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Research on the life of former farm servants is less comprehensive than in the case of peasants. The examination on the economy of large estates led to meaningful findings concerning Somogy county in the 1930s and also since the 1970s. Much less revealing was the research on the lifestyle of estate servants although many researchers and volunteer collectors have published about it, but only briefly. After 1945 some of these former servants became independent farmers or worked as hired help on other farms. While some of them moved into the villages, others remained in the former pusztas which were gradually closed down in the 1970s. Changes occurred in the construction, economy, ownership and use of the land and the whole lifestyle of the villages. These changes differed among former servants, peasants still living in the place of their birth and peasants moving to other regions, depending on their initial wealth.
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Review of: Klára Pinerová - Stanislav Balík, Vít Hloušek, Lubomír Kopeček, Jan Holzer, Pavel Pšeja, Andrew Lawrence Roberts: Czech Politics. From West to East and Back Again. Budrich. Opladen u. a. 2017. 278 S. ISBN 978-3-8474-0585-6. (€ 29,90.)
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Review of: Beqir Meta, Afrim Krasniqi, Hasan Bello, Indoktrinimi komunist përmes kulturës, letërsisë dhe artit 1945-1968, (Dokumente arkivore), Vëllimi I, QSAKAS, Tiranë, 2018, f. 395
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Nakon sloma socijalizma, pojavili su se etnonacionalistički sukobi kao ozbiljan problem u preustrojavanju istočnoevropske politike i identiteta. Ipak, slučaj istočne Evrope nije bio potpuno jedinstven. Devedesete su stigle uz snažnu plimu obnovljenog etnonacionalizma u mnogim područjima, uključujući zapadnu Evropu. U izvjesnoj je literaturi istaknuta povezanost između novog nacionalističkog vala i trenutne faze neoliberalne globalizacije i pratećih migracija, jer su kontrapokreti često kodirani u jeziku etno- ili vjerskog nacionalizma i lokalizma (Comaroff i Comaroff 2001a, 2001b; Wimmer i Schiller 2002, 2003; Appadurai 2006; Schiller i Caglar 2009). Osim toga, u režimima neoliberalne akumulacije, klasa i marginalnost često su konstruirane u jeziku kulturnog identiteta (Schiller, Basch i Blanc 1995; Comaroff 1996; Comaroff i Comaroff 1999; Friedman 2003), dok nacionalistički poduzetnici često profitiraju upravo na reakciji protiv novih obrazaca neravnopravnosti koje proizvode globalni tokovi migracija, novca, investiranja i dezinvestiranja (Gingrich i Banks 2006).
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Until 2014, all Ukrainian presidents except Viktor Yushchenko participated in the celebration of the Soviet and Russian myth of the Great Patriotic War (GPW). Presidents Leonid Kuchma (1994 – 2004) and Viktor Yanukovych (2010 – 2014) participated in official commemorations in Moscow attended by other former Soviet republics. President Yushchenko (2005 – 2010) did not attend the celebration but neither did he seek to remove the GPW from Ukrainian memory politics. Only during Petro Poroshenko’s presidency (2014 – 2019) was the Soviet triumphalist and militaristic narrative of the GPW (1941 – 1945) replaced by commemoration of Ukraine’s participation in Europe’s victory over Nazism and the human suffering of Ukrainians during the Second World War (1939 – 1945) integrated into an overall European tragedy of the loss of millions of lives.
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The following article will examine the formative years of the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics: its main influences and how semiotics jibed with the local cultural endeavours, both in the centres of the Soviet Union and in the Tartu-Moscow school’s peripherally situated stronghold in Estonia. The article’s central concern is the connection of early Soviet cultural semiotics to the aspirations of renewal in the visual arts in the first half of the 1960s.
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This is the first part of the introduction to issue 8/19 of Studia Litteraria et Historica. The issue focuses on an anthropological and sociological analysis of the years 1945–1956 in Poland and, to some degree, on a deconstruction of contemporary Polish narratives on Stalinism. The author discusses the reasons for reexamining the subject, along with the methodological basis of such reexamination. The article also offers a polemical discussion of Andrzej Leder’s interpretation of Poland’s Stalinist period.
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The article concerns Croatian political emigration in the period 1945–1990. The author describes the construction of a political community as a form of opposition to the communist regime in Yugoslavia. The aforementioned group – understood here as a performative actor – made an effort to deconstruct the new ideology and political doctrine and to create a new community. These activities manifested in various forms of organization. In this article special attention is given to Hrvatska revija magazine, which was published in 1951–1966 in Argentina. Its main objective was to make the public aware of the socio-political situation in Croatia and to change public opinion. Croatian intellectuals analyzed topics that were forbidden or censored in their homeland; in particular, they willingly referred to Bleiburg and the figure of Alojzije Stepinac, whose reinterpretation became the foundation of a new political community.
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This is the introduction to a special section “Generation ’68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective).” The author analyzes the concept of “generation” and introduces the articles that compose this collection.
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Whereas much of the European right greeted the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 with a critique of its legacy, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party was largely silent, both because 1968 did not usher in a counterculture and because the protests were directed against the communist party. And yet the Law and Justice party detests the legacy of 1968, for three reasons: 1968 was shaped by the left, ’68 activists and their values played a key role in the ensuing opposition, and because the right actually sympathizes with the communists of 1968, then dominated by nationalists. The right thus traditionally attacks the legacy of 1968 by attacking 1989 instead, when ’68ers played a central role and new left progressivism could finally emerge. That began changing early in 2018 when Poland’s parliament passed its Holocaust-speech law banning calumny against the “Polish Nation.” The resulting criticism brought 1968 back with a vengeance, with the right openly inhabiting the role of the national-communists, and beginning to attack Poland’s 1968 directly. Shedding new light on the diverse meanings of 1968 and the relationship of the right to national communism, the piece ends by looking at developments through Bernhard and Kubik’s theory of the politics of memory.
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1968 is universally considered as the year that Marxism and socialism achieved significant political legitimacy amongst the younger generation. This is only partly true for Czechoslovakia, where the younger generations—students in their early twenties, but also young intellectuals, artists, and political activists entering their professional careers—brought about the emancipation of non-Marxist political thinking in public discourse. In this article, I demonstrate the intellectual clash of the generations of 1968: the older generation that represented Dubček’s famous “socialism with a human face” and that made the Prague Spring liberalization possible by introducing a set of reforms, and new political generations—of students and young intellectuals who rejected the idea of Reform Communism as insufficient for real democratic order. Examining each generation’s understanding of key political concepts such as “opposition” or “political pluralism” reveals that the younger generations had vastly different expectations of “socialism with a human face.”
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Controversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the postcommunist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis.
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This study seeks to delineate the highly convoluted relationship between (rock) musicians and the state in late socialist Romania (1975–1985). By investigating extensive archival files originating from the Securitate records, Agitprop branches, and the ideological committees of the Romanian Communist Party, we examine how the Romanian regime employed its mechanisms of creative control and how it made sense of Romanian musicians’ attempt to navigate them. First, such intricate mechanisms ranged from rewards and penalties in order to ensure ideological compliance, to repression by means of surveillance, recruitment, and harassment. Second, in our exploration of the margins of consent and dissent, the relationship between musicians and the state fluctuated between one of duplicity (that proved beneficial for both entities) and (symbolic) resistance (through collective and individual forms of dissent). Successful dissent came mostly from abroad, while, domestically, musicians were much more rigidly controlled; without being able to articulate coherent forms of dissent through their music, musicians challenged the Securitate through issues of morality. Music also led to the formation of subcultures—csöves and punks—which practiced anti-proletarian rituals of dissent. Thus, this research throws considerable light on broader sociological debates, such as the role of musicians in totalitarian settings, the hidden mechanisms employed by the state, and the ongoing literature concerning the configuration of subcultural movements in the Eastern bloc.
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This article compares the process of cultural reconstruction in two of Eastern Europe’s major cities, Kraków and Leipzig, in the first half-decade after World War II. In both cities, it argues, reconstruction radically changed the cultural landscape even as it seemed to uphold the status quo. City officials rebuilt many of the artistic institutions they knew from the prewar era, but consistently privileged those that were publicly owned and “progressive.” Such selective reconstruction greatly expanded state control over the arts while masking the fact that any change was taking place. It also made Kraków and Leipzig more alike: by accentuating each city’s leftist traditions, local officials fostered a cultural convergence without eliminating national difference. Their work was instrumental in the rise of East European communism. Grassroots reconstruction not only paved the way for cultural revolution but also helped to forge the Soviet Bloc.
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The accession of post-communist states into the Council of Europe system enlarged greatly the territory of effective protection of human rights in Europe and at the same time compelled the European Court of Human Rights to address the current effects of past violations of human rights by communist regimes. It gave the Court an opportunity to establish a legal standard of how to deal with matters such as the public presence of communist symbols and insignia, de-registration of neo-Communist parties, and the relevance of past membership in the Communist parties for an exercise of electoral rights in a newly democratized state. This opportunity was at the same time a challenge, and the Court was less than successful in meeting this challenge, despite the fact that it had already established the relevant legal standards when deciding about the cases triggered by the Nazi past. Without making it explicit, and without articulating openly the relevant differences, the Court has not established any equivalence between legal treatments of the aftermath of the two types of criminal regimes in the European recent past. The article discusses three recent cases belonging to these categories and concludes that there is a clear contrast between the Court’s treatment of “post-ommunist” cases and the same Court’s earlier treatment of equivalent “post-Nazi” cases; the article offers some explanations for the discrepancy which reflects a broader dualism in European collective memory of the past.
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This collection of articles brings together scholars from the United States and Europe to explore mobility writ large in communist East Central Europe. While twentieth-century European mobility has increasingly become the focus of historiography, significant gaps still exist in the research. Especially with reference to the Soviet bloc, scholars have only recently begun to explore how people crossed borders. Where there is research, it is largely limited to individual states.
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Two and a half decades have passed since the formidable tumult called by many the upheaval in the East —the chain of dramatic events that led to the accomplishment of what most among us thought to be unthinkable: the collapse of communist regimes, the end of a system that seemed destined to last forever. The revolutions of 1989 resulted in the rehabilitation of individual dignity after decades of dictatorial domination. The post-1989 East-Central Europe has been a battlefield between proponents of civicliberal values and supporters of populist, ethnocentric, illiberal movements. Precommunist and Communist legacies continue to influence the democratic transitions.
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The Warsaw Commitee of the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) was one of the biggest regional party commitees constituting the middle level of the party apparatus. The wave of strikes in summer 1980 surprised both the country leaders and regional party structures. In face of critical situation, the Warsaw Committee’s absurd strategy was to pretend that nothing much was happening. At that time a lot of party members gave up their membership.
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