International Lenin School

"[1] That goal was to be achieved through an intensive one-year course of study including economics and history, Marxist theory, and the strategy and tactics employed by the world communist movement.

The greatest number of students at the ILS came from Germany (370), followed by Czechoslovakia (320), and France, Poland, Italy, the United States, and China each supplied between 200 and 225 participants.

[7] Particular attention was paid to study of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as well, including the policies, organizational structure, and procedures of that organization.

[6] Internationally, Lenin School students can be traced as late as the 1960s and beyond exercising significant responsibilities either as heads of communist governments, such as Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, Poland's Bolesław Bierut and Władysław Gomułka and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, or as leaders of significant oppositional parties elsewhere, such as Vietnamese Communist Leader and First President Ho Chi Minh, the general secretaries of the United States, French, Greek, Irish, and South African Communist Parties, Gus Hall, Waldeck Rochet, Nikolaos Zachariadis, Ernő Gerő, Sean Murray and Moses Kotane, respectively.

Other important students of the Lenin School include such figures as Harry Haywood,[8] James Larkin Jr,[8] Markus Wolf[9] and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

It was located at 49 Leningradsky Prospekt, Moscow, in a purpose-built complex with lecture halls, film theatres, library, shops, restaurants and residences.

Graduates from that period, who later held prominent positions, include Alexander Dubček, Thabo Mbeki, John Dramani Mahama, Demetris Christofias, and Nadia Valavani.