Süha Umar is a Turkish Ambassador (Rtd.) He served as Head of the Turkish Delegation to ACRS.

Yezid Sayigh is a former Palestinian diplomat. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to ACRS. 

Fred Axelgard is a former US diplomat. He served as a member of the US delegation to ACRS.

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 CIA’s National Intelligence Daily for 21 July 1990 describes the latest developments in Iraq, Liberia, Koreas, the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria and Panama.

Document describes Muslim Brotherhood and Communist Party activities in early September 1956, and covers the Suez canal crisis, the Algerian rebels, enmity between the Communists and the Brotherhood, Brotherhood camps in Syria, 1956 elections in Jordan, the Russian delegation's trip to Syria, an alliance between the Ba'ath and the Communists, and a rivalry between the Communists and Kamal Jumblat.

Ji Denggui and Ilie Verdeț discuss bilateral relations between China and Romania, nuclear proliferation and diarmament, Soviet-American relations, Comecon, European security, US policy toward Taiwan, Japan-Soviet relations, and economic development in China and Romania, among other topics.

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.