Blending Soviet and Dutch Culture: Communist Family Life in the Netherlands 1945–1965

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the postwar cultural sphere of the Dutch communist movement. Drawing on a series of interviews with 27 Dutch cradle communists born between 1935 and 1955, communist archives, and a wide range of other sources, it explores respondents’ cultural upbringing and family leisure time in the period 1945–1965. It challenges the notion that Dutch communists all lived in a closed sectarian milieu or ideological bubble and instead argues that Dutch communists had a close yet complex relationship with the ‘bourgeois’ (non-communist) world.