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Who was a secret courier for the Comintern in the 1930s and what did they talk about when Danish communists visited the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen in the 1970s? Previously unknown archival material sheds new light on Danish communism and the Soviet system’s activities in Denmark.
In the early 2010s, the Workers’ Museum & ABA, the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark and the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History (RGASPI) had a joint research and archive project under the heading Comintern and the Danish Communists.
Central to the project has been the digitization of the Danish personal files in the Comintern archive at RGASPI. This collection of over 400 cases has not previously been used in its entirety, which is why it is with great pleasure that we can now provide access to this interesting material from ABA in Taastrup.
The collection includes cases of well-known Danish communists such as Aksel Larsen, Arne Munch-Petersen, Martin Nielsen, Thøger Thøgersen, Knud Jespersen and Jørgen Jensen, as well as a large number of smaller communists who in one way or another had contact with the Soviet system.
In addition, the collection contains cases of a large number of prominent Danish politicians of both social democratic and bourgeois persuasion, including prime ministers from Vilhelm Buhl to Jens Otto Krag, as well as a few other opinion makers such as Niels Bohr.
As the examples of personal files suggest, the cases do not stop with the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. Archiving continued after the war under the auspices of the Soviet Communist Party, SUKP, right up until the fall of the Wall in 1989.
The files, which vary in size from 1 page to almost 1,000 pages, typically contain biographies, letters, student evaluations from Soviet party schools and Russian news telegrams, but also reports from secret Comintern couriers and from the Soviet Embassy in Copenhagen to the International Department of the USSR Central Committee.
The documents are primarily in Russian, German and Danish.
See the register of cases in the ABA’s archive system. Access to the material is according to the archive’s general terms of access.
An introduced selection of documents from the personal cases is published in the source collection Датские кадры Москвы в сталинское время. Избранные документы из личных дел датчан в архиве Коминтерна [Danish Moscow cadres in the Stalin era. Selected documents from the Danish personal files in the Comintern archives], edited by Jesper Jørgensen, Andrei Sorokin, Thomas Wegener Friis, Alexander Chubaryan, Chris Holmsted Larsen, Morten Møller, Anette Eklund Hansen, Svetlana Rosental and Anne-Mette Anker Hansen.
The project is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation.
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