Between 1945 and 1964, more than 6 million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015) is the first study of the Communist Party’s internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. Edward Cohn, associate professor of history, uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen.
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