Introduction
Notes Introduction 1. Several recent studies have considered the role played by Communism in the history of the 20th century, as political orientation and organization: Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Ecco; London: Bodley Head, 2009); Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution. A History of International Communism, 1917–1991, trans. Allan Cameron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); David Priestland, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World (New York: The Grove Press, 2009); Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Macmillan, 2007); Steve A. Smith, ed., Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Though argu- ing from various political points of view their focus remains on traditional political history, not on Communism as a collective experience and the Comintern as the site of a particular type of militant practice. 2. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘“Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories’, in Koselleck, ed., Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 349– 375, here p. 354. 3. Koselleck, ‘Space’, p. 355. 4. Koselleck, ‘Space’, p. 355 (translation modified). 5. Raphael Samuel, ‘Faith, Hope and Struggle: The Lost World of British Communism, Part One’, New Left Review no. 154 ( November– December 1985), p. 11. 6. According to Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self- Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), the hopes of self- determination for the colonies that had been prompted by Wilson’s rhetoric were extinguished by Spring 1919 at the latest.
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