About Victor Kiernan
Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan was a British historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. Kiernan's work was prominent in the field of Marxist historiography in Britain, analyzing historical events from a Marxist point of view. Belonging to a group of prominent British Marxist historians active in the 20th century, Kiernan was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1934 until 1959, when he left in protest over the party's response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also involved in promoting Urdu poetry among Western audiences. Kiernan wrote a major essay in 1952 for the first issue of the journal ("Evangelicalism and the French Revolution"), produced several landmark articles, and later served on its editorial board from 1973 to 1983. His family came from a congregationalist, non-conformist religious tradition that he later suggested played a role in his socialist formation and that of many of the Communist Party Historians Group founded in 1946. Propelled with three new scholarships, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he achieved a double-starred First in History (B.A.,1934; M.A., 1937).
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