communist parties, Gus Hall, Waldeck Rochet, Nikolaos Zachariadis, Ernő Gerő, Sean Murray and Moses Kotane. Harry Haywood, James Larkin Jr, Carolina Loff, Lina Ódena, Markus Wolf, David Alfaro Siqueiros and the future Prague Spring leader Alexander Dubček also studied there.

Korean Wikipedia adds that Korean communists including Pak Hon-yong and Kim Tan-ya studied at the school.

The International Lenin School was the Comintern's central school for political cadres, uniting theory with underground practical technique. Its students were trained to fight imperialism and colonial rule, and returning home they formed the leadership of their movements; the school also served as the channel through which communist parties produced cadres loyal to the centre's line, a lineage that continued after the Second World War in the Institute of Social Sciences.