Kurginyan: Hitler hated Communist International intelligence service

01.12.2025, Moscow.

Hitler fiercely hated members of the Communist International (Comintern) movement and saw them as a rival force to fascism, philosopher, theater director, and the leader of the Essence of Time movement Sergey Kurginyan said during a 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.

The visit to Kushnarenkovo coincided with Kurginyan’s beginning to work on a new production at the theater On the Boards based on his play The Time of Trouble [Smuta]. One of the important plot lines is linked with Comintern figures and the Comintern intelligence school (also known as International Lenin School). Together with his comrades and students – members of the Aleksandrovskoye Commune, Kurginyan traveled to Kushnarenkovo (Bashkiria).

In November 1941, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) was evacuated to Ufa, where members of the international communist movement conducted anti-fascist radio broadcasts in foreign languages, creating radio interference during Hitler’s speech.

In December 1941, radio broadcasts began from Ufa in German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Czech, French, and Spanish. The authors of the radio broadcasts were representatives of the Third International: Dolores Ibárruri, Klement Gottwald, Palmiro Togliatti, and Mátyás Rákosi.

The Comintern intelligence school was evacuated to the village of Kushnarenkovo near the city of Ufa. It was housed in the Topornin estate, an old 19th-century mansion. The mansion’s location on Mount Devichya, with the Belaya River below, was very convenient for an intelligence school. Cadets would arrive by river and enter the intelligence school building undetected. Before and after the war, the Topornin estate housed an agricultural technical school, but in 1994, the mansion burned down and has remained in a semi-ruined state ever since.

Those who were trained at the Kushnarenkovo intelligence school, later, were parachuted behind Nazi lines and conduct underground work, provide intelligence reports to the USSR. These were “exceptionally extraordinary people“: Palmiro Togliatti, Maurice Thorez, Francine Fromond, Katja Niederkirchner, and Gerhard Koenen [phonetic transcription of the Cyrillic characters]. Many of the school’s graduates endured torture, concentration camps, and were killed by the Gestapo.

Dolores Ibárruri and Sofia Dzerzhinskaya taught at the Comintern intelligence school. The school’s graduates included East German intelligence chief Markus Wolf, Richard Sorge’s radio operator Johann Weingart [phonetic transcription of the Cyrillic characters], Theodor Winter, Klement Gottwald, Rudolf Vetiška, and many others whose names remain classified.

Kurginyan recalled that only the communists truly resisted fascism in Europe because they possessed an “extremely deep faith in history.”

“The Comintern radio and all these people – they were also engaged in informational resistance – and Hitler fiercely hated everything associated with them, he was deeply afraid of them, and sensed some competitive force alternative to him,” Kurginyan explained.

He emphasized that if the world still exists, it’s because another force, that possessed an extremely deep faith in history, began to fight against fascism, which had plotted to “stop the wheel of history.” From 1941 to 1943, forces prepared to defy fascism in Europe were gathered in Ufa and Kushnarenkovo.

“And at the time, this antagonistic pair was formed: one one hand, there was this profound faith in history, and on the other, this dark, anti-historical imperative of Nazism, which is now being resurrected because of the collapse of communism; fascism with its hatred of history and the sacred faith in history of these people, thanks to which the world still exists, truly exists… back then, these two hostile poles were established. And here, at this place, all this happened,” he said, pointing to the building where the Comintern intelligence school was located during the war.

Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency