Indoctrination or Scholarship? Education of Africans at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the Soviet Union, 1923‐1937

Bibliographic Data

ID10325449
AuthorsIrina Filatova (0000-0001-5449-4980, University of KwaZulu-Natal, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume35
Issue1
Pages41-66
Publication date1999-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePaedagogica Historica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0030-9230 • E-ISSN: 1477-674X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0030923990350104
OpenAlexW2009722747
LanguageEN
Citations received12

For two decades, during the 1920s and 1930s, hundreds of communists and representatives of national‐liberation movements from all over the world came to Moscow to study at “Communist Universities"‐ educational institutions which were created, funded and controlled by the Communist International, an international communist organisation which united and directed the activities of the overwhelming majority of communist parties throughout the world from 1919 until 1943. Graduates returned to their countries equipped with theoretical and practical knowledge of revolutionary struggle. The Comintern's universities must have had an enormous influence on the history of the 20th century but until recently virtually nothing was known about them. They operated under conditions of such strict secrecy that even decades later most of their graduates refused to speak about them. It was not known who studied at these universities, and when, and what was taught there. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Comintern archives to begin to understand the activities of educational affiliates of this organisation. This article deals with one such institution, the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and with one category of its students, namely students from African countries. The picture that emerges from the article gives the reader a clearer understanding of how Comintern universities operated and what the significance of their activities was

Academic freedom · Communism · Communist state · Higher education · Ideology · Indoctrination · Institution · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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