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The topic of this article is Andrychów’s history after World War II. The time--frame includes the events from 1945 (the city’s liberation by the Red Army and thecreation of the communist system in Andrychów) to 1950 (the beginnings of theSix-Year Plan). The purpose of the article is to present the postwar history of Andrychów regarding the city’s political and social history over the examined period.The article was divided into two parts.In the first part – Political life – I presented the politcal situation in the city afterits liberation in January 1945. The Polish Worker’s Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza,PPR) was active in 1944 in Andrychów. Thanks to the fact that the German armywas driven out of Andrychów by the Red Army, the Polish Worker’s Party couldbegin its activity. The political situation had an influence over the politics of the Andrychów’s authorities. In 1946 was hold a referendum „Three Time Yes referendum”in Andrychów. At the beginning of the year 1948, the most important parties in thecity – the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) and the PPR strived for unification. Andrychów’s authorities were fighting with the anti-communistresistance. The inhabitants, however, were also affected by the repressions.In the second part – Social life – I described the most important social problems of Andrychów’s inhabitants after the war. As the social life is concerned, thecommunist authorities were well-disposed towards certain pursuits of Andrychów’sinhabitants. In 1948, a radio network was installed in the city. In 1949, the authoritiestried to establish a seondary school.
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The article focuses on the question of how the use of Russian as the language of interethnic communication in the USSR was substantiated by representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia, in particular, what they saw as its difference in this quality from the use of the Russian language as a world language. The article shows the involvement of the creative intelligentsia in the implementation of the Soviet national policy in the BSSR; the perpetuation of the memory of the intelligentsia by the Soviet authorities. To solve the tasks, the materials of the Soviet scientific and periodical press, the state archive of the Vitebsk region were studied. Representatives of the intelligentsia were widely involved by the Soviet and party bodies in the implementation of national policy in the BSSR and in other union republics. In their creative and scientific activities, representatives of the intelligentsia could count on substantial state support, but only if their work was "in line" with what was necessary for the Soviet state at this historical stage. But even within a limited framework, the results achieved were impressive. The importance of the Russian language, not only as a language of interethnic communication in the USSR, but also as a world language, steadily grew; the broad involvement of the intelligentsia in the implementation of Soviet national policy contributed to the establishment of cultural exchange not only between different regions of different Soviet republics, but also between different regions of the socialist camp countries. The perpetuation of the memory of historical figures — representatives of the intelligentsia by the party and Soviet bodies was one of the ways to include the intelligentsia in the general cultural and semantic space of the Soviet Union. Much of the positive experience of that time can be in demand in modern conditions.
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For thirty years of existence of the Ivanovo school of intellectual studies, it has been long been proved that the intelligentsia is a heterogeneous, multi-faceted, ambiguous phenomenon, but the activities, ideological and moral foundations of such representatives as architects have practically been not considered. An important role in filling this rather interesting gap, according to the author of the article, can be played by the book of M. I. Futlik “Bad Clausura, or the Pursuit of the Wind: in letters, poems and prose”, published in Perm in 2018. The author’s memoirs, from his student days in the 1950s to the present, carefully reproduced fragments of his correspondence with friends, provide a fairly broad and informative panorama of the life of “underdeveloped socialism” and “wild capitalism”, as friends call modern society, contain abundant information about the place in this society of intellectuals and intellectuals in general, and architecture and architects in particular. The book is considered as a valuable historical source, and criticism of the historical source is the main method of the historian's work. The opinion of the author of the article on many of the issues raised is no less individual and debatable than the content of the book itself.
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The District Office of Public Security in Wadowice was one of the most important institutions of the new political power in Poland between 1945-1956 inthe district of Wadowice. Although it was supposed to uphold public order andsecurity of citizens, its officers committed a number of criminal offenses, fromminor, such as theft or battery, to the strongest, such as rape or murder. Some ofthese crimes stemmed directly from the tasks and the nature of the service ofa totalitarian regime, others were committed by the officers offstage, for personalgain, or even out of pure sense of impunity. During the first five years of the DistrictOffice at least 100 officers served and at least 10 percent of them committed oneoffense, but among these, some committed more than one. This indicates a defectin the process of staff recruitment and a prevalence of political criteria over substantive criteria in the process of workers selection for Office of Security. Witha large rotation of Security Office personnel, such a selection system negatively affected its quality, and the lack of control and lack of punishment, sometimeseven consent to illegal actions, caused the exposure of the worst tendencies andcharacteristic traits in the officers.
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This article joins the dynamically developing branch of contemporary historiography, which is the history of animals and interspecies relations, focusing on the issue of animal oppression in recent Polish history. It presents the preliminary results of the archival research carried out in the Central Archives of Modern Records, the Archives of the Ministry of Environment, and in the Institute of National Remembrance, as well as the analysis of press publications, which made it possible to distinguish several most important fields of research on the problem of oppression of animals in Poland between 1945 and 1970.
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This article attempts to present the attitudes of Warsaw workers between 1955 and 1957 and the functioning of party organisations in the industry during crisis time. The source base for the study, apart from the literature on the subject, was the archival material of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) of various levels, from factory units to voivodeship ones, mainly of ten large Warsaw factories (kept in the State Archives in Warsaw, branch at Milanówek). The subject of research was the behaviour and opinions of workers and the functioning of basic party cells and their evolution in the wake of the most important political events. The analysis also focused on the factors shaping the situation in Warsaw factories, the main stages of the crisis and the post-October ‘normalisation’ of workplace party cells, and the main models of attitudes of their members. The bottom-up perspective also made it possible to formulate conclusions about the sources of the crisis inside the PZPR, the course of factional fights, and the post-October PZPR leadership policy.
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The paper discusses the social and political situation in the Katowice Voivodeship in December 1970 after the announcement of the increase in food prices, prevention and order activities undertaken by the Citizens’ Militia (MO) and the security apparatus during the crisis and the reaction of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) to the growing agitation of society. Despite mounting tension, reinforced by the news of workers’ revolt in the cities of the Coast, the police forces effectively paralysed weak attempts to stir up strikes and demonstrations in the Katowice Voivodeship. Political changes in the PZPR leadership prevented the crisis from escalating. The attitudes of the region’s inhabitants were also influenced by: the strong position of the PZPR, the preventive arrest of nearly a thousand potential leaders of protests and riots, relatively good living conditions in the Katowice Voivodeship, and the divergent interests of various groups of the province’s population.
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The article deals with the effects of the so-called ‘Winter of the Century’ of 1979 on the example of the Lubusz Land in a broad national context. The conditions in the country and the region were analysed in various domains of economic and social life: transport and communication, the energy and heating systems, trade and supply, and also in relation to industrial and agricultural problems. The then authorities’ incompetence was emphasised as a result of political system weaknesses, leading to numerous failures and organisational chaos.
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The paper discusses the relations between directors of enterprises and supervising provincial committees of the Polish United Workers’ Party in the years 1971–1974. The issue in question is studied on the basis of documents from four provincial committees of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Katowickie Province, Warszawskie Province, Lubelskie Province, and the City of Warsaw). Using the agency theory, the authors distinguish the main problems and costs arising in the relations between secretaries of provincial committees and directors in the context of the principal–agent relationship. The analysis of the assembled source material allows the authors to define the methods used by the directors when explaining difficulties in implementing investment projects. Among these are manipulating data, covert operations, and actions aimed at giving themselves credibility. The authors conclude that the directors took great pains to present themselves as fully committed to meeting the goals in their assigned projects and production plans. The increase of investment projects developed in the discussed period led to intensification of such strategies on the part of enterprise directors.
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Information blackout was the main tool of maintaining the leading position of scientific atheism as an integral part of Marxism-Leninism in Soviet academia. As an obligatory academic course, scientific atheism provided students with a theoretical framework, which did not allow them to see a complex picture of the function of religious institutions, religious ideas, and the activities of distinguished Church men and women. While atheism had been promoted using the instruments of the state-run propaganda institutions and the system of higher education, resistance to it was a matter of individual activity. This article deals with two cases from the history of the deconstruction of the information blackout in the field of Church and religious issues, which happened in the Soviet Union between the 1960s and 1980s. The author was not only a contemporary of the processes described in this article but also took part in the events, which are central to this paper.
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This report uses the data from the sermons belonging to Archpriest Tavrion (Batozskiy) and Archpr. Sergiy (Savelyev). The focus is on their ministry in the 1960s-1970s, one of the most difficult times for the Russian Orthodox Church, when the majority of the old-school priests died in the labour camps while the young ones were the products of the Soviet system, some of them government appointees. Their unwavering faith and steadfast Christian love challenged atheistic ‘soviet spirituality’, that denied individual freedom and destroyed human spirit. In the 1960s-1970s Archpriest Tavrion was the head and Spiritual leader at the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Convent near Yelgava, Latvia, while Archpriest Sergiy served as a parish priest at the Pokrov Church in Moscow. It was this time that became for Frs. Tavrion and Sergiy final period of their life and ministry – the most spiritually significant. Most of the sermons extant was delivered during that period.
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The aim of this article is to analyse the changes in scientific atheism during Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign (1958–1964). The study uses materials found in archives and publications of the given period. Formally, this campaign started when the 21st Congress of the Communist Party brought in a new, more radical programme of anti-religious propaganda. Atheism was both a goal (creating atheist society) as well as a strategy (to minimize influence of organized religion). Its main characteristics were: 1) involvement of former clergy; 2) more intensive teaching of atheism in schools and universities (after education system was criticized by party leadership for shortcomings in atheist education); 3) use of sociological research; 4) changing role of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults from at least formal mediator in state-church relations to more active involvement in combating religion); 5) use of scientific achievements in atheist education of masses (planetarium as a pedagogical tool, use of space conquering in atheist propaganda). At the same time, Soviet leadership had to admit that all these measures did not eliminate religion. In some cases official reports pointed to resurgence of religion. Scientific atheism served as a form of collaborationism (in the broadest sense of this term) – that is why it was often formal and at the same time, within the limitations, provided a relatively safe space for scholars interested in studying religion.
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Critical scholarship on the literature of the Nigerian Civil War tends to dwell mostly on the human tragedy, often neglecting other nonhuman casualties of war. I identify the use of the environment as a tool of war in the theatre of combat especially during violent confrontations between the fighting troops and will analyse how this is depicted in selected war narratives on the Nigeria–Biafra war. By focusing on the effects of the war on the ecology, my study invites a more holistic examination of the total landscape of war bearing in mind the entanglements and shared vulnerabilities between humans and nonhumans. It also admits to an intersection between war literature and ecocriticism for if there are claims of genocide because of the perceived vulnerability of a group of humans during the war, then there are also evidences of ecocide as a result of the attacks on the defenceless nonhuman entities within the domain of war.
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This article explores the unlikely infusion of state-sponsored spiritualism into the materialist ideology of Bulgarian late communism. In the 1970s, Minister of Culture and daughter of party leader Lyudmila Zhivkova initiated grandiose state programs to inject the “occult” into Bulgaria’s national culture, art, science, and even political philosophy. Inspired by her Eastern religious beliefs, she sought to “breed” a nation of “all-round and harmoniously developed individuals,” devoted to spiritual self-perfection, who would ultimately “work, live and create according to the laws of beauty.” How are we to explain such a paradoxical lapse into state-sponsored spiritualism in a milieu dominated by materialism as a philosophy and way of life? How did Zhivkova’s occultism inform and transform Bulgarian late socialism? In pursuit of these questions, the article opens with Zhivkova’s intellectual and political trajectories, especially her spiritual formation, as I see her religiosity as the cornerstone of her cultural theory and praxis. The second part reconstructs Zhivkova’s theoretical apparatus, while the third demonstrates how it was translated into a large-scale aesthetic-spiritual utopia, which posited art, culture, aesthetics, and spirituality as a way to revamp the entire communist project. I contend that as quixotic as Zhivkova’s vision was, her policies contributed to the liberalization of art and culture in a period that has long been associated exclusively with stagnation and decay. In so doing, I demonstrate that impulses to attach “a human face” to the communist project endured even after the Prague Spring of 1968.
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In the mid 1980s the publication of Vladimir Anić and Josip Silić's Pravopisni priručnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika stirred much debate about the orthographic norm and the orthographic policies. The paper thoroughly analyzes „the genesis of Pravopisni priručnik“ and the reception of this orthographic manual on the part of the (professional) public. The author particularly focuses on the orthographic policies in the period following the Second World War and the language policies in the 1980s as well as the attempt of the high-ranking Party officials in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia to institutionalize a „common language policy“ which would include a „common orthography of Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian, Croatian or Serbian standard language“ which would in turn be applied in all four republics. The publication of Anić and Silić's orthography reference book in such a context serves as the confirmation of Croatian autonomy in shaping of the orthographic norm of the standard language.
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The presented paper explores the almost forgotten and little-reflected translation activity of actress Mária Bancíková (1913 – 1962). Bancíková was among the acclaimed personalities of the so-called inter-generation of actors, embarking on their careers in the 1930s, which was characterised by its inclination towards psychological-realistic acting and also by its accurate work with the Slovak language as a language of the stage. Bancíková was able to make the most of her talent and her feeling for languages not only as an actress, but also as an occasional translator from Hungarian, Russian, and especially Czech. The paper deals with the selected translations of Czech drama that she created for the drama ensemble of the New Stage Theatre of the Slovak National Theatre in a socially complex period at the turn of the 1940s and the 1950s. It focuses on the critical response to Bancíková’s translations, and especially on her ingenious approach and contribution, using the examples of the specific fairy-tale-romantic language of Josef Kajetán Tyl’s Strakonický gajdoš [The Strakonice Bagpiper] or the dialect of Alois Jirásek’s Vojnarka.
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This submitted contribution deals with the participation of the National institute for Education in school-books preparing. After the WWII there was serious lack of school-books related to many subjects or using of them was politically incorrect. After the installation of communist regime many school-books or studying-texts were not compatible with newly adopted school curriculums. This problem was a result of more and more intensive enforcement of ideological demands. Both official tasks – revision of already existing school-books and creating /with research/ new texts – were the important professional base of the National Institute for Education, especially after the year 1949. The participation of this pedagogical institution in described activities took two main forms – official management of many review procedures in case of individual authors (but in case of authors groups too) and guaranteeing of commissions for school-books creating. Every author was in process of school-book writing, obliged to cooperate with the National Institute for Education. But no every school-book, planned to the start of the school year 1950/1951, was released in proper time, because the process of their preparation was complicated by spectrum of problems and complications.
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One of the most relevant topics of the modernist heritage is the changing valuation of the examples that have a strong relationship with the historic surroundings. These variations come not only from different evaluations of the modernist heritage but also from the ever-changing approaches to the heritage. That is why it is worth examining the modernist cases that are directly connected to the historic part of the cities.
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