International Lenin School

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Situated in Moscow and shrouded in secrecy, the International Lenin School (ILS) was founded in 1926 as an instrument for the "Bolshevisation" of the Communist International (Comintern) and its national sections, following the resolutions of the fifth Congress of the Comintern. Between 1926 and 1938 the school provided up to 3,000 communists with such a training. Most of them were from European and American communist parties, with another Comintern-affiliated institution, the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, catering for the majority of students from colonial countries. The students were taught courses in working-class history, the political economy of imperialism, Marxist theory, and the experience of proletarian dictatorship – consolidated by practical work in a Soviet economic enterprise. In the earlier part of the school’s operation they also became members of the Soviet communist party.

Internationally, Lenin School students can be traced as late as the 1960s and beyond exercising significant responsibilities either as heads of communist governments, like Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, Poland’s Władysław Gomułka and the GDR’s Erich Honecker, or as leaders of significant oppositional parties elsewhere, such as the general secretaries of the French, Greek and South African communist parties, Waldeck Rochet, Nikolaos Zachariadis and Moses Kotane. Other important students of the Lenin School include such figures as Harry Haywood and David Alfaro Siqueiros.