Writing histories of communism and "really existing socialism" have been fraught with political tension for decades. On the one hand, sectarian debates in the global left too often overlooked the nuances of really existing socialism and cutting edge academic research in order to align with specific ideological orientations.
On the other hand, and far more consequential, Cold War-era anti-communism (and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed) engendered generations of historians - both professional and not - with an implicit hostility to communism as an intellectual starting point. While many historians have directly opposed anti-communist History writing, and successfully shaped and contributed to academic and popular discussions, anti-communism persists in the academy and popular discourses globally.
So how should we assess and understand "anti-communism" and its relationship with History? And how do popular memory politics, nationalist imaginations, global political shifts, archival access and academic trends play into it? And what does all this mean for the left and socialist politics today?
On today's episode we discuss all this and more with Stefan Gužvica, using his recent article in Jacobin on the notorious "Black Book of Communism" as a starting point. You can read the article here:
https://jacobin.com/2025/01/black-book-communism-courtois-history
Stefan Gužvica is assistant professor at the Department of History of the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation. He is the author of Before Tito: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the Great Purge, 1936–1940. He is currently working on a book based off his doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Regensburg in 2022, titled "Sickle without a Hammer: Revolution and Nation-Building in the Balkans, 1900s–1930s."
(episode image is a French anti-communist poster circa 1950/51 entitled "Caucasian Dance" produced by the movement "Peace and Freedom". In the background, accompanying Stalin on balalaikas, are the leaders of the French Communist Party at the time: Marcel Cachin, Jacques Duclos, André Marty, and Maurice Thorez)
