Communist Academy

a higher educational and scientific and research institution in social and natural sciences (1918–36). Founded by a decree of the All-Union Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR on June 25, 1918, in Moscow, it was called the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences and opened on Oct. 1, 1918. According to the statute approved by the All-Union Central Executive Committee on Apr. 15, 1919, it was named the Socialist Academy. The Communist Academy had approximately 100 full members and a number of corresponding members. Its scientific goals consisted of “the investigation and development of the history, theory, and practice of socialism”; its educational aims, of “the preparation of scholars in socialism and responsible workers of socialist construction’”; and its organizational aims, of “the unification and solidarities of workers of scientific socialism.” On Apr. 17, 1924, it was renamed the Communist Academy. On Nov. 26, 1926, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR ratified the academy’s bylaws. In December 1929 the Leningrad Division of the Communist Academy was organized.

The Communist Academy included the scientific institutes of philosophy, history, literature, art, and languages; Soviet construction and law; world economy and world politics; economics; agrarian studies; and natural sciences; it also had a number of sections and commissions on special problems and questions. A number of societies were attached to the Communist Academy: the society of militant dialectical materialists and the societies of Marxist scholars in problems of state, Marxist historians, Marxist biologists, Marxist-Leninist doctors, Marxist mathematicians, and Marxist orientalists.

After its reorganization in 1932, the Communist Academy concentrated for the most part on developing the key problems of socialist construction and world economy. From 1922 it published the periodical Vestnik Sotsialistich. akademii and from 1924 Vestnik Kommunistich. akademii, which appeared until September 1935. For many years the academy was a leader in the field of social science. It played an important role in the struggle with bourgeois ideology. The Communist Academy was liquidated by the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) published on Feb. 8, 1936, which aimed at the unification of all scientific workers into one state scientific center—the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.