Party School in Longjumeau

the first school for training workers as party cadres; founded near Paris by Bolsheviks under the direction of V. I. Lenin in the spring of 1911.

Those who attended the school in Longjumeau were selected by local party organizations in Russia and were confirmed by a credentials committee and by a general meeting of the school committee that was formed by a decision of the January plenum of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in 1910. The school accepted 13 students, three of whom were sent by the Moscow party organization, three by the St. Petersburg organization, and the rest by the party organizations of Baku, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Nikolaev, Tbilisi, Sormovo, Ekaterinoslav Province, and the Dabrowa coal basin (Poland). Five more students attended the school as auditors. The school was an institution for the entire RSDLP. There were ten Bolsheviks among its students, who included I. S. Belostotskii, B. A. Breslav, A. I. Dogadov, la. D. Zevin, A. I. Ivanova, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, I. V. Prisiagin, I. I. Shvarts, and I. D. Chugurin.

Lenin was the school’s ideological guiding force and principal lecturer. He presented 56 lectures in courses on political economy, the agrarian question, the theory and practice of socialism in Russia, and the materialist conception of history. He also gave a report on the existing situation and the state of the party and led a class on the Communist Manifesto of K. Marx and F. Engels. Lecture courses were offered on such subjects as labor legislation, parliamentarism and the Social Democratic faction in the Duma, the history of the European socialist movement, the trade-union movement, the history of literature and art, the history of the RSDLP, and the nationality question. Instructors included N. A. Semashko, D. B. Riazanov, C. Rappoport, I. F. Armand, Z. Leder, and A. V. Lunacharskii. After completing their studies on Aug. 17 (30), 1911, the students left to do illegal party work in Russia. Lenin’s school in Longjumeau was the forerunner of Bolshevik party schools and Communist universities.