What is it about?
This paper examines the nature of internationalism in these parts. It looks firstly at the reasons for the Gorizian comrades' refusal to join Palmiro Togliatti's 'progressive' Italian Communist Party in 1945 in favour of Marshal Tito's Leninist-Bolshevik Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It then turns its attention to why they reversed that decision in 1947, and at the immediate, short and medium-term implications of that choice.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Can internationalism be culture-specific? The findings of this research suggest that the answer is 'yes.' The pragmatic responses of the Gorizian comrades to successive developments support the notion that their internationalist orientation was informed by immediate contexts, conditions and exigencies, not theoretical standpoints. In other words, they were empirical rather than normative.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure for me, and I hope that readers will enjoy accessing a history that even in its own national context has been largely neglected. The oral and written documents used here allowed me to present a relatively detailed account, if necessarily a limited one, of an extract of this communist community's fascinating and significant trajectory.
Dr Fiona Haig
University of Portsmouth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Communists on the Brink: The Gorizian Comrades of the Early Post-War Period, The International History Review, August 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2017.1357134.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
