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Announcements
BUILDING THE OLD BOLSHEVIKS: Dave Harker writes: 'After I started a critique of Trotsky on "culture", the logic of my questions about the relationship of Old Bolsheviks and the working class in general (and "proletarian culture" in particular) drove me back to 1917, 1905, 1903, 1882, 1848 and, eventually, 1825, before I started coming forward again. Preparing a first draft of 'Building the Old Bolsheviks, 1882-1905' I have been struck by how little we seem to know about the original working-class pre-Bolshevik Social Democratic and early Bolshevik cadre, or why Lenin had recurrent problems with intelligenty in general, and those interested in the politics of "proletarian" culture in particular. I am therefore trying to find details of any auto/biographies of working-class pre-Bolshevik "proto-Bolsheviks" published in English (or French), at any period. I am not a Russian specialist and would appreciate any suggestions.' Email:
A SUBVERSIVE THIRD: George Barnsby, who many readers will know as a historian of working people in Birmingham and the Black Country, has published a first instalment of autobiography: Subversive: or one third of the autobiography of a communist. This describes George's experiences growing up in London between the wars and serving in the army in India and Burma. Two appendices provide an account of the Furthest East Rhythm Club in the World (George had a passion for jazz as well as politics) and a facsimile of the soliders' paper he produced in 1942, Red Front. It is fifty pages long and costs £3, include p&p, from Dr George Barnsby, 141 Henwood Rd., Wolverhampton WV6 8PJ.
KURT LEWIN: Bill Cooke writes: 'I am researching the influential German-American social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, who died in 1947. Lewin worked for the OSS in the war, but had extensive German-left connections: for example, Karl Korsch was a very close friend and Lewin also appears to have been a friend of Sergei Eisenstein. Lewin travelled in the USSR in the early 1930s, and also had students from the Soviet Union. I have received copies of some FOIA archive material from the FBI which shows that the CIA investigated him in the mid-1950s, but I am anxious to identify whether there is any information about Lewin in Russian or German archives.' Anybody able to assist with contacts, suggestions or information, please contact: Bill Cooke, Manchester School of Management, UMIST, PO Box 88, Manchester UK. Email:
INCOMKA AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: John Earl Haynes writes: 'The International Computerization of the Comintern Archive (Incomka) project has opened up at workstation at the Library of Congress which allows researchers to search and view scanned images of 1,059,354 pages of Communist International records held at the Russian State Archives of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. This is approximately 5% of the total volume of Comintern records. A committee of historians of the Incomka project picked the fond/opisi to be scanned. In addition to digitized scanned images, Incomka includes a digitized comprehensive electronically searchable database of Comintern collections at RGASPI. The database is an edited electronic version of the printed finding aids (which total more than 20,000 pages of archival descriptions) allowing rapid computer searches using file descriptors, key words, and personal or organizational names. The database allows rapid location of file descriptions of all of the files containing more than twenty-million pages of the Communist International records at RGASPI. The Incomka database is searchable in both Cyrillic alphabet Russian and Latin alphabet English. At the Library of Congress the Incomka workstation is located in the European Reading Room. Researchers can make printed copies of documents.' For more information about Incomka contact: John Earl Haynes, in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; email:
