Communist University of the Toilers of the East


The Communist University of the Toilers of the East was a revolutionary training school for important Communist political leaders. The school operated under the umbrella of the Communist International and was in existence from 1921 until the late 1930s. Part of the university was split into the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University.

History

The Communist University of the Toilers of the East was established 21 April 1921, in Moscow by the Communist International as a training college for communist cadres in the colonial world. The school officially opened on 21 October 1921. It performed a similar function to the International Lenin School, which mainly accepted students from Europe and the Americas. It was headed in its initial years by Karl Radek, who was later purged from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The curriculum included both theoretical and practical matters, including Marxist theory, party organization and propaganda, law and administration, theory and tactics of proletarian revolution, problems of socialist construction, and trade union organization.
From Summer 1922 KUTV had regional branches in Baku, Irkutsk, and Tashkent. The University published Revolutionary East. Amongst those who taught there were Ho Chi Minh, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Leonid Krasin, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Khalid Bakdash, Igor Reisner, and Boris Shumyatsky.
In 1928 the Japanese Foreign Ministry estimated that some 1,000 foreign students studied at KUTV, and that 400 Chinese students comprised the largest group, followed by 350 ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union, and between 30 and 40 Japanese. The Soviet Union solicited working-class Japanese to study at the KUTV without the Japanese government's consent. The Japanese students studied under Sadaki Takahashi and Keizo Yamamoto, along with several Russian instructors. The Japanese students studied economics, the history of world revolution, Leninism, philosophy, labor union theory, and Japanese studies. Kyuichi Tokuda, a member of the Japanese Communist Party, was instrumental in recruiting and sending these Japanese workers to KUTV via Shanghai and Vladivostok.
KUTV was closed in the late 1930s. Its tasks were transferred to smaller, local institutions in the various Soviet republics.

Alumni

Prominent alumni of the KUTV include: