title: Introduction
abstract: 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 domest