Laughter and Forgetting Revisited
The review of: A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 by Padraic Kenney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. pp. 341.
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The review of: A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 by Padraic Kenney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. pp. 341.
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The review of: 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals by Krishan Kumar. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. pp. 377.
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The review of: Balkan Babel, 4th ed. by Sabrina Ramet. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002.
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This article explores the ideological and institutional causes of the emergence of political coalitions between orthodox communists and extreme nationalists in the late communist and post-communist periods. The causes of the emergence of new forms of national socialist ideologies, parties, movements, and regimes are sought in the historically rooted ideological affinities between socialist and nationalist ideologies and the perceived necessity for communist cadres of defining a substitute “combat task,” coopting the nationalist intelligentsia, and attracting desperately needed popular support. Such attempts at “national-socialist” mobilization in the late communist and post-communist context face serious social-structural, institutional, and ideological constraints. Consequently, it is inappropriate to subsume these parties, movements, and regimes under familiar concepts such as fascism, totalitarianism, integral nationalism, populism, or sultanism. Instead, they should be seen as distinct subspecies of late communist and post-communist authoritarianism.
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This article aims to reconstruct as much as possible, following access to the documents of the time but also other sources, a relevant image of the location, conditions of detention, nature of crimes, prison population and its nationality, security guards in the Alba Iulia penitentiary in the period 1907 - 1968. An element of novelty of this work is given by the fact that the presentation of the prison in Alba Iulia is based on original sources found in various holdings of the National Archives; the documentary holdings of the Alba Iulia penitentiary from the National Archives, Alba branch - (with the inherent difficulties of translating and adapting to modern language some documents written in Hungarian for the period 1907-1919), documents kept by the Archive of the National Administration of Penitentiaries. Also, other sources for this article come from the Hungaricana online portal where the Virtual Collections was discovered, with unique documents issued by the Hungarian administration in Transylvania, until 1918. We can say that this research is an unexplored field because information on the prison, then the penitentiary in Alba Iulia, is presented only tangentially in various works. Generally, it only refers to the existence and history of this settlement, which is the motivation of this approach. The present analysis shows that the penitentiary in Alba Iulia, originally built to satisfy the criminal policy of the dual Austro-Hungarian state, continues in the interwar period and, later in the Communist period, to be a tool under state patronage, serving both criminal purposes but also political. The institution is experiencing an obvious development, as a result of its expansion and modernisation, especially after the 50s, an element demonstrated by the increase in the number of detainees. However, in its case, during the Communist period, the same abuses did not occur, as those in the famous Communist prisons: Aiud, Gherla, Sighet, Pitești, etc. Rather, the policy of managing the huge workforce was respected – especially, by setting up the three external detention sections in Mintia, Bârcea Mare and Deva. Therefore, the Alba Iulia prison turned, in time, into a regional penitentiary, of approximately medium size, - required by the Communist regime as a result of the decisions of the Bucharest leadership enslaved to Soviet interests demanding the punishment of all opponents and political opponents. It can also be considered a transit prison.
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The paper reconstructs the biography of archimandrite Benedict Ghiuș (1902-1990), former vicar at the Romanian Patriarchy, a close collaborator of patriarch Justinian Marina, and important member of the mystic-theological circle known as “The Burning Bush”, while corroborating relevant data from the files of the Securitate. At the same time, the paper also compares several chronologically different documents that contain the biographic information of Ghiuș and discusses the relation between various types of documents (such as records or informative notes) and the differences in the narratives they deliver.
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Thirteen years ago, in the pages of this journal, Jan Gross contributed an article that looked broadly at the social changes that the Second World War brought to Eastern Europe, drawing out the key themes he saw as necessary for understanding the imposition of Communist party dictatorships thereafter. His thesis, connecting the experience of the war to the rise of communist dictatorships that ensued, was certainly provocative in the spring of 1989, but has unfortunately never been more fully explored, despite the article's appearance on many a syllabus (including my own), pointing to its novelty and significance. I hope in the following pages to rectify this state of affairs by presenting a framework in which we can look at the changes the war wreaked in Eastern Europe and, in our post-cold war world, shift the focus away from the Red Army and the Soviet Union and toward domestic conditions. [...]
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An enduring, central, and most distinctive feature of the Greek communist movement is its dual character: since the party's split in 1968, a pro-Soviet " orthodox" Communist Party has coexisted and competed with a "reformist" one (which officially shed its communist identity in 1986 ) . The roots of this dualism, however, go deeper and can be traced back to the military defeat of the communist movement in the Greek Civil War. Two years after the communist defeat in 1 949, and despite the restrictions imposed by the post-civil war regime, a vibrant leftist (though Communist-controlled) party emerged within Greece. This party coexisted with the exiled Communist leadership and a vast network of party-affiliated organizations that developed outside Greece, among the tens of thousands of Greeks who found themselves in Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the civil war. [...]
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Very few Hungarian communist women were as self-conscious as Mariska Gardos (1885-1973 ), the prominent trade-union activist, who at the celebration of her birthday, surprised her assembled students and friends saying: "Today, at seventy three, I must process my recollection according to my three-year plan." Writing lengthy political memoirs requires a conscious author remembering her role as a witness to events. It is also a requirement that these events were labeled as historically important. Or it requires a woman who worked in a key nomenklatura position, if possible with very prominent men. It is a truism by now that women during "statist feminism" were denied positions with real political power. [...]
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The review of: Mircea Raceanu. Infern '89. Bucharest: Silex, 2000. 415pp. Annexes. Index.
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Half a century ago communist or socialist Poland had a totalitarian regime that eliminated all forms of political opposition and tried to impose a totalist ideology by monocentric but hardly monolithic power. Pursuing control of society by means of terror and a fully developed secret police, it was obsessed by the superior idea of unity. It is worth recalling that the key concept of communist ideology in Poland in the years prior to 1980 was "the moral-political unity of the nation." It is also important, however, to see that the regime began to loosen its strictly totalitarian traits relatively early, soon after 1955, evolving gradually towards an authoritarian rule marked by limited, lame, or "socialist" pluralism. Classifying Polish socialism under the rubric of authoritarian regimes has a great number of opponents mainly among the radical and stubbornly anticommunist right in Poland, who argue that the regime in spite of its evolution was totalitarian to the very end. [...]
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The review of: Egon Balas. Will to Freedom: A Perilous Journey Through Fascism and Communism. Syracuse. N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 469 pp.
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In his famous novel about the normalization that followed the Prague Spring, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera refers to the former Czechoslovak president Gustav Husak as "the president of forgetting" in the wake of 1968. Husak was not, however, the first president to preside over collective forgetting in Czechoslovakia after 1945. Edvard Bend, with the support of most Czechs, also presided over collective forgetting in the aftermath of the postwar expulsion of the Germans, when virtually an entire people was removed-and, insofar as possible, expunged from Czech consciousness. [...]
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In the 1980s, as the first large cracks appeared in the state the Titoists had mortared together, Yugoslavia witnessed the growth of lively local alternatives to the mainstream press. These new or revitalized media-magazines, newsletters, intellectual journals, and even the occasional radio station-became important conduits for the forces that shook apart the federal state. They spread the idea that the Communists were losing (or had lost) what remained of their legitimate mandate to govern, and they offered an arena for a renewed debate over whether political power should be vested with ethnically defined nations rather than the broader, multinational community of Yugoslav citizens. Especially noteworthy was the independent press in Slovenia, the most prosperous and ethnically homogeneous of the Yugoslav republics and, if the Slovenes themselves are to be believed, the most "western" in culture and political mentality. Little Slovenia became a hive of alternative media activity. [...]
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The Women of Messina by the Italian author Elio Vittorini was published in 1964 and belongs to the prose of neorealism. In this novel, the author depicts the period after the Second World War, and later, the economic boom in Italy as well. The Italy emerging after the Second World War is in catastrophic spiritual and material circumstances. The war left the country in severe moral and political disintegration. Italy had been conquered and occupied by the military, depending on the support of the Allies and was, therefore, unable to completely govern its own destiny. The postwar period of Italian rebirth is ending at the end of 1950s and the beginning of 1960s. An era of a new industrial revolution begins and the country starts living a new reality, as the one seen in modern and developed countries. The Italian ‘economic miracleʼ, i.e. the so-called ‘economic boomʼ of the 1950s and 1960s, is the period of a great economic growth and industrial development with Italy as its protagonist. The economic and industrial advancement is thus changing the living conditions, but also the relations within the society, as well as the etiquette and the mindset. In The Women of Messina, Vittorini is trying to join his own lyricism with the historical events which he strives to portray in their very essence. In this novel, the author is experimenting with a choral narrative of an epic scope and the fresco of Italyʼs rebirth after the period of the Second World War. The novel tells a story of Uncle Agrippa who is looking for his own daughter by travelling throughout Italy on a train while she, Siracusa, not even knowing that her father is looking for her, spends time with Ventura, her lover. However, more dominant is the story about a utopian community established by a group of immigrants, Ventura and Siracusa among them, which symbolically represents a resurrection of humans after a tragedy of war. These three narrative flows function within the novel as individual stories that overlap at times. The novel embodies a new mode of transposition in time; the transfer from the post-war years into 1960s is sudden and abrupt and there are no fractures in the narrative between the two periods. The novel transfers from the myth of a peasant civilisation into a criticism of an industrial society.
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Reporting to the media about armed conflicts, various conflicts and especially about the crime of genocide, is the most complex aspect of the journalistic research job. This study is devoted to the reporting of the German weekly newspaper Der Spiegel on the breakup of Yugoslavia and armed conflicts on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the study research and its purposes, the analysis of the contents of all media reports of Der Spiegel in the period 1986-1996 was carried out.
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Thirty years ago hope was crushed in Prague. Although their efforts were marred by suspicions of civil society and the legitimacy of non-communist alternatives to political and economic development, the Prague reformers, oblivious to the major geo-strategic arrangements of the ideological age, searched for socialism with a human face. Alexander Dubček and his comrades were hostages to the myth of the predestined role of the party, and their concessions to pluralism by today's criteria were much too modest. Even the archive documents glaringly confirm how limited and self-restrained these reforms were; nevertheless they were enough to make Wladyslaw Gomulka and Walter Ulbricht nervous and push the Soviet leaders into action. [...]
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Reform efforts in the Slovak and Czech Communist parties in the late 1980s have largely gone unnoticed. The prevailing image of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (Komunisticka Strana Československa, KSC) was that of a stagnant, unreformable behemoth, the very image of party ossification after the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent party purges. The expulsion of nearly a third of the party's members ( 450,000 in total) during the 1969-70 normalization campaign that followed the Spring was to have eliminated any overt reform movements left in the party. [...]
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The article examines the complex relations between man, motor-car and urban environment in socialist Sofia in the period when the automobile evolved from rare and almost unaffordable item of luxury to essential element of the urban transport. The study focuses at the unfavorable changes in the urban environment caused by the automobilization, the related professional and public discussions, the urban communication plans and concepts, their implementation and the effects of it. The subject is examined in the broader context of the urban development of socialist Sofia and the environmental politics of the ruling Communist party.
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Recent scholarship on the origins of the Solidarity movement has centered on the question of attribution: "Who done it: workers, intellectuals, or someone else?" The temperature of the debate is rising and the battle lines are drawn. On one side , there are those who argue that the workers were the "prime motivators" of the remarkable social opposition in Poland in 1980-81. On the other side of the barricade, there are those contending either that intellectuals played a key role, or that mobilization was a result of the activities of civil society. Class terms have dominated the discourse and intellectual affiliations have colored analyses as well. Is this debate a manifestation of academic internecine conflict, or is it driven by a theoretically important research question? [...]
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