Does the photo show Harris’ Communist Party membership card?

Claim:

A picture shows US Vice President Kamala Harris’ membership card for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Evaluation:

context

The image is supposed to come from Soviet archives, but actually comes from a website where anyone can create Soviet-era ID cards.

At the end of August 2024, an alleged photo of a membership card was shared that identified US presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union several Social Media Platforms And Sites:

The image was often shared along with a photo of a printed text explaining that the membership card was “a unique document” recently declassified by the State Archives of the Russian Federation:

On August 19, the official Telegram channel of the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF) published the CPSU party card of US presidential candidate Camille (sic) Harris, which she received during her first visit to the USSR in 1984.

It turned out that the American politician joined the Communist Party of the USA at the age of 16 and in the mid-1980s came to Moscow and Voronezh at least three times through the All-Union Komsomol organization.

“To dispel all controversy surrounding Comrade Harris, today we are publishing a unique document from our archive – her party card, which was handed to her personally by the second secretary of the Komsomol in June 1984,” Matvey Streltsov, senior researcher at GARF, told reporters.

Harris herself did not want to comment, but according to the New York Times, her campaign headquarters will not demand a refutation: the US presidential candidate was indeed a member of the CPSU and paid party dues until 1991.

These claims have no basis in reality. The documentary evidence that is being cited as proof that Harris is or was a communist – this alleged Soviet-era membership card – is in fact conclusive evidence of a forgery.

Pictures of alleged CPSU membership cards with the same ID number and payment receipt (the columns on the right side of the picture) were shared on social media almost a decade. This is because it is the number used on an image from a Russian website that allows users Printing a person’s name and face on such a card is about as opposite of a “unique document” as it gets:

The photo used in the Harris forgery, allegedly from 1984, was taken at Howard University. in 1986. Apart from this forgery, there is no evidence that Harris traveled to the Soviet Union or joined a communist organization at this time.

A search of recent New York Times articles about Harris conducted by Snopes found that none of the articles matched what was described in the social media posts as additional evidence of the legitimacy of the claim.

Since this image comes from a website that produces variants of the same “membership card” used in this claim, and not from the State Archives of the Russian Federation as claimed, the claim is classified as “fake.”

Snopes has written several Stories about similar false claims regarding Harris and her campaign’s alleged support of communism.

Sources