This book focuses on the documents relating to the Uyghur classes that were organised in Moscow between 1925 and 1935, and the presentation of the University of the Workers of the East (KUTV). The book poses and answers three key questions relating to this: why was it deemed necessary to educate classes of Oriental workers, who was in charge of it and how was the pedagogical project developed? By studying the formation and circulation of elites, political elites of a revolution in the making, this book deems the project a failure. In the second part, reconstructed biographies of the KUTV students are presented, covering their living conditions, their ups and downs, their level of education, and their moral and physical conditions. After considering the causes and reasons for the failure of this Comintern enterprise, the book posits that it could have been brilliant if it had succeeded in setting itself up against both Chinese and Soviet control.
Focusing on previously neglected cultural expressions of colonial-period Korean socialism such as Marxist philosophy, Marxist historiography, and travelogues by socialist writers, The Red Decades reveals Marxian socialism as a cultural phenomenon of colonial-age Korea. Providing an account of the social composition of the Communist milieu in 1920s and 1930s Korea and outlining the aims of the colonial-period Communist movement as formulated in programmic documents, this text offers a rich, nuanced description of the microcosm of Korean Communism—a setting of factional alignments, pilgrimages to Moscow, extended stays of the Korean revolutionaries as exiles in China and the Soviet Union, and a polylingual environment with Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian being equally important as the idioms of socialist propagation and international networking. Placing the endeavors of colonial-age Communists within a global historical context allows for dissections of how Korean socialists' ideals interacted with the realities of the conservative turn taking place in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s, as well as considering the implication of Stalinism for Korean revolutionary culture. Yet this analysis also focuses on the individuals involved, especially on their persistent issue of factionalism in the Korean Communist movement and on the role of underground radicalism in shaping the subaltern subjectivities of the participants. The Red Decades discusses the world-historical place of “alternative modernity” that colonial-age socialists of Korea were pursuing. Based on a wealth of Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese primary sources, including the Korea-related parts of the archives of Comintern, an under-utilized resource in Anglophone scholarship. The research also accommodates the achievements of the last decades, from South Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Anglophone and Russophone academic worlds. The breadth of this study situates the philosophical, historiographical, and political practices of Marxism of colonial Korea in the global historical perspective and simultaneously explores the long-lasting influences of the Communist movement in post-1945 North and South Korea.
Who are the people comprising the Communist movement in Eastern Europe? What is their motivation in joining the party? In a comparative analysis of the eight East European Communist parties—Polish, Czech, Magyar, Romanian, Bulgarian, Yugoslav, Greek, and Albanian—R. V. Burks offers precise knowledge about Communism's adherents. The author conducted interviews with repentant Communists held in Greek prisons, with exiled members of the anti-Communist opposition, and with active members of the party; he also made a critical analysis of election returns and of original sources in a dozen languages. The-result is a wealth of specific information on the participants’ age, sex, education, professional training, social class, and ethnic origin. Basing his comparisons and conclusions on this data, Mr. Burks is able to point to some interesting discoveries: social class (at least as Marxism conceives of it) is hardly a factor in drawing these people to Communism, and the industrial worker is not the backbone of the movement. Instead, the effects of cross-cultural education, shifting world prices, and what might he called ethnic politics have directed these people to Communism. Mr. Burks has provided a close analysis of the anatomy of Communism in a crucial part of the world. Originally published in 1961. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Realities of the street-level American Communist experience during the worst years of the Depression "Red Chicago" is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists. Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities in which they lived and the industries where they worked. "A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz"
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
