Party papers

New York City

A communist sympathizer’s star-struck account of an interview with Vladimir Lenin and smuggled directives from Moscow to America will soon be available to historians and other scholars, The New York Times reported this week. The documents are among a massive trove recently donated by the Communist Party USA to New York University’s Tamiment Library, which specializes in the history of the American labor movement. The party’s archives, which include journals, pamphlets, and 1 million photographs from the files of the party’s newspaper, could shed new light on long-simmering controversies over the U.S. party’s links to the Soviet Union. In an interview with a sympathetic American journalist, Lenin is quoted describing the U.S. as a “great country in some respects.” Then he asks: “How soon will the revolution come to America?”

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