The forthcoming issue of the academic journal History of Communism in Europe is Narratives of Legitimation in Totalitarian Regimes in the 20th Century Europe – Heroes, Villains, Intrigues and Outcomes. Twenty five years ago the grand narrative of European communism collapsed together with the Great Wall of Berlin, leaving in its wake an invitation for questions, analyses and startling revelations. This grand narrative resisted for several decades and a perfume of nostalgia for those times still persists in Central and Eastern Europe. Looking further back in time, countries in this area and in the rest of the European space experienced regimes of the extreme right. Today many of the consequences of both extremes are widely known, but the question of legitimation still lingers. This volume tries to explore the myriads of strings that formed those grand narratives: grass-root ideologized story-telling, construction of important characters and figures, micro and macro-narratives, narrative templates of collective memory, narratives that define and legitimate knowledge and truth, symbolic figures of heroes and villains. Are there specific types of legitimation according to different cultures and cultural influences? We welcome articles that intertwine history, memory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, gender studies, literature or any other related field and are written from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Topics may address the following aspects:

• different grounds for legitimation of a totalitarian regime;
• national/nationalist discourses and their narrative memory templates;
• symbolic institutions and symbolic characters: monographs, self-built identities – autobiographies; narratives of identity grounded in tradition;
• types of narratives and their use in legitimation: arts, literature, history, science;
• socialist narratives of legitimizing gender equality;
• daily social practices, education and propaganda;
• narratives and counter-narratives on the relationship between religious and laic authority;

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