2022: "The Sakharov Case" and Western Communist Parties (original) (raw)
The communist ruling parties (CPs) of Eastern and East Central Eu-rope aft er 1945 were among the most powerful political organizations of the twentieth century. They possessed unique political, societal, and cultural shaping powers; for several decades they mobilized signifi cant parts of their particular societies. They drove the socialist transformations forward, and they claimed to put utopian societal models into practice. They effi ciently determined millions of their members' biogra-phies and were able to bind them to their basic organizations, despite their erosion and demise in the late 1980s. However, their treatment by historiography is still remarkably one-sided. Historians have overwhelmingly, if not at all, tended to limit them to their functions of passing on and carrying out the politburos' orders and off ering their members career progression in exchange for good conduct. They are seldom recognized as separate organizations and dealt with as elements of an all-encompassing socialist statehood. In addition, their capacities as social and cultural communities have largely remained unnoticed. Their members and functionaries are rarely interpreted as genuine historical actors with their own motives and viewpoints. Rather, they are seen as homogenous masses of " believers " that the party leaderships perceived them to be—or pretended to perceive them to be. Even though the term " party state " has become a historiographical key concept, there are at best vague ideas of what the parties' inner life was like below the fl oors of the supposedly almighty politburos. This book collects contributions that aim to develop new interpretations of both the inner workings of the parties as well as their political practices. The volume begins by asking about the mutual relationships between the CPs and the particular societies, about the inner life of the parties, and about the scope of action of the medium-and lower-level