The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 5
Section I
Preserve for all time? Archival Problems – New Archival
Projects – Institutions and Funds
John Haynes, Washington:
170 000 Names for the INCOMKA Database of the Comintern Archives 1 . The
Result of International Cooperation
One hundred and sixty-seven scholars from fifty-four nations have contributed their time and
knowledge to improving the accuracy of a new electronically searchable database for the
archive of the Communist International. The opening, in the early 1990s, of the archives of
the Communist International made available to scholars around the world a tremendously
rich resource. The twenty-million pages of Comintern records, located at the Russian State
Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow, provided documentation on the
history of political, trade union, and left-wing cultural activities in scores of nations where the
Comintern and affiliated communist parties or »sympathizing organizations« operated during
the period from 1919 to 1943. The great size of the Communist International archive,
however, slowed exploration of this valuable source of original documentation. Even the
finding aids (opisi) prepared by RGASPI archivists totaled more than twenty-thousand pages
of description of the Comintern’s records. Scholars, whose principal interest was in the
politics of a particular country, also found the Russian language of the RGASPI finding aids a
barrier as was the difficulty in traveling to Moscow.
1 INCOMKA – International Committee for the Computerization of the Comintern Archives