Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute
The Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, established in Moscow in 1919 as the Marx–Engels Institute (), 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 thought. From 1956 to 1991, the institute was named the Institute of Marxism–Leninism (IML). The Marx–Engels Institute gathered unpublished manuscripts by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and other leading Marxist theoreticians as well as collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals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 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 editions of the Collected Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and numerous other official publications. It 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). History Establishment The Marx–Engels Institute was established in 1919 by the government of Soviet Russia as a branch of the Communist Academy, intended as an academic research facility to conduct historical studies and to collect documents deemed relevant to the new socialist regime. First director of the facility, located in Moscow, was David Riazanov. On January 11, 1921, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) adopted a resolution on the establishment of the Marx–Engels Institute, which in 1922, became an independent institution under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR (from April 1924—under Central Executive Committee of the USSR). The institute assembled and maintained a research library devoted to socialist-related theme, amassing in a little over 10 years a collection of some 400,000 books, pamphlets, and journals, 15,000 manuscripts and 175,000 photocopies of original documents held elsewhere. Among these were 55,000 manuscripts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels alone—far and away the single most important accumulation of such material. The institute included an academic staff which engaged in research on historical and topical themes of interest to the regime. The institute included sections devoted to the history of the First and Second Internationals, the history of Germany, the history of France, the history of Great Britain, the history of the United States, the history of the countries of Southern Europe and the history of international relations. Also included were sections working in philosophy, economics, political science and the history of socialism in Slavic countries. The main