Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism

Agnieszka Mrozik is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.Stanislav Holubec is Associate Professor at the University of České Budějovice and the University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.

• Introduction: Historical Memory of European Communisms Before and After 1989 Stanislav Holubec and Agnieszka Mrozik Part I: Memory of the Left in Post-Socialist Europe 1. "Of the Past Let Us Make a Clean Slate": The Lack of a Left-Wing Narrative and the Failure of the Hungarian Left Csilla Kiss 2. Communist Successors and Narratives of the Past: Party Factions in the German PDS and the Russian CPRF, 1990–2005 Thorsten Holzhauser and Antony Kalashnikov 3. The Memory and Identity of the Western European Left in the Light of European Integration: View from Inside Walter Baier Part II: Memorial Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe 4. Dissonant Heritage: Soviet Monuments in Central and Eastern Europe Aleksandra Kuczyńska-Zonik 5. Lenin, Marx and Local Heroes: Socialist and Post-Socialist Memorial Landscapes in Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia — The Case Study of Jena and Hradec Králové Stanislav Holubec 6. The Politics of Oblivion and the Practices of Remembrance: Repression, Collective Memory and Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Russia Ekaterina V. Klimenko Part III: Communist Politics of Memory Before 1989 7. What Happened in 1980? Memory Forging and the Official Story of the Martial Law in the Polish United Workers’ Party Jakub Szumski 8. "We Must Reconstruct Our Own Past": 1960s Polish Communist Women’s Memoirs —Constructing the (Gender) History of the Polish Left Agnieszka Mrozik 9. Romanian Communists Under Gheorghiu-Dej: Legitimation Before 1965 and Its Memory as Opposition to Ceauşescu Monica Ciobanu 10. Constructing New Friends and Enemies: Rewriting Czechoslovak History After the Communist Takeover Darina Volf 11. Constructing Memoirs of the October Revolution in the 1920s Oksana Klymenko

"In putting together this edited volume, Mrozik and Holubec have taken some important steps in beginning to strip away the superstition about the past. I applaud their desire to challenge the totalitarian thesis about twentieth-century state socialism in Eastern Europe. This critical nuancing of the recent past, undertaken by young scholars in the region, is essential if we are to have more open and honest debates about the relationship of the communist past to the future of the contemporary Left."Kristen Ghodsee, University of Pennsylvania, USA, 2018"A truly interesting choice was to include communists from Western Europe along with experiences from the so-called Soviet Bloc. The volume’s focus is not on how communism itself was remembered, but on the reconstruction of historical memory and narratives characteristic for the movement itself – in the West, during particular periods of state-socialism and after their collapse."Agata Zysiak, Praktyka Teoretyczna 31:1 (2019)"This volume focuses, on the one hand, on the central question of the role of historical memory for a political movement whose core ideal was based on the creation of a future world. On the other hand, the editors explicitly address the relationship between self-historicization and the actual position of power that the political movement found itself in."Sabine Stach, Acta Poloniae Historica 119 (2019)