Нов документален сборник за периода на „чистия сталинизъм“ в България
Любомир Огнянов (съставител). Политическа история на съвременна България. Сборник документи. Т. II (1948–1953). София, Държавна агенция „Архиви“. 2018.
Book Review
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Любомир Огнянов (съставител). Политическа история на съвременна България. Сборник документи. Т. II (1948–1953). София, Държавна агенция „Архиви“. 2018.
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Northwest and Northeast Thrace is the region where the voynuk institution was probably established in the 1370s. According to the Ottoman chronicles, the voynuks from these areas served from the very beginning in the state stables and military wagon trains, taking care of horses, cargo animals, and military equipment. However, it turns out that Christians from a number of villages in the region of Plovdiv and Pazardzhik, which are later known as Voynuk settlements, were registered in 1472 in one akunji register. This fact suggests that in the earliest period of their history, voynuks accompanied the raids of the akunjis into the areas still not occupied by the Ottomans to the west of the Upper Thracian Lowland. In the 16th century the voynuks from Northwestern Thrace were set apart as a separate group subordinated directly to the voynuk sanjak-bey in Rumelia. It is likely that this fact actually reflects their place within the voynuk institution as voynuk category, which served in the inner palace stables in the capital where the Sultan’s personal horses and the horses belonging to the officers of the inner courthouse service were raised. Various types of Ottoman documents from the 15th to 16th centuries show that Plovdiv (Filibe) is the seat of the voynuk sancakbey, therefore this Thracian city is the center of the voynuk institution in Rumelia. In the 16th century, a lot of voynuk villages were registered in Northwestern Thrace. In the second half of the century, in some of these settlements, the voynuk service and related tax privileges were abolished so that the ex-voynuks could become regular taxpayers from the vakifs of Suleiman the Magnificent and some other members of the Ottoman dynasty. But in those villages where voynuk service was preserved, the number of voynuks increased. While 755 voynuks were registered in the region of Plovdiv and Pazardzhik in 1529, in 1573 their number increased to 903 people. As a supplement to the article a large excerpt from the voynuk register, compiled in 1528–1529, is published translated for the first time in Bulgarian. It contains rich information on the names of voynuks, their number, their settlements, and the voynuk agriculture in the form of tax-exempt baştinas.
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Bulgaria founded its commercial agencies in the European vilayets of the Ottoman Empire in the end of 19th century. Their existence was difficult because of the ambiguous treatment of the Ottoman authorities. The first Bulgarian commercial agents were men of good education and high repute. Their work coincided with the activity of two more important factors having their impact on the Bulgarians in the region: the Exarchate and the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (VMORO). The Bulgarian representatives had their own influence among the local Bulgarian population and acted as mediators between the two other organizations.
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The author aims to focus on the traditional customs in Macedonia regarding wedding and marriage; on the attitude of IMARO towards these institutions; the new marital “rules” imposed by the Organization and engagement norms between the partners; the techniques used by IMARO, and the goals it pursued. In the end, an attempt is made at revealing the effect of the Organization’s activity in this direction, the changes made and the results achieved. The researcher uses a variety of sources, including a large amount of memoirs, as well as program and other documents issued by IMARO.
More...Петков, П. Ст. (2018). Книга за върховете „Свети Никола“ и Шипка. София: Български бестселър, 160 стр.
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The history of the construction of Kherson, of the fortress, the shipyard and the ships that laid down the foundations of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, is comparatively short in time but vast in view of the work done. An important element of the development of Kherson as a city center was its settlement, which was also part of the overall migration process in the southern Russian regions. The subject of the proposed study is the attempts of the Russian rulers to attract migrants from the Mediterranean. To the already well-known facts of Grigorii Pisarevski’s study, drawn from the diplomatic and military service of the Russian Empire, the author adds information from the orders of Prince Grigorii Potymokin and from the relations of the Russian Ambassador to Constantinople, Yakov Bulgakov, who assisted in the passage of ships with colonists through the Straits and the Ottoman capital. The difficulties during the sea voyage were just the beginning of the completely unsuccessful experience in Kherson and the lands around it to be accommodated migrants from Southern Europe.
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After its discovery by WC. Roentgen by the end of 1895, X-Rays were immediately used for medical and surgical purposes to detect foreign objects within the human body due to injuries and/or gunshots, which inspired discussions over its functionality in military surgery. X-Rays were first used in the beginning of 1896 at the British River Wars in Nile, Egypt. In May 1896, the Italian Doctor Guiseppe Alvaro took two wounded soldiers from Ethiopia to Italy and shot radiographies of them by making use of X-Rays in the Naples Military Hospital. He published his observations in Giornale Medico del Regio Esercito. Before Alvaro’s piece, an article had been published in Medizinische Wohenschrift, on February 4, 1896 about the use of X-Rays on the wounded soldiers in the Prussian Army. However, the systematic practice of X-Rays use in the military dates to the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 by its implementation on the bodies of the casualties of war, first in Istanbul, and then in Athens by means of the radiographies showing evidence of pieces of bullet and shrapnel inside the bodies of soldiers. The first military radiographies were scientifically and systematically taken through a device set up by those two interns of the School of Medicine in Istanbul from May 1, 1897. That war was the first occasion that radiographic imaging techniques were used extensively on wounded soldiers at both fronts soon after the discovery of X-rays. This historic development is presented in this article by evidence based on the Ottoman Archival documents and on the newspapers published at that time. Rather than a competitive historiography, our paper has been dealt with mutual respect by objectively honouring professional zeal of all the physicians who took part at that fateful event, meritedly.
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The article attempts to briefly characterize and objectively assess the role of the prominent figure in the international revolutionary movement, H. G. Rakovsky, in the development of social processes in Ukraine during the Civil War and the time of the head of the Soviet government of the republic on the basis of an analysis of historical facts and documents. In the last decades, this page of his life receives controversial lighting.
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In recent years “disinformation” – more popular nowadays as “fake news” – is again in the center of international relations as a powerful weapon to achieve foreign policy goals. The historic reconstruction of the Soviet-led “disinformation” campaign during the Cold War displays that Russia’s current tactics of distributing “fake news” is quite the same. The difference is that today it reaches anywhere in the world, including the United States itself, which makes it far more successful. In the fight against it, the United States can learn many lessons, both positive and negative, from its Cold War experience.
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The study of the Inter-Korean relations during the Cold war period could show us clearly that none of the presently existing problems that are put on the table of negotiations are new. Exactly the opposite, most of them have been already a matter of discussion and negotiations as well as different strategies for solving of the core issue, the one of the possible Korean reunification has been explored, developed and negotiated again during the Cold war period. That’s why studying of that period is critically important if we would like to understand and foreseen the current development of the problem as well as the chances for its positive progress. The paper traces the different stages and all the circumstances and different factors of the Inter- Korean dialogue during the Cold war period. The dialogue is related with two main points of discussion the one of the demilitarization and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as a precondition of the other key issue of the Inter-Korean dialogue, the one about the possibilities and the way for future Korean Reunification. The issue about the Korean unification has been viewed from the prospective of Bulgaria during the Cold war but through the prism of the PDRK-ROK relations. The study has been made entirely on unpublished archival primary documents from different collections and funds of the Bulgarian State Archives and the archive of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry. Some of the documents are part of the Funds of the Archive of Bulgarian Communist Party that are again preserved within the Bulgarian Archives State Agency (ASA).
More...Vladimir Zlatarski. Die Unaufrichtigen. Bulgarien, Rumänien und die Mittel-mächte (1913–1914). Sofia, Verlag „Avantgarde Prima“, 2018. 302 S.
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The paper is based on unpublished Ottoman tax registers (tapu tahrir defteri) kept at the collections of the Oriental Department of the National Library “St. St. Cyril and Methodius”, the Central State Archives in Sofia and the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. The main goals of the research are: to determine the ethnical and religious structure of the population in the settlement of Kızıl ağac (today the town of Elhovo, Bulgaria) and in the ore-mining settlements in the region during the 15th and 16th centuries; to track demographic trends among Muslims and non-Muslims; to reconstruct the social and professional structure of urban population; to examine the status, migration and ethnical and religious characteristics of the settled slaves and freed slaves in the settlements; to analyze the development of the settlement network in the context of the Ottoman institutions.
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After the Bulgarian liberation 1878 the good contacts between Bulgarians and Romanians began to change and a bilateral antagonism started to grow. There were various reasons behind this process: aspirations for protecting and enforcing their own national interests, but also jealousy, suspiciousness and insincerity. The struggle among the Great Powers for influence over the foreign policy orientation of the two neighbouring countries played a role too and also factors like personal relationship between the rulers, between members of the elites and even stereotypes. This article examines the different phases in the relations between Bulgaria and Romania and reconstructs how the antagonism, accumulated during several decades, emerged to the surface between 1913 and 1916, wiping away the long peaceful relations between the two neighbouring nations.
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In 1869 a Bulgarian Learned Society in Braila was finally founded, as realization of an idea of the Bulgarian Revival community from the 1850s. From the begging the Bulgarian Learned Society and its leaders are actively involved in European scientific life, using the experience of the work of similar institutions. Thanks to the efforts of several leading figures, a network of contacts is quickly established, which contributes to the further development of the Society. This article provides information on the BLS‘s connections with various individuals and foreign scientific organizations at the its initial stage, and aims to present and analyze the various factors that influence the development of such relationships.
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Tolstoyism as a teaching with its anti military line, with its preaching about fraternal love and unity, with its ethic religious feeling which is an upbringing tool, with the vegetarian way of life which priorities have been demonstrated by its followers, wins disciples in Bulgaria in the first decades of 20th century. A number of organizations were set up and started functioning under the influence of these ideas – Bulgarian vegetarian union, temperance societies and unions, Esperanto movement, pacific movement – which contributed to its broader social support. But Tolstoyism could not survive in the epoch of sharp political collisions because it teaches beautiful but helpless ethics. Today its ideas are subjected to analysis and discussions.
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This article considers the creation of IRA and pays attention to its ideology, organization and social structure during the period under review. It examines the main IRA’s actions in the conflict with British government (1919 –1921) and their consequences. The main thesis presented in this study is that through its heterogeneous actions during the Irish war of independence IRA becomes decisive but not only factor in the rejection of the British government from the south of the island. Applying partisan tactics and acting together with the separatist Irish government IRA successfully neutralized British armed forces leading to the signing of the peace treaty between two countries (06.12.1921).
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The Thracia Pontica range of issues was perceived and named by Professor Alexander Fol in the 1970s as a resut of the complex expeditions Apollonia – Strandzha and Mesambria – Haemus, organised by the Institute of Thracology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. During subsequent decades, the following important results were obtained. A national Centre of Underwater Archaeology was established with seat in the town of Sozopol (1978). Eight international symposia Thracia Pontica have been organised, as well as annual national and international expeditions. The view on the Thracian maritime culture along the coasts of the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea as an integral part of the history and culture of the Eastern Mediterranean is substantiated. Thracia Pontica constitutes part of the issues connected with Mycenaean Thrace (mid-second – mid-first millennium BC) because the Mycenaean religious, political and cultural models penetrated from the south to the north by sea. The Thracia Pontica range of issues comprises also the Thracians from Northwestern Asia Minor and its coastal areas, including the Aegean islands Thasos, Samothrace, Imbros, Lemnos and Naxos. The settling and the development of the Greek apoikiai along the Thracian coasts proved to be a process in which the two sides – the Thracian ethnos-related and the Greek polis-related sides – were mutually complementary and they interacted, playing hence the role of contact zones. The Summer University Strandzha Mountain and Its Role for the East–West Transfer of Civilisations was created on Alexander Fol’s initiative in 2002 and it functioned until 2015. Between 2009 and 2018, the Neophyte Rilski Southwestern University in Blagoevgrad implementeted research projects every year, connected with the range of Thracia Pontica issues along the Black Sea, Sea of Marmara and Aegean coasts.
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In the first half of the 1960s the Cold War confrontation entered into a new phase of arms races and uncontrollable ideological and psychological warfare that created obstacles for normal political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the two sides of the “Iron Curtain”. However, in the second half of the decade, international relations improved significantly and foretold the onset of the Détente era. This process had a direct impact on Bulgarian foreign policy and made possible he resumption of the US – Bulgarian relations. The Bulgarian foreign policy made a giant step toward the establishment of friendly bilateral relations, which, it must be added, was achievable with the blessing of and permission from the Soviet Union. Bulgaria carried out an active campaign to create stable and lasting trade relations with America. The financial difficulties of Moscow and the well-hidden economic collapse of Bulgaria in the 1960s sparked the Soviet pursuit of “peaceful coexistence”, to which Washington, being in a better position, responded only a decade later. Yet even under these international circumstances the US did not build closer economic ties with Bulgaria. That initiative was left to Iran, the closest US ally in the Middle East, which in 1966 established fruitful economic relations with the “most unfavored” Soviet satellites – Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.
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