Issued
A Comment on the “Materials on the Commune Question” [I]
(August 31, 1959)
For distribution to all comrades in the Political Bureau and the Secretariat.
Mao Zedong
August 31
[I]
Refers to three items of material submitted on August 29, 1959, by Chen Boda, Director of the Political Research Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China:
1. “Some Materials on the ‘Commune’” published in Issue No. 4 of *Propaganda and Education Trends*, compiled and printed by the Central Propaganda Department on January 7, 1958. Contents include:
   a. An explanation of the term “commune”;
   b. Citizens’ communes, communist associations;
   c. The Paris Commune;
   d. Soviet agricultural communes.
2. Recollections by G. A. Kurbanov of the Soviet Union on the conditions of a commune in the early period of the October Revolution.
3. The definition of “agricultural commune” from an old edition of the *Great Soviet Encyclopedia*.
When Mao Zedong issued the instruction to distribute these materials, he gave them the title “Materials on the Commune Question” and titled the second item among them “Recollections of the First Russian Commune.”