The activities of the International Control Commission of the Communist International after the VII Congress.

The article is dedicated to the study of the activities of the main control body of the Communist International – the International Control Commission (ICC). The object of study is the ICC, established in 1921. The paper examines the main aspects of the ICC's activities after the VII Congress of the Comintern in 1936, including the influence of the campaign for the verification and exchange of party documents in the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the work of the ICC; the activities of the joint commission of the Personnel Department of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and the ICC (or the Anvelt-Kraevsky Commission) to review the recommendations of members of foreign sections in the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks); the introduction of a new procedure for investigating violations of party norms and the change in the role of the ICC for foreign sections. The analysis of various aspects of the Comintern's activities allows the identification of general trends that defined the directions of the organization's work as a whole and the International Control Commission in particular. The influence of the events of the Moscow Trials on the Commission's activities is examined separately, leading to a tightening of the policy of Comintern control bodies towards foreign communists. The methodological basis of the article is grounded in the principles of historicism, objectivity, and scientific rigor, as well as the structuralist approach, and the historical-comparative and historical-genetic methods. The scientific novelty of the article is primarily determined by the object of study itself: until now, the activities of the International Control Commission had not been the subject of separate works. A deeper study of this issue allows for the filling of existing gaps in the history of the Communist International. Archival documents from the RGAEPI funds were used in writing the article, including statistical data on violations of party discipline by members of national sections of the Comintern. Based on this information, the categorization and sequence of the consideration of relevant cases by the ICC leadership were reconstructed, and the correlation between events in the internal politics of the USSR, the activities of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in the ICC, and the work of the International Control Commission in the first year after the VII Congress of the Communist International was revealed. In light of the circumstances presented, it is hypothesized that the activities of the ICC were driven by the growing suspicions of the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) towards foreign communists and, to some extent, became a prologue to the repressions against Comintern workers in a later period.