Comparative Communist History and the ‘Biographical Turn’

Abstract

AbstractThe historiography of European communism has enjoyed a new lease of life since the opening up of communist archives in the early 1990s. There now exist major monographic studies of most European communist parties in the period of the Communist International (1919–1943). New perspectives have been provided on concepts like stalinism and stalinisation. A more recent body of work looks at the construction of communist identities and the communist politics of memory. This review article focuses on what has been described as the biographical turn in communist historiography. The currently prolific interest in biography of historians of communism may in part be regarded as a historiographical catching‐up exercise; it allows the provision of a familiar genre of historical writing which was hitherto little explored due to lack of appropriate sources. While the value of conventional biography is recognised here, possibilities for further development are identified with more innovative conceptions of the biographical framework. These include comparative or collective biography, the political uses of biographical capital and the construction of communist life histories and ‘work upon the self’.