As a result of the Rival Communist Parties internship program first advertised in 2020, the archival series HU OSA 300-5-90 Records of Kevin Devlin and the Communist Area Analysis Department on Non-Ruling Communist Parties has been processed, with its detailed description and finding aids now available in the online catalog.
Kevin Devlin was a senior political analyst at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for more than 20 years and served as chief of the research department’s Free World Analysis section in the 1960s, and later assistant director of the Communist Area Analysis Department. The office on Non-Ruling Communist Parties, led by Devlin, collected materials on Communist parties in non-target countries worldwide, from Argentina to Italy and to Japan. Hence the collection comprises press clippings and summaries, biographies, congress materials, diplomatic reports, and office documents, related to virtually all the Communist parties in non-Socialist countries. Arranged by country, two larger sections compose the series, with the first 122 boxes documenting the activities of Communist parties, and the remaining 18 focusing on the International Communist Movement’s presence in Africa, South America, and South-East Asia.
The documents provide insight into the local particularities and the transnational connections of the global Communist movement, contributing to the intellectual history of the left-wing political spectrum. Of special interest are the reports compiled by Kevin Devlin and his colleagues (William McLaughlin and Joseph Cornelius Kun), covering, for example, the Sino-Soviet split, the impact of the War in Vietnam, Western Communist reactions to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, attitudes to dissent among various Communist politicians across the world, or the evolution of Eurocommunism.
The series was processed primarily by Adrian-George Matus (October 2020 – May 2022), currently a CEU Budapest – OSUN fellow at the Archives, and by Mariia Zimina (October 2020 – June 2021), within the framework of the Rival Communist Parties internship program supervised by former Archivist at Blinken OSA Örs Lehel Tari.