"Unswerving loyalty": Moscow and the Communist Party of Australia, 1920-40.

THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL (Comintern) was intended by its founders to be the world party of socialist revolution. It was formed in 1919 and dissolved by Stalin in 1943. Its sections, the communist parties of many countries around the world, were authorised as "communist" by the Comintern, and in return for this recognition (the authority it bestowed upon them, and the subsidies from Moscow it usually entailed) they proclaimed their support for, and attempted to implement, the various decisions made by the Comintern's congresses and Executive Committee.

The Comintern was both keenly aware of its "world-historical" role, and bureaucratic in its structure and habits. Consequently, it collected and filed extensive records. These were stored in an archive that by 1999 had come to be called the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI). In recent years, RGASPI has been co-operating with scholars, libraries and publishing houses around the world to disseminate much of this material. Among the major products of this initiative so far have been a number of volumes in the series "Annals of Communism", published by Yale University Press, and the deposit of the very extensive archive of the Communist Party of the USA in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, which was opened to the public in 2000. The opening of the RGASPI archives has led to better-informed studies of the American Communist Party, the British Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s, and the relationship between Dimitrov, last Secretary of the Comintern, and Stalin.

The Comintern Archive at the Australian Defence Force Academy Library (CAAL) is part of this effort to make the Comintern archives accessible. It contains around 18,000 pages of documents on microfilm recording the official links between the Comintern and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) spanning the years 1920 to 1940, from which Dr Kevin Windle and I have selected for publication eighty-five documents in a forthcoming book entitled Our Unswerving Loyalty.

The Comintern's archives are organised in a series of collections and stored in folders, with individual designations based on a triple classification of fond, opis, and delo. Many of the documents are in English, with Russian (and other) translations. Many deal with routine matters, or are drafts of documents finally (and sometimes publicly) proclaimed. Some documents are repeated. Some documents are designated "Secret", "Most Secret", or "Confidential", though it is not easy to see in all cases why such a designation was made. The coverage can also be patchy. In general, records in CAAL from the earlier period (especially the 1920s) are fuller than those from the 1930s; towards the end of the 1930s the documentary record becomes scant. If this is the case with the materials dealing with Australia, it is also the case with the CPUSA archives in Washington. CAAL nevertheless provides a new avenue to explore the early history of the CPA (and not just its relations with Moscow, on which Our Unswerving Loyalty focuses).

During the 1920s and 1930s, Australian communist leaders went to Moscow to attend Comintern conferences and report on the prospects for revolution in Australia. The CPA submitted reports on its conferences and Central Committee meetings to the Comintern's Executive Committee (ECCI) and the Anglo American Secretariat. Local leadership disputes were referred to Moscow, and a great deal of advice and some "orders" came the other way. On all these matters CAAL has much to tell us. It reminds us, in particular, of the difficulties of communicating over such long distances in the days before faxes, e-mail and jumbo jets. Australians were stationed in Moscow for varying periods of time (often on their way to conferences or at the Lenin School), but because of the length of time away from Australia their usefulness in reporting on party matters, or helping Comintern leaders to resolve antipodean disputes that were put before them--sometimes by telegram--was limited. The Comintern, for its part, sent representatives to Australia to ensure that its orders were being followed.

The documents in CAAL encompass and supplement the archival material from the Comintern available, after permission from the SEARCH Foundation, at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and brought to Australia by Barbara Curthoys in the 1990s. They also provide a useful supplement to existing archival materials in the Normington-Rawling Collection held at the Australian National University, and other Australian collections. The additional material in CAAL includes directives from Moscow in 1926-27, materials on the internal situation of the party, Comintern resolutions on the "Australian question", and early correspondence about the formation of the CPA.

Large though the CAAL collection may be, it is not complete; some documents, for example, refer to others that cannot be found, or to attachments that are missing. And given the limited material from local branch level in Australia, we are witness largely to a conversation between leaders and other "insiders". How an ordinary CPA member would have experienced the party's relationship with Moscow, from the material available here, can only be guessed ...