Comintern (Communist International) Project (1996-2003)

Until 1992, the Communist International materials at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow were open only to selected scholars. Without a proper electronic catalogue the holdings comprising 22,000,000 pages written in over 90 languages were practically unmanageable.

In 1992 Professor Hermann Weber, the well-known German historian, asked the Council of Europe to support the development of an electronic catalogue and digital archive to save the massive collection, now endangered by the political changes. On June 27, 2003 an electronic database containing 220,000 files and 1,000,000 digitized pages was introduced into the Research Room of RGASPI by INKOMKA, the international body set up to save the Comintern Archives.

The English and Russian language database and digital content, which continues to grow, are not available online but can only be accessed from dedicated workstations at every INKOMKA member institution, including the Archivum since 1996.