The documents reproduced come from the Russian Centre for the Preservationand Study of Documents of Most Recent History (RTsKhIDNI), known until 1991 asthe Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Until August 1991this Institute was under the control of the Central Committee of the Communist Partyand was a research centre for Party members. Its archives, whose holdings were untilrecently restricted to the Institute's staff and highly placed members of the SovietCommunist Party, contain material on people active in the world Communist movement fromits beginnings to 1952.

The Russian material in these archives comes from several sources. The core of thecollection came from the archives of ISTPART, the Department for the History of theParty formed in 1918 by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party(Bolsheviks). The ISTPART collection was supplemented by the personal archives ofleading figures of the Russian Revolution, some donated, some confiscated, sometransferred from local archives and from the current archive of the Central Committee.

Axelrod (1850-1928) 33 microfiche
Kalinin (1875-1946) Microfilm 220 reels
Kirov (1886-1934) Microfilm 45 reels
Martov (1873-1923) 34 microfiche
Molotov (1890-1986) 111 microfiche
Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937) Microfilm 121 reels
Trotsky (1879-1940) 1,129 microfiche
Zasulich (1849-1919) 34 microfiche
Zhdanov (1896-1948) Microfilm 35 reels and 517 microfiche

Published in association with the State Archival Service of Russia (Rosarkhiv)