Boris Souvarine (1895-1984) was one of the founders of the French Communist party (1920) and member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (1921-1924). He gradually developed a critical view on the athmosphere of terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and published his main work, “Stalin”, in 1935. In the same year Souvarine founded the Institute of Social History in Paris and started publishing a journal “Le Contrat Social”. Throughout his long life Souvarine acquired rare books and archives of the social movement activists to complete his vast collection.

The Boris Souvarine Archive at IHEID comprises several sections:

• his personal documents, vast correspondence, press clippings and historical photographs, dating from 1917-1960, before the time of his Comintern activity to the period of Khrushchev’s leadership;
• the Archive of Anatole de Monzie, a French political figure and scholar;
• various donators’ folders;
• numerous folders of the family of Sergey Prokopovich, Russian economist, sociologist, liberal politician, Minister in the Provisional (Kerensky) Government (1917), and his wife, Yekaterina Kuskova, a politician, advocate of social reformism, economist and journalist writing on economics, history and political matters, founder of the “Public Committee for Famine Relief” in 1921 and, a year later expelled with her husband from Soviet Russia for their anti-Bolshevik activity. The family lived in Geneva from 1939 up to their deaths, leaving their archive material, containing rare original correspondence, manuscripts and press clippings dated 1900-1954, to Boris Souvarine.
  Source : The Boris Souvarine archive and library at the Graduate Institute / Svetlana Yakimovich. In : From communism to anti-communism, Open Edition, 2016.