L'histoire enfin retrouvée : L’Internationale Communiste de la tragédie allemande à l'apogée de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (1933-1943). Une rétrospéctive sur le journal de Dimitrov

Abstract

Around the world, historians, journalists and the public interested in the history of communism and the Left have complained about the scarcity of informal or private sources and testimonies about leading groups of the Comintern, the Communist parties and the Soviet leadership. Rightly, it was regretted that only scarcely, information had filtered out of Stalin closest circle, or could not be entrusted to posterity at all. Similarly, the small number of such authentic documents on the leadership of the Comintern in the 1930s and 1940s was emphasized concerning the multiple inflections of international communist policy according to the requirements of foreign policy and Soviet political power in general. The publication of the diary of the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, who became "helmsman of the Comintern" under Stalin, and which includes the period between 9 March 1933 and June 1943, marked a major turning point for our knowledge and historiography. Although published some fifteen years ago, the Dimitrov Diary still offers a wealth of knowledge, whose exploitation has only just begun. The following transnational vision tries to resume the history of the Communist International and its relationship with Stalin and the Communist Parties in the light of the new insights provided by the diary. This vision sheds a light on the transnationally entangled process of how anticommunism and nationalism arose from the innermost of the Soviet system itself
under the rule of Stalin.

Institut für Soziale Bewegungen
University of Bochum, Germany