Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated.

Every political movement creates its own historical memory. The communist movement, though originally oriented towards the future, was no exception: The theory of human history constitutes a substantial part of Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's writings, and the movement inspired by them very soon developed its own strong historical identity, combining the Marxist theory of history with the movement's victorious milestones such as the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, which served as communist legitimization myths throughout almost the entire twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, however, the movements history became strongly reinterpreted to suit Joseph Stalin's political goals. After 1956, this reinterpretation lost most of its legitimating power and instead began to be a burden. The (unwanted) memory of Stalinism and subsequent examples of violence (the Gulag, Katyn, the 1956 Budapest uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring) contributed to the crisis of Eastern European state socialism in the late 1980s and led to attempts at reformulating or even rejecting communist self-identity. This book's first section analyzes the post-1989 memory of communism and state socialism and the self-identity of the Eastern and Western European left. The second section examines the state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes in the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. The final section concentrates on the narratives the movement established, when in power, about its own past, with the examples of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

Communism in twentieth-century Europe is predominantly narrated as a totalitarian movement and/or regime. This book aims to go beyond this narrative and provide an alternative framework to describe the communist past. This reframing is possible thanks to the concepts of generation and gender, which are used in the book as analytical categories in an intersectional overlap. The publication covers twentieth-century Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, the Soviet Union/Russia, former Yugoslavia, Turkish communities in West Germany, Italy, and Cuba (as a comparative point of reference). It provides a theoretical frame and overview chapters on several important gender and generation narratives about communism, anticommunism, and postcommunism. Its starting point is the belief that although methodological reflection on communism, as well as on generations and gender, is conducted extensively in contemporary research, the overlapping of these three terms is still rare. The main focus in the first part is on methodological issues. The second part features studies which depict the possibility of generational-gender interpretations of history. The third part is informed by biographical perspectives. The last part shows how the problem of generations and gender is staged via the medium of literature and how it can be narrated.

Every political movement creates its own historical memory. The communist movement, though originally oriented towards the future, was no exception: The theory of human history constitutes a substantial part of Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's writings, and the movement inspired by them very soon developed its own strong historical identity, combining the Marxist theory of history with the movement's victorious milestones such as the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, which served as communist legitimization myths throughout almost the entire twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, however, the movements history became strongly reinterpreted to suit Joseph Stalin's political goals. After 1956, this reinterpretation lost most of its legitimating power and instead began to be a burden. The (unwanted) memory of Stalinism and subsequent examples of violence (the Gulag, Katyn, the 1956 Budapest uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring) contributed to the crisis of Eastern European state socialism in the late 1980s and led to attempts at reformulating or even rejecting communist self-identity. This book's first section analyzes the post-1989 memory of communism and state socialism and the self-identity of the Eastern and Western European left. The second section examines the state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes in the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. The final section concentrates on the narratives the movement established, when in power, about its own past, with the examples of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.