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On Sunday, March 3, 1963, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Denmark made a historic decision that we can be happy about today. They decided that the Central Committee meetings should be recorded on tape in the future.
By Jesper Jørgensen
It was not an easy decision for the members of the Central Committee, and there was certainly no consensus on it. Several expressed skepticism about the move and asked what would happen to the reel-to-reel tape on which the recording was made.
Kaj Hansen from Odense, later a member of parliament, put it this way:
“In any case, I would like to know how long the tape should be stored. Because if it’s to be used at all, it must be on the condition that it’s deleted as soon as it’s written off. We wouldn’t want a tape to be played on Aktuelt Kvarter [DR’s news program] or referenced elsewhere.”
Although transcription and subsequent deletion was part of the proposal, it was only passed with a small majority of 9 for and 5 against. For several members, recording a meeting conflicted with what they thought was wise to do in relation to an outside world that was fundamentally hostile and would gladly exploit an insight into the internal discussions in the Communist Party.
The recording of the meeting on March 3, 1963 was probably deleted. In any case, we now only have a transcript of the audio recording. However, the tapes are saved from the end of 1964 until 1991. It seems that two years later, the party gave up making transcripts of all meetings and chose to save the tapes instead.
The majority of the tapes were handed over to the ABA in connection with the transfer of the party archive to the ABA in 1989-1990 and have remained largely unused since then.
One reel-to-reel tape, which was sealed and stored with party secretary Poul Emanuel, later came to ABA from Tage Revsgaard Andersen in 2009. It was the recording of the central committee meeting on January 10-11, 1970, where Hanne Reintoft was approved as a new member of the party after a heated discussion. I used this recording myself in the article “The party’s gray eminence? Ib Nørlund and the internal power struggles in DKP in the 1970s” in Arbejdermuseet & ABA’s Årbog 2009 (2010).
Another person who has had access to the recordings is Arne Hardis, who in “Idealisten. A biography of Hans Scherfig” (2008) uses the source to reveal Scherfig’s wholehearted support for the exclusion of his former close friend Carl Madsen in May 1975.
There are probably many other great stories hidden in these unique recordings – stories that can probably help nuance our understanding of the Danish Communist Party. Here you can get an insight into the internal discussions that were rarely aired externally, and it will also be possible to investigate whether anything was said internally other than in public.
In 2011, the ABA initially digitized and made available 195 reel-to-reel and cassette tape recordings from the period 1964 to 1979. In the form of 455 files, there is now access to around 600 hours of central committee meetings. Plus a few other meetings and conferences that have been on the same tapes. Unfortunately, the series of recordings of the central committee meetings is not complete. Some meetings are either missing or only partially covered.
The second part of the recordings was made available in 2013 and includes 800 hours of recordings from 64 central committee meetings in the period 1980-1991. the series of recordings of the central committee meetings is not entirely complete. Some meetings are missing or only partially covered.
The second part of the recordings covers the period when DKP gradually lost more and more ground both in parliament and in the trade union movement. Until 1987, the party was led by Chairman Jørgen Jensen, who continued the Muscovite line.
From 1987 to 1991, Ole Sohn was chairman. He represented a renewal wing of the party, inspired by the new tones from Moscow about glastnost and perestroika, who tried to turn the tide, but with limited success.
In parallel with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party ended up decimated and split. A contributing factor was the party’s financial situation, which deteriorated as the number of subscribers to the party’s newspaper Land og Folk declined, membership fell sharply, and the Soviet Union’s financial support for the party ended in 1990.
The audio files are linked to the relevant entries in the electronic registry of DKP’s archive in ABA’s library and archive system. E.g. DKP archive, Central Committee meetings 1967-1968
The recordings are restricted for research use like the rest of the DKP archive and can, with permission, be listened to in ABA’s reading room.
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