Istprof

(Commission for the Study of the History of the Trade-Union Movement in Russia and the USSR), a body working under the auspices of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and created by the Fifth All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions, which was held in Moscow on Nov. 2–6, 1920. By December 1926 these commissions were established under the central committees of 23 sectorial trade unions and 50 local trade-union councils. The commissions searched for, collected, and preserved materials on the trade-union movement and did research on the history of the country’s trade-union movement. The central Istprof systematically organized scholarly consultations, ail-Union conferences of Istprof personnel (May to June 1928), and discussions and set up museums and exhibitions.

Istprof published the collections Materials on the History of the Trade Union Movement in Russia (vols. 1–5, 1924–27), which contained essays, research, and memoirs on the history of the trade union movement, as well as archive documents and bibliographic surveys. Istprof had a research office; by 1930 the library of the research office had more than 20,000 books and magazines, of which about 80 percent were issues of the pre-revolutionary trade-union press, various departmental papers, and other publications considered to be bibliographical rarities. The archive of the office had more than a thousand folders of historical materials obtained by reprinting materials from various state, public, and private archives. Istprof founded a museum with departments on the interunion movement and on the movement in separate branches of production. Istprof worked closely with the Communist Academy, Istpart (Commission on Party History), the Central Archive, the Museum of the Revolution, and other historical research institutions. In the spring of 1930 the Presidium of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions adopted a resolution disbanding Istprof and charging the History Institute of the Communist Academy with research on the history of the trade-union movement.