H. R. Kedward is the author of a major study of the Resistance in Vichy France from 1940 to 1942. He has given special attention to the Communists in the 1939-41 period, and expressed the following view on earlier research into Communism: (76)

In the first place the accepted procedures of free-thinking historical research are seen as irrelevant when Communist history is involved. Communist evidence, facts and interpretations, held to originate in political dogma and not in the realities of history, are believed to be suspect, if not worthless, as documentation. From this springs the dubious practice of preferring evidence about Communists to evidence from Communists. Still further it is presumed that Communist opinion and action has a monolithic quality: that if Paris was under the orders of Moscow, still more was the provincial paper ``Le Travailleur Alpin'' a mere echo of ``L'Humanité''. Research and comparison is expected to reveal nothing but faithful reproduction of central policy.

Kedward points out that when the subject is Communists, the pursuit of provincial peculiarities, and any sectional analysis, a sine qua non of all other historical research, is considered unnecessary, the excuse given commonly being that they tend to present their history as indivisible and without inner contradictions. Kedward rejects such an excuse. No individual historian, he writes, ``can afford to evaluate the consistency of Communist opinion until he has made...local analyses and individual case studies...''.

Neil Mclnnes, too, rejects the monolithic view in his standard work The Communist Parties of Western Europe: (77)

For one thing, the formal structure masks the real dynamics of power in CPs...Secondly, the myth of monolithic unity scantily covers the reality of currents and fractions, struggles for power and clashes of ideas behind the fictitious unanimity.

In another of the standard works on the Western European Communist Parties, R. Neal Tannahill also attacks former a priori attitudes to the subject of Communism. That is not to say that these scholars deny that the Soviet Communist Party played a major part in the development of the other Communist Parties. Among other comments by Tannahill one finds: (78)

The demise of the Comintern did not mean the end of the control from Moscow. In 1947 Stalin created the Cominform as an agency for adjusting the policies of the Western Communist Parties...to the needs of his diplomacy. Although the Cominform was instrumental in spreading the Soviet Union's Cold War line among the Western parties, it is unclear how much direct intervention actually occurred. Again, the evidence is very sketchy, and it is difficult to determine which actions on the part of the Western Communist Parties were self-motivated and which were the result of direct pressure from Moscow.