Under the powerful influence of the Great October Revolution, the liberation struggle of the working masses of many countries of the world was widely unfolded. After several years of intense class warfare, the revolutionary wave temporarily subsided. In the course of the revolutionary movement, the international proletariat gained a wealth of political experience, but at the same time suffered great losses. Prisons were overflowing with freedom fighters, and thousands of them were forced to leave their homeland. Political prisoners, emigrants, and their families endured severe poverty. Young communist parties in those years sought forms of centralized assistance to persecuted revolutionaries. In 1920-1921, as bourgeois terror intensified, national associations of assistance to persecuted revolutionaries emerged in a number of European and American countries: in 1920, the "Organization for Assistance to Victims of the Capitalist Dictatorship" was established in Bulgaria, and in Poland - the "Polish Political Red Cross". In the United States, there were both the "National Defense Committee" and the "Labor Defense Council". In April 1921, the German "Red Aid" was formed, one of its founders was K. Zetkin. Similar organizations have appeared in other countries. The idea of forming an international workers 'organization, which, in the words of K. Zetkin, was intended to become a "sanitary detachment of the revolution", originated in Soviet Russia, the country of the victorious working class, which was the first to extend a fraternal helping hand to the proletarians who were defeated in the revolutionary battles. The proposal to create such an organization was made at a meeting of the bureau of the Society of Old Bolsheviks on September 13, 1922. He was nominated by an associate of V. I. Lenin, the revolutionary internationalist Yu. Markhlevsky 1 . It was warmly approved by the presence of- 1 TSPA IML under the Central Committee of the CPSU, f. 124, d. 12, l. 24. Yu. Yu. ... Read more