Jean Elleinstein

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Jean Elleinstein (born August 6, 1927 in Paris , † January 16, 2002 ) was a French historian who specialized in the study of communism .

biography

As the son of an industrialist who voted on the left and kept repeating "if I weren't a Jew, I would be a fascist ...", the young Jew Jean Elleinstein passed the demarcation line in 1941 and had to live underground until 1944 when he became the patriotic Joined militias in Megève . He joined the Parti communiste français (Communist Party of France, PCF) after Liberation at the age of seventeen and quickly became an activist for the party, first as a journalist in a communist press agency, then in the PCF press office before campaigning for the communist youth organization Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France and the World Federation of Democratic Youth .

His activism earned him several weeks in prison in 1949, after which he spent 16 months in hiding in 1952/1953. He then resumed his studies, became a professor in 1954, acquired the Certificat d'aptitude au professorat de l'enseignement du second degré in 1958 , the Agrégation d'histoire in 1960 and became Maître de conférences . At the same time he was responsible for the creation of the Union of Communist Students - Union des étudiants communistes .

The XX. CPSU party congress in 1956 and the Servin-Casanova affair in 1960/1961 - two PCF reformers were reprimanded by the party leadership for "revisionism" - shook his convictions. Sidelined in the party, but strongly supported by Roland Leroy , Elleinstein approached Italian or Spanish communists in tone. As deputy director of the Center for Marxist Studies and Research, between 1972 and 1975 he published a history of the Soviet Union in which he clearly freed himself from orthodox theses such as those advocated by Jean Bruhat since 1945. In accordance with the policy of opening up at this time of a union of the left and Eurocommunism , the PCF let him go. Jean Elleinstein used the freedom he had gained in 1975 by publishing a history of the Stalinist phenomenon - Histoire du phénomène stalinien , in which he analyzed Stalinism as the unfortunate product of historical circumstances.

He became the unofficial spokesman for a democratic communism with the Communist Party, proclaimed as part of the XXII. Congress of the French Communist Party in February 1976. This was marked by an attempt to break with the Soviet system, led by Jean Kanapa . After the failure of a union of the left in 1977 and the rapprochement between Georges Marchais and Brezhnev , Elleinstein was sharply criticized in the PCF. In 1981 he was expelled from the party.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philippe Robrieux : Histoire du parti communiste intérieure. Volume 2: 1945-1972. De la liberation à l'avènement de Georges Marchais. Fayard, Paris 1981, ISBN 2-213-00934-1 , p. 45.
  2. ↑ a b c Stéphane Courtois : Jean Elleinstein. In: Jacques Julliard, Michel Winock (eds.): Dictionnaire des intellectuels français. Les personnes, les lieux, les moments. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-02-018334-X , pp. 436–437.
  3. ↑ Philippe Robrieux: Histoire du parti communiste intérieure. Volume 4: Biographies, chronology, bibliography. Fayard, Paris 1984, ISBN 2-213-01209-1 , p. 198.
  4. ↑ David Scott Bell (Ed.): Contemporary French Political Parties. Croom Helm, London et al. 1982, ISBN 0-7099-0633-1 , p. 4.
personal data
SURNAME Elleinstein, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 2002