25.11.2025, Moscow.
The building of the Communist International intelligence school (also known as International Lenin School) in the village of Kushnarenkovo is a sacred place where prominent figures of the International Communist Movement taught and studied before being sent behind enemy lines during World War II, said philosopher, theater director, and leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan during his visit to the Bashkir village of Kushnarenkovo, where the Comintern intelligence school was located in 1941–1943. A video of his speech was published on November 24 on Rossa Primavera News Agency website.
Before beginning work on a new theater production based on his recently completed play The Time of Troubles [Smuta], Kurginyan, together with his comrades and students — members of the Aleksandrovskoye Commune — traveled to Kushnarenkovo (Bashkiria), where the Communist International (Comintern) intelligence school had been evacuated in November 1941. One of the important plot lines of the new play is linked with Comintern figures and the Comintern intelligence school in Kushnarenkovo.
Kurginyan noted that in Europe, only the communists truly resisted fascism because they possessed an “extremely deep faith in history.” It was the General Secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, Georgi Dimitrov, who said in 1935 that reactionary and fascist forces wanted to stop the “wheel of history”.
“This [faith in history] was, of course, inherent to the entire communist movement. They revered it, and some said they could hear the footsteps of history when they put their ear to the ground. Others said that the power of history was such that they could hear it calling each of them by name. They were saying that it is a unique entity and an abstract concept,” Kurginyan said.
In November 1941, the Comintern Executive Committee was evacuated to Ufa. From there, the famous international Comintern radio broadcasts were conducted. The Comintern intelligence school was placed 60 km from Ufa, in the village of Kushnarenkovo, due to its secluded location and difficult accessibility.
The Topornin estate, which was provided to the school, was well-located — on Devichya Mountain, washed by the Belaya River. An old two-story mansion from 1816 with a fenced-off territory was allocated for the intelligence school. In 1931, the building was transferred to an agricultural technical school.
After the war, the Comintern intelligence school building was returned to an agricultural technical school. In 1994, the building burned down and has since remained in a semi-ruined state.
“The Comintern intelligence school in Kushnarenkovo trained members of the International Communist Movement who were later parachuted behind enemy lines. Many of them died in Gestapo prisons. It is an absolutely sacred place. And the fact that it is in such a condition, it seems to me, only adds to its sacredness,” Kurginyan said.
Dolores Ibárruri and Sofia Sigizmundovna Dzerzhinskaya, widow of Felix Dzerzhinsky, taught at the intelligence school. The children of prominent foreign communist leaders studied at the special school: in the Balkan group — Šarko Tito, son of Josip Broz Tito; in the Spanish group — Amaya Ibárruri, daughter of Dolores Ibárruri; and Louis Mercader, brother of Ramón Mercader, who eliminated Leon Trotsky.
Along with the legendary East German intelligence chief Markus Wolf, other notable students included: Johann Weingart [phonetic transcription of the Cyrillic characters] (radio operator of Richard Sorge), Yu. A. Kolesnikov (Hero of Russia, leader of the partisan movement), Francine Fromond (participant in the Soviet–British special operation, killed by the Gestapo), Katja Niederkirchner, Theodor Winter, Gerhart Koennen [phonetic transcription of the Cyrillic characters] (participants in operations connected with the “Red Orchestra,” imprisoned in a concentration camp and executed in 1945), and many others.
“I have the feeling that here [in the intelligence school building in Kushnarenkovo] you can encounter these shadows. That I was called here by people who loved something truly great and enormously sacrificed for it. Dolores’s son Rubén fell in the Battle of Stalingrad. Behind all these people stand tragedies and catastrophes. Markus [Wolf] was later bitterly persecuted in the post-Soviet era. All of them came from humble origins, somehow gathering in Moscow for Comintern congresses, dreaming of great processes and great destinies. They managed to play an exceptionally important role,” Kurginyan said.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
