Introduction

The division of contemporary Europe, prepared at Yalta and consecrated in the years that followed, is a lasting and ironic monument to the achievements of Hitler and his war. It so dominates the landscape of the continent that it takes a constant effort of the imagination to see recent history in terms other than those of ‘east’ and ‘west’. The international dimension itself changed radically for all communists with the dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943. In the short run this freed domestic Communist movements in their respective national resistance groupings from the charge that they were little more than the foreign arm of Soviet policy. After 1945, therefore, the dominant common theme was the ensuing tension between the local actions of Communists in Greece or Yugoslavia, in France or Italy, and the Soviet Union’s interest in reconstructing an international movement once again subservient to a common strategy.