Bergien - Communist parties revisited sociocultural approaches to party rule in the Soviet bloc, 1956-1991

COMMUNIST PARTIES REVISITED

Sociocultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 19561991

Edited by
Rdiger Bergien and Jens Gieseke

Published in 2018 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

2018 Rdiger Bergien and Jens Gieseke

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-776-5 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78533-777-2 ebook

Contents

Rdiger Bergien and Jens Gieseke

Edward Cohn

Michel Christian

Sabine Pannen

Jens Gieseke

Frdric Zalewski

Christoph Boyer

Alexander Titov

Rdiger Bergien

Andrea Bahr

Jay Rowell

Krzysztof Dbek

Mark Kramer

Martin Sabrow

Jan C. Behrends

Padraic Kenney

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for their generous support, as well as Dariusz Stola and Bernd Florath for a number of extremely productive comments. Furthermore, we sincerely thank Marion Berghahn, Chris Chappell, Amanda Horn, and the whole staff at Berghahn for their support, and the two anonymous scholars for their extremely helpful reviews. Their comments and recommendations impelled us to improve our ideas and prose.

Our special thanks go to Francesca Bondy, who took the burden of copyediting. At the Centre for Contemporary History, Ute Gro, Stephanie Karmann, Roxanna Noll, Nora Prfer, Theresa Thaller, and Florian Schikowski accompanied the preparations of this volume with great commitment. We would like to express our gratitude to them, to the whole Communism and Society team and to all other colleagues for the unique warm and inspiring atmosphere at the Centre for Contemporary History.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Sociocultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 19561991

Rdiger Bergien and Jens Gieseke

The communist ruling parties (CPs) of Eastern and East Central Europe after 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 significant parts of their particular societies. They drove the socialist transformations forward, and they claimed to put utopian societal models into practice. They efficiently determined millions of their members biographies and were able to bind them to their basic organizations, despite their erosion and demise in the late 1980s.