After World War I, several communist movements tried to replicate the Bolsheviks’ take-over of Russia in European countries, most importantly and most often in Germany. All failed. As a result, the Soviet leadership and communists worldwide from around 1920 focused more energies on colonized countries, especially in Asia. As most of these seemed to lack the economic and sociopolitical conditions necessary for a communist revolution, the aim was to weaken if not overthrow European imperial rule, serving the interests of both the USSR and the local petit bourgeoisie, peasants, and few industrial workers. The perhaps greatest price was China. Moreover, India was seen to be (exceptionally) ripe for direct communist action.

Communists and some anti-colonial nationalists were also active in and across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, often sharing resources while being networked with the Communist International. Abbreviated as the Comintern (also the Third International), the latter was thekey international communist organization: founded in 1919 in Moscow, headquartered there, and employing through its dissolution in 1943 thousands of professional cadres from around the world, principally from Europe and Asia, as Brigitte Studer’s Reisende der Weltrevolution: Eine Globalgeschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale (2020) shows. Also in the Soviet Union, the year 1920 saw the landmark Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku. And in 1921, the Communist University for Laborers of the East (Kommunistichyeskii univyersityet trudyaschikhsya Vostoka, KUTV) opened its doors in Moscow. It became the first full-fledged Soviet training center for Soviet Muslims and for foreign communist cadres, principally from Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, and it impacted Soviet views of the East, as Lana Ravandi-Fadai and Masha Kirasirova have shown in “Red Mecca” (2015) and “The ‘East’ as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration” (2017), respectively. The text here is the English translation, published in 1954 in the collection J. V. Stalin: Works: Volume 7, of a Russian text published in 1925 in the principal Soviet newspaper, Pravda, rendering a speech that the 1924-1953 Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) held to KUTV’s students in 1925.

An agreement between Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt to cooperate in combating Communism and Zionism.

Description of the new office of the Committee for the Liberation of the Arab Maghreb in Cairo, as well as activity in the Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria offices, consideration of opening a Tunisian main office in Lebanon, and progress of the Tunisian and Moroccan independence movements.

The Journalist informer learns that the Communist parties of Algeria and Morocco have invited the communist parties of the rest of the Arab countries to form a group for joint action.

The Journalist Informer catalogues the ways in which the Lebanese Communist Party has developed, including increased cooperation with other communist parties in the region, stronger labor unions and better public relations.

A report on the Communist conference in Haifa regarding the topics on the agenda.

Short document discussing Mamdūḥ al-Maydānī's resumption of surveillance of Syrian movements hostile to Ḥusnī al-Za’īm and studying the communists.

Report on a conference of Arab Communist parties, held to discuss the political situation in the Middle East and a list of those in attendance.

Extensive account of Cheab's visit to Budapest, Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad, Georgia, Bucharest, Sofia, and Plovdiv.

Several military leaders from the Democratic National Front have been arrested by the British Intelligence Service in multiple locations as a result of treason.