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1. Historiographical Notes Historiography is the self-reflexive story of history. It goes without saying that the seminal experience that shaped the historiographies on socialism , and the modality of their representation in the three countries under analysis, was the post-1945 political order. Political exigencies logically conditioned the retrospective reading of the history of socialism. Whereas in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria socialism was established as a “real” political system, in Greece the “eminent” period of the left, that being the resistance movement, was clouded not only by a traumatic civil war, but also by a final defeat that determined post-1949 political developments . Moreover, the left, due to the conservative post-Second World War political establishment, was denied both political and national “citizenship .” Whereas in the first two countries, despite systemic differences in applied socialism, there was a need for the legitimization of the newly created order, a circumstance manifested in the construction of linear narratives of continuity, logically leading to an explication of the status quo, in Greece, the left could claim only the role of an “honorable,” but defeated “outsider.” While in the one case, it was “victory,” in the other, it was “defeat” that determined the trope of narration. In contrast again to the experience of the left in Western Europe, in which Greece was officially taxinomized due to Cold War arrangements , the immediate post-Second World War period was not characterized by a return to “normality,” but by the burden of an additional fratricidal experience with long-lasting consequences. The setting, thus, for the Greek left and consequently for its historiographical inquiries was, given the circumstances, dramatic, not to say tragic, comparable rather to the Spanish experience. In Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, communist parties maintained the monopoly of historical narration, despite modifications in the narratives (in Yugoslavia, for example, after the break with the Soviet Union in 1948), whereas in Greece, the leftist legacy could not be appropriated by one single source, not even the Communist Party, and became the apple of discord of competing official and unofficial leftisms, particularly after 1968 and the official 310 V. Modernity Without Socialism split in the KKE. Whereas Marxist analysis was the only one available, and due to surplus use became a discredited, analytical tool in previous communist countries, in Greece Marxism was the chosen option of most sophisticated academics and not only intelligentsia. This circumstance goes also to explain predictable differences in the various Marxist narratives. While, for example, economic historians in Bulgaria (e.g., Jacques Natan) and Yugoslavia (e.g., Nikola Vučo) were eager to demonstrate the development of a rampant capitalism, which led teleologically to the establishment of socialism, Greek Marxist scholars (e.g., Konstantinos Tsoukalas) would stress the distorted character of capitalistic development in the European periphery. An alternative Marxist analysis, external to the KKE, made its headway in Greece in the 1970s and followed logically in the footsteps of Western Marxist paradigms, particularly the French school. With respect to the history of the KKE and its legacy, the principal evaluations reflect to a certain extent—and how could it be otherwise—political allegiance. Whereas for example the official KKE narrative has been broadly attuned to the Soviet exegetical grand narrative, various “alternative” leftist narratives of diverse colors have seriously contested its evaluations. So, for example , the eradication of dissent as part of the Stalinization process, considered a righteous victory of the orthodox line in official party narratives , is heavily contested by the alternative interpretations. A depolitization of the history of socialism as an exclusively inter-leftist affair is, however, progressively gaining ground. A lineage of continuity is the backbone of every grand narrative and, for this reason, a structurally indispensable element of every congruent , or seemingly congruent, story. The history of the early period of socialism in Greece (1870–1918), that is before the institutionalization of the SEKE, is not an exception to this rule. Historiographical controversy affects predominantly later periods, that is the inter-war period and, more heavily, the resistance movement and the civil war.3 There is consequently less at stake in the treatment of the early period , which is examined predominantly from the standpoint of the history of ideas,4 since before 1918 there was a lack of an organized and coherent institutional structure. The intellectual history approach has promoted an encyclopedic viewpoint in the research of the history of socialism in Greece, accountable not only for setting the canon, but also for encouraging the narrative of continuity, characteristic in the...

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