After World War I, several communist movements tried to replicate the Bolsheviks’ take-over of Russia in European countries, most importantly and most often in Germany. All failed. As a result, the Soviet leadership and communists worldwide from around 1920 focused more energies on colonized countries, especially in Asia. As most of these seemed to lack the economic and sociopolitical conditions necessary for a communist revolution, the aim was to weaken if not overthrow European imperial rule, serving the interests of both the USSR and the local petit bourgeoisie, peasants, and few industrial workers. The perhaps greatest price was China. Moreover, India was seen to be (exceptionally) ripe for direct communist action.

Communists and some anti-colonial nationalists were also active in and across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, often sharing resources while being networked with the Communist International. Abbreviated as the Comintern (also the Third International), the latter was thekey international communist organization: founded in 1919 in Moscow, headquartered there, and employing through its dissolution in 1943 thousands of professional cadres from around the world, principally from Europe and Asia, as Brigitte Studer’s Reisende der Weltrevolution: Eine Globalgeschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale (2020) shows. Also in the Soviet Union, the year 1920 saw the landmark Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku. And in 1921, the Communist University for Laborers of the East (Kommunistichyeskii univyersityet trudyaschikhsya Vostoka, KUTV) opened its doors in Moscow. It became the first full-fledged Soviet training center for Soviet Muslims and for foreign communist cadres, principally from Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, and it impacted Soviet views of the East, as Lana Ravandi-Fadai and Masha Kirasirova have shown in “Red Mecca” (2015) and “The ‘East’ as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration” (2017), respectively. The text here is the English translation, published in 1954 in the collection J. V. Stalin: Works: Volume 7, of a Russian text published in 1925 in the principal Soviet newspaper, Pravda, rendering a speech that the 1924-1953 Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) held to KUTV’s students in 1925.

The Soviet leadership discusses the state of Soviet foreign policy after the Hungarian crisis and Khrushchev’s visit to the US. Molotov criticizes Khrushchev for recklessness in foreign policy direction. Soviet inroads in the Middle East and the Third World are analyzed. The effects of the crises in Eastern Europe are placed in the context of the struggle against US imperialism.

The CC CPSU states that the removal of N. M Taraki, and the rise of H. Amin to political leadership in Afghanistan bolstered counterrevolutionaries. The CC CPSU approved a small military force to stabilize the country, supporting the regional and international interests of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. The message is sent to the Members and Candidate Members of the CC CPSU, the Members of the CPSU Central Auditing Commission, the CC of the Communist Parties Of Union Republics, Kray Committees, and Oblast Committees of the Party, The Moscow City Committee of the CPSU, the Leningrad City Committee of the CPSU, and the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Soviet Navy.

A CC CPSU decree granting technical assistence to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in order to build a radio wave boradcasting station.

The CPSU politburo discusses the effects of Molotov's foreign policy on Soviet influence in the Middle East. Molotov is accused of being adventurous, leading to a loss in prestige for the Soviet Union when imperialist powers forced Egypt to withdraw from the Suez Crisis.

This CC CPSU document discusses the anti-Soviet and anti-Afghan movements that interfered with the establishment of an Afghani parliament.

Members of the CC CPSU summarize the political instability in Afghanistan, pointing to collective leadership in government and to the military as stabilizing the political situation.

Strengthening the ideas of the April Revolution through increasing DRA and PDPA party ties to foster an intra-party democracy is the basis for an upcoming meeting between H. Amin and senior Soviet policy makers in Moscow.

The violent actions by the DRA, led by H. Amin, to de-stabilize the Afghan government, dissolving the gains made in the April Revolution, causes the Soviet Union to place military detachments in Afghanistan.