The Communist Academy (Russian: Коммунистическая академия, transliterated Kommunisticheskaya akademiya) was a higher educational establishment and research institute based in Moscow.
It was intended to allow Marxists to research problems independent of, and implicitly in rivalry with, the Academy of Sciences which long pre-existed the October Revolution and the subsequent formation of the Soviet Union.
On November 26, 1926, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union (ЦИК СССР) confirmed the charter of the CA.
However, the very independence that originally inspired the new academy caused it to run afoul of Joseph Stalin, and he abolished it in 1936, an early manifestation of his rapidly developing purges.
In 1931, the Communist Academy included 9 separate institutes, the Natural Science Association, 9 scientific journals and 16 Marxist societies.