The Communist International
The Communist, or Third, International (COMINTERN) was founded in early 1919 by Lenin as an international revolutionary proletarian party. The COMINTERN consisted of about 70 communist and socialist parties in Europe, Asia, and America. Consequently, it deeply influenced the political life of many countries worldwide. The semi-legal and clandestine activities coordinated by the COMINTERN made this one of the most cloistered societies of recent centuries.

COMINTERN Archives
The COMINTERN archives contain 55 million pages of original documents in almost 90 languages, covering the whole period during which the organization was active, from 1919 till 1943. The archives contain 237,000 files from seven Congresses, thirteen Executive Committee Communist International (ECCI) Plenums, and over 70 communist, socialist, and other international organizations. Hand-written amendments and other personal corrections made by various figureheads of the communist movement make this material even more valuable.

Access to the COMINTERN archives
After Stalin dissolved the COMINTERN in 1943, its archives were transferred to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, and later to the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Classified as top secret, the COMINTERN archives were inaccessible until late 1991, when the archives were opened to the public. Even though the archives were public, they were still difficult to access. Online access to the complete database describing the content of the COMINTERN Archives and instant access to the most relevant documents of this important archive is possible since August 2004

The conversion from a paper-based archive to an electronic archive
At the end of 1992, it was concluded from discussions between the Council of Europe, the International Council on Archives (ICA), the Federal Archival Service of Russia (Rosarchiv) and specialists on the history of COMINTERN that an international project could and should be undertaken for facilitating access to the COMINTERN archives through computer technology. After three years of preparatory work and negotiations, on 6 June 1996, Rosarchiv and ICA signed a Framework Agreement on the implementation of the project, aiming at:

  • o the creation of a comprehensive database describing the 220.000 files of the COMINTERN archives. This database enables researchers to search through the inventory of the archive using state of the art technology. The database is based upon a paper-based description of the inventory consisting of over 20,000 pages. It will be clear that computer searching means a big step forward in terms of access to this inventory. Especially since relevant field have been translated into English and important keywords and names have been standardized.
  • o a collection of digitized images representing 1.000.000 pages of the most frequently used documentary units. The number of pages is approximately 5% of the total number of pages in the COMINTERN archive. The images are linked to the database.

The project has been placed under the supervision of an International Committee for the Computerization of the COMINTERN Archives (abbreviated as INCOMKA) composed of the representatives of the Council of Europe, Rosarchiv, RGASPI, ICA and eight Partner Organizations sponsoring the project: the Federal Archives of Switzerland, the Federal Archives of Germany, the Archives of France, the State Archives of Italy, the Ministry for Education and Culture of Spain, the National Archives of Sweden, the Library of Congress, US, and the Open Society Archives, Budapest.

The project was completed last summer with the official opening of a Reading Room located in RGASPI and equipped with 17 workstations providing access to the electronic information. Using these facilities, researchers at RGASPI can browse through and search in the inventory. The digitized images are immediate available. The Partner Organizations did receive a copy of the digital information on CD’s. This copy will be accessible at their institutions.

The next step: Online access
At the start of the "INCOMKA project" in the mid nineties, CD-ROM was an accepted carrier for digital information. Nowadays, especially in the scholarly community, CD-ROM is already an old-fashioned or even obsolete technology. A similar project starting now would strive for worldwide online access to the digital information.

In this perspective it is quite logical that at the end of the INCOMKA project involved parties considered the possibilities to realize online access to the database and the scanned images. This resulted in the site that you are currently visiting.

Involved organizations
The Comintern Archives are stored in the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow, operating under the supervision of the Federal Archives Bureau of Russia (Rosarchiv).



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