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THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN ARCHIVE
Communism was one of the defining movements of the 20th century and one unique in its international scope and political ambitions. Britain was no exception; and, from its formation as a section of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, the British communist party provided a pole of attraction for tens of thousands of activists on the British left.
For decades, the party's archives were a closed book to researchers, and the full story of its activities proved impossible to tell. With the dissolution of the party in 1991, however, the decision was taken to deposit the archives alongside those of the Labour Party in Manchester's People's History Museum. Catalogued in 1993-1994, these turned out to be one of the outstanding national collections for the political history of the British left and have since aroused considerable scholarly interest. For the period from the 1940s, records of the party's central leading bodies have been meticulously preserved and include notes taken at meetings by leading party officials. In addition there are extensive records of central departments like the industrial department, which dealt with the trade union activities which were the most visible and controversial sign of the party's influence, and the international department, which maintained links with communist parties overseas.
With a very few exceptions (e.g. the congress series CP/CENT/CONG from 1920), the institutional papers of the CPGB now held at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), Manchester, date from 1943, the year when the earlier archives were transferred to Moscow, up to 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Editorial oversight of the project and scholarly introduction are provided by Professor Kevin Morgan, University of Manchester. Microform Academic Publishers gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by the Communist Heritage Trust to reproduce this archive as an online resource (ISBN 978-1-85117-135-4) and on microfilm, and by the LHASC to derive information from its exhaustive catalogue descriptions.
To give visitors an idea of the type of archival materials represented, licence-free access can be found to one or two individual documents from each online collection. (Full 30-day TRIAL ACCOUNTS for both these CPGB archives and the BRITISH ONLINE ARCHIVES website are available for academic librarians.)
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