Communist University of the National Minorities of the West

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The Communist University of National Minorities of the West (KUNMS) , shortened West University ( Russian Коммунистический университет национальных меньшинств Запада имени Мархлевского , transcript . Kommunistitscheski uniwersitet nazionalnych menschinstw Sapada imeni Marchlewskowo ) was a Soviet university for the training of party and state officials for the Western territories the RSFSR , later the USSR and finally also for party cadres of communist parties in many European countries. The university was named posthumously after the Polish communist and its first rector Julian Balthasar Marchlewski . It existed from 1921 to 1936.

organization

From a formal point of view, the KUNMS was an educational institution of the Communist International . In fact, however, it was subordinate to the party apparatus of the CPSU (B) - especially in political and ideological questions . H. ultimately to the party's Politburo and its General Secretary Stalin . Like any other university in the RFSSR (later the Soviet Union), the KUNMS was financed from the state budget. In addition to the headquarters in Moscow, there was a location of the university in Leningrad .

The KUNMS was headed by rectors at the top and heads for the individual national sectors (sections, faculties). Before its dissolution in 1936, there was a Belarusian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Greek, Jewish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Tauride , Moldovan, German, Polish, Romanian, Scandinavian, Finnish and Yugoslav sector. The largest sector was the German. It primarily comprised students from the large national minority of the Volga Germans and other Russian Germans who lived in the western regions of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, a few hundred German emigrants were added.

history

The Communist University of the National Minorities of the West was founded by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Federative Socialist Soviet Republic (RSFSR) on November 28, 1921. The decree was signed by Lenin . According to the decree, it was initially their job to train party workers and state officials from the western areas of the RSFSR. In accordance with Lenin's party doctrine in 1921/22 , according to which the world revolution was imminent, its task was nevertheless broader. From the beginning, the work of the KUNMS was internationally oriented towards the doctrine of protelarial internationalism . That is why the KUNMS's field of activity was not limited to the national minorities of the west of the RFSSR (USSR), but also included important European countries. Germany in particular appeared to be on the verge of a revolutionary overthrow from 1921 to 1923. It is characteristic of this phase in the history of KUNMS that Julian Marchlewski was appointed its first director (rector). As a friend and fellow campaigner of Rosa Luxemburg, he was considered the embodiment of an internationalist, especially since he was a co-founder of the KPD as well as the Polish Communist Party and the Communist International . After Marchlewski's death in 1925, the head of the Jewish sector, Maria Frumkina, became the second (and last) rector of KUNMS.

The later history of the KUNMS was in principle synchronized with the fluctuations in the party history of the CPSU (B). Every power shift in the structure of the Politburo and ultimately the victory of the Stalin faction had an impact on the teaching staff and students of the KUNMS. At the end of the 1920s, the internationalist principle of the KUNMS came increasingly at odds with Stalin's doctrine of building socialism in one country . Although former students like Wolfgang Ruge felt a certain intellectual freedom at the institute, probably nobody could escape the ideology of Stalinism . Nonetheless, lecturers as well as students or graduates of KUNMS came under the NKVD's sights in the course of the Stalinist purges in the party and state apparatus and during the Great Terror from the mid-1930s . In 1936 the KUNMS was dissolved. Most of the former employees or students of the facility were arrested and executed either as "spies" (because often foreigners and emigrants) or " enemies of the people ". On the basis of Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR , foreigners in particular were accused of " espionage " for enemy powers and sentenced accordingly. Not infrequently, there were also administratively ordered expulsions without any judgment by the ordinary courts to the countries of origin from which the exiles had previously emigrated or fled. Some who initially escaped execution were instead sent into exile or ended up in the gulag with prison terms of up to ten years . For example, Maria Frumkina, the former rector of KUNMS, was deported to Karaganda ( Kazakhstan ) and died there. Presumably she was shot in 1941.

Rectors

  • 1921–1925: Julian Balthasar Marchlewski (1866–1925)
  • 1922–1927: Yrjö Sirola (1876–1936) - Vice-Rector of the Leningrad Branch
  • 1925–1936: Maria Jakowlewna Frumkina, b. Malka Lifschitz (1870–1941?)

Lecturers

Students and graduates

See also

literature

  • Julia Köstenberger: The history of the "Communist University of the National Minorities of the West" (KUNMZ) in Moscow 1921-1936. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism 2000/2001. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2001, pp. 248–303.
  • Wolfgang Ruge: Promised Land. My years in Stalin's Soviet Union. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-498-05791-6

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Ruge, p. 461 (list of abbreviations and glossary)
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Ruge, p. 44
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Ruge, p. 43
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Ruge, p. 70 f. and p. 81