New Research on Communist History: The 1930s

New research, and new archival documents, continue to force revisions of our understanding of the history of the communist movement of the 1930s. This panel will feature new research, from primary sources. * John Maerhofer will discuss Takiji Kobayashi, the most prominent Japanese proletarian novelist and member of the Communist Party of Japan. In 1933 Kobayashi was to be tortured to death by the Japanese police. Maerhofer, who reads Japanese and has lived in Japan, will discuss Kobayashi's internationalism. * Joe Ramsey will examine the radical fiction of Paul William Ryan, a.k.a. "Mike Quin" (among other aliases). Quin became a significant figure in two separate fields: that of proletarian literature -- short stories, poems, and reportage; and in pulp fiction. * Grover Furr will review his work in three archives housed in the USA: the Leon Trotsky archives at Harvard and the Hoover Institution, and the Volkogonov Archive at the Library of Congress; as well as published materials from the former Soviet archives in Russia, and show how they give a very different understanding of Trotsky's writing about the murder of Sergei Kirov in Moscow on December 1, 1934 -- a topic to which Trotsky devoted much space in his journal _Bulletin of the Opposition_.