Among them is Marx-Engels Historisch Kritisches Woerterbuch (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism) in several volumes, sponsored by the philosophy department of the Free University of Berlin under collaboration with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in Berlin. It has “a strong philological emphasis, in addition to its emphases on practical criticism and relation to experience”.

Needless to point out, the Comintern Archive, declassified by the central committee of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) in its twilight years, has facilitated a free and dispassionate historiographic effort in unveiling the experiment with communism and fault lines thereof. Moreover, and very importantly, Marxism needs a dispassionate critiquing as Marx himself suggested De omnibus dubitandum doubt everything in the Spring of 1865 while staying with his uncle, Lion Philips in Zalt Bommel (Holland) , for creative progression of his ideology and praxis thereof.

Spelling out the rationale for the OHHC, editor Steve Smith, professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence having broken new grounds for research on the socialist experience in the erstwhile Soviet Union (1917-1941) and pre-Deng Xiaoping China (1949-1976) stated succinctly - “It is now possible to see the Communist era as a whole, as an arc of development that started in 1917 and ended (uncertainly) in 1991. The hindsight we enjoy is by no means of 20:20 quality: it is too early, for example, to pronounce on the significance of the regimes in China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, since Communist parties are still in power and have - Cuba excepted - presided over hectic bouts of economic growth based on the market. In the twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down, however and in the thirty years since the People's Republic of China (PRC) beat a hasty retreat from Maoism, historians have come to appreciate the deeper dynamics of Communist movements and regimes in new and more subtle ways.”

The areas spelt out by OUP are quite dispersive. Some three dozens of essays are categorized in not only a scholastic way but positioned in abroad perspective. For instance, the core theoretical issues and debates are (a) Marx and Engels, (b) Lenin and Leninism, (c) Stalin and Stalinism and (d) Mao and Maoism. Turning points in global political turmoils centered around the development of applied Marxism - better Official Marxism (OM: coined by the legendary Indian scholar D D Kosambi) and Smith spotted cut-off years that are very realistic but historically significant too : 1919, 1936, 1945, 1956, 1968 and 1989.

Indeed, the world communist movement in its nascent stage got a shake-up in 1919 when counter-revolutionaries had struck blows in Germany and Hungary while 1936 and 1945 are crucial times for fascism's high-voltage and plummeting phases. If the 20th Congress (1956) of now-defunct Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) was a turning point and a slap on Zdhanov's Two Camps Theory that arbitrarily prescribed two alternatives (support Warsaw Pact or bow down to NATO) ignoring the potentials of non-aligned ideas, the blurred perspective of Soviet armed intervention in Czechoslovakia and student revolts in France with big responses in not only Germany and other West European countries but 'third-world' countries where new message from Herbert Mercuse hotted up student and youth stirs all in 1968. And 1989 saw criss-crossing of two events : fall of Berlin Wall and crisis in CPSU.

OM covers Comintern, communist party histories in the eastern, central and south-eastern Europe, Chinese communism, communism in east and south-east Asia, Africa, Latin America and Muslim countries. Well-known Comintern and Gramsci scholar of international repute Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta, formerly Surendranath Banerjee chair at the department of political science, University of Calcutta warmly welcomed the project OHHC. “It sounds quite good although very ambitious. It's quite promising. Steve Smith is a very competent scholar and his comparative studies on China and Russia are quite well known”.. Contextually, Dr Dutta Gupta who worked at the Comintern archive for about six months is associated with journals and brought out a seminal work: Comintern and the destiny of communism in India:1919-1943 . He reviewed Stephen A. Smith: Revolution and the People in Russia and China.

In the latest issue of The International Newsletter of Communist Studies, Smith has questioned the validity of some of the traditional positions on formation of working class consciousness in the making of the two revolutions and has come out with new theses on the basis of new findings. These focus on awakening of selfhood and identity formation, the rural-urban interface in the shaping of the consciousness of the migrants who settled down in the two aforesaid cities and related issues. Based on primary sources, together with new studies on this question which have come out in recent years, this is a commendable work that deserves serious attention of all concerned scholars, he observed.

For the scholastic community in the arena of history and politics, a very good news about the OHHC project is assignment of writing perhaps the most ideologically important section to Prof. Paresh Chattopadhyay who teaches political economy at the Department of Sociology at University of Quebec at Montreal. His work on Marx's critique of political economy and is explicitly based on the Marxist categories as they appear in Marx's original works, aside from the political economy of development and on quantitative methods in social sciences is recognized the world over. His current research on the neglect of basic emancipatory imperatives by the 20th Century socialist models has evinced conspicuous interest among the academics. It all began with Lenin, extended during the Stalin era in the USSR and China under Mao, he argued with unassailable records and documents.

Nonetheless, the Kolkata-based political scientist finds a gap in the coverage “There is no section on communism in South Asia, which means India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh are out.” Several veteran researchers on the history of communism in Asia would expect the OUP project to widen the coverage further at least by inclusion of special section on the communist movement in the SAARC countries with scholars like Dr Dutta Gupta. (IPA Service)