Directions of the Recent Historiography of Skopje

Περίληψη

If each generation has a duty to rewrite history, as per Karl Popper’s famous saying, then the post-communist generation of historians from the former communist Balkan countries has several reasons to re-evaluate the historical past. The commanded and ideologically charged historiography of the Balkan communist countries had as its interpretative starting point the “principle of the class-struggle”, which was the driving force in historical materialism, and saw socialist society more as a result of internal social struggles than as a product of the Cold War and the imposition of the Soviet model. Thus, events were interpreted through refractive prisms with the main characteristics being: the emergence of the progressive role of the Communist Party, the demonisation of bourgeois class enemies, and the axiom of the dialectical relationship of “material basis and ideological superstructure”, which in most cases was applied mechanistically rather than in a constructive and productive way.