International Lenin School
The International Lenin School was a Comintern training center in Moscow for 12 years and, after the Second World War, until 1990 an offer from the CPSU for young communists from all over the world.
The school was founded in 1926 and existed in the Comintern form until 1938. At that time, around 3500 communists from 60 countries were ideologically formed and sent to the school by their communist home parties. Most of the Lenin students (around 400) came from Germany at the time.
The school was initially headed by Nikolai Bukharin , after his exclusion from the party by Klawdija Kirsanowa . Wilhelm Pieck directed the Lenin School from January to May 1932 .
Well-known graduates of the Comintern School
Some graduates of the Lenin School later held leading positions in communist governments, such as Nikolaos Zachariadis in Greece, Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, Władysław Gomułka in Poland or Erich Honecker , Erich Mielke , Elli Schmidt and Heinz Hoffmann in the GDR .
Lenin School after 1956
A secret school of the same name was set up by the CPSU in the late 1950s. It was a boarding school on the outskirts of downtown Moscow and offered years of training to Communists from Europe and especially from Latin America. People working illegally also spent transition periods there. All students were bound to strict secrecy. There, men and women between the ages of 20 and over 50 learned exclusively from capitalist or dictatorial countries, without the involvement of socialist states, including party leaders. Normal was an academic year dealing with Marxism-Leninism , strategy and tactics, and the history of the labor movement; the peculiarities of the country of origin were included. All events were translated simultaneously. At the end of the 1970s, heated debates and quarrels took place on site with the delegates from there, in contrast to the politics of the "revisionist" KPI and the reformed KPF . The lecturers were co-opted from Moscow's Lomonosov University and the party cadre. Jan Vogeler was one of the better-known professors ("teachers") . "Comrades" from West Berlin received two-month training courses. The school was abandoned in the late 1980s under Gorbachev . After the collapse of the Soviet Union , the facility was first given to the Gorbachev Foundation and then transferred to the Finance University of the Government of the Russian Federation .
See also
literature
- Julia Köstenberger: The International Lenin School (1926–1938). In: Michael Buckmiller , Klaus Meschkat (Hrsg.): Biographical manual for the history of the Communist International: A German-Russian research project. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-05-004158-2 , pp. 287-309.
- Julia Köstenberger: The cadre school of Stalinism. The international Lenin School in Moscow (1926–1938) and the Austrian Lenin students. Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-643-50666-5 . (Vienna Studies in Contemporary History, 8)