International scholarly conference on the Communist International, which will take place in Hannover, April 28 to 30 this year.

The purpose of this conference is the presentation and discussion of the results of a Russian-German research project which aimed at the utilization of the personal files of the Moscow Comintern archives. This contribution to Comintern research will be contrasted with different approaches, which also use biographical research to gain new insights into the Communist world organisation of the 20s and 3Os.

More information:

http://www.gps.uni-hannover.de/ipw/komintern

International Conference: The Communist International: Persons – Apparatus – Structure

Leibniz House Guesthouse of the University of Hannover Holzmarkt 5, 30159 Hannover

Wednesday April 28, 2004

10.00 Klaus Meschkat (University Hannover): Welcome Address

10.15 Kyrill Anderson (RGASIP Moscow): New approaches of Comintern Research after the opening of the Comintern archives

Discussion

11.00 Michael Buckmiller (University Hannover): The Project “Biographical Handbook of the Communist International” An Introduction

Discussion

I. Sources of Biographical Research

12.00 The Structure of the Comintern archives

Valerij Fomichov (RGASPI Moscow): Access to sources

Jurij Tutochkin (RGASPI Moscow): Structure of sources

Svetlana Rosental (RGASPI Moscow): Description of sources

13.00 Lunch break

14.30 Hermann Weber (University Mannheim): Between autobiography and record-based testimony: Political participant and researcher of international Communism

II. The Universal in the Particular? The biographical fate of the protagonists of world revolution

16.00 Annelie Schalm (University Hannover): Ruth Fischer – a woman in times of upheaval of International Communism 1921-1927

17.00 Reinhard Mueller (Institute of Social Research, Hamburg): Herbert Wehner – a typical biography of Stalinized Comintern?

18.00 Bernard H. Bayerlein (University Mannheim): Georgi Dimitroff

Thursday April 29, 2004

III. Collective Biography – national or regional biographical handbooks

9.30 Feliks Tych (University Warsaw): The biographical handbook of the Polish workers’ movement

10.45 José Gotovitch (Vrije Universiteit Brussels): The Comintern dictionary of French-speaking countries

12.00 Klaus Meschkat (University Hannover): The Comintern in Latin America

13.00 Lunch break

IV. Group identity – Statistics between continuity and rupture. On hierarchy of power

14.30 Peter Huber (University Basel/Hannover): Leading cadres of the Comintern – a sociological cross-section

16.00 Olaf Kirchner (University Hannover): The Russian Section of Komintern – a State within the State?

17.30 Julia Köstenberger (University Vienna): The International Lenin School Friday April 30, 2004

V. Ideology and the Logic of Terror

9.30 Alexander Vatlin (Lomonosov University Moscow): The Russification of Comintern

10.45 Friedrich Firsov (Yale University New Haven): The Purges of the Apparatus of the Comintern

12.00 Wladislaw Hedeler (University Bonn): The Group of Victims – reconstruction of biographies of a GULAG

13.00 Lunch break

14.30 Michael Buckmiller (University Hannover): Dialectics of Perpetrators and Victims. Mechanisms of Domination in the History of the Comintern

Discussion