Work in Progress

Tony Cliff Biography – Call for Information

IAN Birchall is writing the biography of the late Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein). He would be particularly interested to hear from anyone who has recollections, documents or other information about Cliff in the period before 1960, and especially anyone who knows anything of Cliff’s activities in Palestine before 1946. Please write to Ian Birchall, 4 Toby Court, Tramway Avenue, London, N9 8PG.

Solidarity History Project

KEN Weller has informed us that there is now a Solidarity History Project underway, which will be written by John Quail. Ken adds: ‘Questionnaires flying around like confetti, cellars, attics and garden sheds being turned out, some surprising and interesting stuff being turned up, it is surprising how one’s memory plays tricks.’ He says that it will take several years, and that they are just at the stage of collecting materials. He ends: ‘In the unlikely event that any of your iron-hard Leninist readers know of caches of materials, could they let me know?’ Ken can be contacted via his email address kenweller@ukonline.co.uk, or through Revolutionary History.

Comintern Archive Inventory

IDC Publishers, a Swedish firm in the Netherlands (www.idc.nl) is making the entire Comintern archive available. It comprises 15 kilometres of shelving and 55 million documents, all of which will be inventoried on-line free of charge. There will also be a million documents on line in image form for which a subscription will be needed, and these will be continuously augmented. There is also a project to put documents on microfilm. We are not aware of the cost of subscribing, but readers should enquire of their university libraries, as we suspect it will be far too expensive for individual researchers. Contact IDC Publishers at POB 11205, 2301 EE Leiden, Netherlands, e-mail info@idc.nl, telephone ++31 (0)71 514 27 00; enquiries in the USA and Canada should be addressed to IDC Publishers Inc, 350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1801 Empire State Building, New York, NY 10118, USA, e-mail info@idcpublishers.com, telephone ++1-212-271-5945. Check the website at www.comintern-online.com.

News From Canada

THE Socialist History Project (Canada) is pleased to announce that Ian Angus and John Riddell have begun work on Against the Stream, a book-length history of Trotskyism in Canada, which is to be published late in 2005. The authors presented some early results of their research in Toronto on 9 October with a talk entitled Canadian Socialists in World War II, which looked at the way in which the Canadian Communist Party and the Trotskyist movement responded to the anti-conscription movement and unprecedented labour struggles between 1939 and 1945. For more information on this and other investigation into the history of the left in Canada, go to the Socialist History Project’s website www.socialisthistory.ca.