Écrire son autobiographie (les autobiographies communistes d'institution, 1931-1939)

摘要

Writing One's Autobiography (institutional Communist autobiographies, 1931-1939). Biographical control was an essential element of leadership policy within the Communist movement. This study is based on the first group of 364 autobiographies made available to scholars by the recent opening of Soviet archives. It proposes a framework for analyzing the texts that is able to account for the tense relations between institutional aims and militants who were more or less predisposed to accomplish the social and psychological work the institution enjoined them to perform by "inviting" them to write their autobiographies. Institutional Communist autobiographies, which belong to the long-term history of institu tional control over "the depths of the heart", reveal a variety of sometimes contradictory modes of self-recall, characteristic of the Community Party world.