Marxist History and Historians in the 20th Century - Contextual Essays

Dona Torr was born in 1883. Her recently-deceased grandfather John Torr had been a merchant and for the last seven years of his life the Conservative MP for Liverpool. She was brought up in a large and newly-built Victorian mansion,... Read more →

Individual deposits within the CPGB archives are significant both for the biographies of the individuals concerned and as a record of the wider activities of the party and its ancillaries. The dividing line between these materials and the party's institutional... Read more →

The singular nature of the CPGB's relationship with the Communist International means that the organisational holdings of the archives in Britain are of a highly asymmetrical character. Discrete groups of documents from the inter-war years, some of considerable historical significance,... Read more →

Stalin, to go by a famous throwaway remark, had little time for 'archive rats'. Certainly, in his day and long afterwards the nosing out of archival detritus was an activity largely denied the historians of communism. In most cases, this... Read more →