Marx-Engels Institute

The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, launched in Moscow in 1919 as the Marx-Engels Institute (Russian: Институт К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса), was a Soviet library and archive attached to the Communist Academy. The institute was later attached to the governing Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and served as a research center and publishing house for officially published works of Marxist doctrine.

The Marx-Engels Institute gathered unpublished manuscripts by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, and other leading Marxist theoreticians as well as collecting books, pamphlets, and periodicals related to the socialist and organized labor movements. By 1930 the facility's holdings included more than 400,000 books and journals and more than 55,000 original and photocopy documents by Marx and Engels alone, making it one of the largest and richest holdings of socialist-related material in the world.

In February 1931 director of the Marx-Engels Institute David Riazanov and others on the staff were purged for ideological reasons. In November of that same year the Marx-Engels Institute was merged with the larger and less scholarly Lenin Institute (established in 1923) to form the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

The institute was the coordinating authority for the systematic organization of documents released in the multi-volume works Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (Marx-Engels Collected Works), the Lenin Polnoe sobranie sochineniia (Complete Collected Works), I.V. Stalin Sochineniia (Works), and numerous other official publications. The institute was officially terminated in November 1991, with the bulk of its archival holdings now residing with a successor organization, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI).

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