Historical Residential Architecture under Totalitarian Regimes and After
Romanian Case Study
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Romanian Case Study
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This study analysis situation in Čáslav district during the years 1949 to 1952/1953. Specifically deals with so‑called časlavský case, which was solved in two phases. At first, the functionaries of the Čáslav district complained about the then Deputy Chief Secretary of the District Committee of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (DC of CPC) Čáslav Josef Beran, because of his autoritarian behavior. They also spread their complaints among the Čáslav workers and local inhabitans. However, they were punished, instead of Josef Beran. The whole case took a new direction on the year 1951. This change in the case was connected with the arrest of General Secretary of Central Committee (CC) of CPC Rudolf Slánský at the end of the year 1951. After that the search for the „inner ennemies“ escalated in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. At the and of the whole case, the original punishments of the Čáslav functionaries were changed, and the Josef Beran was punished on the contrary.
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Both China and Bulgaria carried out banking reforms in the 1980s. The Chinese reform was pushed from the inside and by the people and no explicit goals were set for the reform at first, including the goal of establishing a two-tier banking system. This fact made the Chinese reforms in different fields more time-consuming, but also more coordinated because the economic growth that resulted from the reform itself gave more resources to the decision-makers to solve the problems at hand. The Bulgarian reform was, to a large extent, the result of outside factors and was initiated by politicians. It was designed with more deliberation and was part of a program packet that included banking and industrial enterprises reforms as a whole. But Bulgaria did not have enough time to implement the reform plan before the political upheaval of 1989. Although China has got a comparative success in its banking reform, Bulgaria also had some important advantages. We cannot speculate whether the Bulgarian method of reform or the Chinese one was more effective.
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Yugoslav shipbuilding suffered great material damage during World War II. Even that which was not destroyed had very little value at its end. Shipyards had to be built and upgraded according to new and modern concepts. All adopted construction plans and projects of renewal, reorganisation, and modernisation, as well as parallel efforts in production and investment construction, in Yugoslavia were aimed at developing an industrial branch that had been of very little economic importance for the country before World War II. For that reason, significant financial resources (around 28 billion dinars) were invested in the development of the shipyard in the observed period, which enabled larger-scale shipbuilding to begin during the 1950s. Given the permanent military threat to the country in the first post-war decade, shipbuilding in that period placed emphasis on the construction of ships for the needs of the navy. A large number of vessels were built for the needs of the Yugoslav Navy, which significantly contributed to increasing the country’s defence capability. However, we must point out that the first fleet program from 1947, which, among other things, foresaw the delivery of 4 cruisers, 20 destroyers, and about 100 submarines to the navy, was never carried out. Due to the reduction of the danger of war, starting in 1953, Yugoslav shipyards began to pay more and more attention to the construction of ships for the needs of the merchant marine and for export. In the last five observed years (1956–1960), shipbuilding became a distinctly export industry, placing more than half of its products on foreign markets. The increase in shipbuilding production in this period also had a favourable effect on the development of many other industries (ferrous metallurgy, electrical and mechanical industry, etc.), but above all it had a great influence on the improvement of the Yugoslav foreign trade balance.
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Review of: ARTUR HAMRYSZCZAK - Archiwa polskie i sowieckie w realiach systemu komunistycznego, red. Janusz Łosowski, Mirosław Szumiło, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Warszawa 2021, ss. 352, ISBN 978-83-8229-219-0
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Industrial buildings in Zagreb after WWII were constructed in the Modernist manner as product of the industrialization of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Their designers were renowned architects of the Croatian Modern Movement from the pre-WWII period, continuing to practice modern architecture in the challenging collectivist times thereafter. Production halls, administrative buildings, chimneys, social service facilities and dormitories show a functionalist belief enriched by the elegant gigantism of reinforced concrete structures. Zagreb’s post-WWII industrial architecture, aesthetically equivalent to any contemporary concrete structures erected in either Western or Eastern Europe, is deserving of creatively reuse.
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The article focuses on the state design organization Stavoprojekt and its involvement in international architectural competitions for hotels in Czechoslovakia mainly in the 1960s. The research draws upon newly discovered archival materials, among them hotel plans for the cities of Brno, Ostrava, Karlovy Vary and Prague. Although Stavoprojekt and its branch in Brno are known mainly for the construction of apartments, the architects also created original architectural designs. The text deals with the Brno construction of the International Hotel and other unrealized hotel designs produced for competitions, presented to the public for the first time in the text. The architects’ efforts ended gradually due to the August occupation of Czechoslovakia and the onset of normalization.
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In its century-long history, the Romanian Communist Party struggled not only to gain political power, but also to be accepted by the Romanian public as an important political force. Not being very concerned with the quest of the rampant social injustice in the interwar Romania, in the beginning the Party was nothing but a Soviet fifth column, pleading for the distruction of the national State. After taking power with Soviet support after WWII and the Stalinist terror in the 1950s, the RCP started a long journey to make peace with the Romanian society through fast economical development and strenghtening patriotic feelings against Moscow control. In the end, the regime collapsed due to increased shortages and economic bankruptcy.
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Petru Caraman, a huge personality of 20th century, one of the pioneers in the field of Comparative Ethnology and also of Slavic Studies, is presented through his main contributions, but also accordingly to his life. One of the victims of the Communist regime in Romania, although the Professor wasn’t a declarative opponent, but a prominent scholar put down by the illiterate colleagues – instruments of Soviet regime, Petru Caraman shown that even in such difficult period of time one should remain faithful to his opinions and mainly to his science. In despite of difficult conditions, he manage to write fundamental researches for Romanian modern Ethnological sciences.
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The Porcupine is one of the most surprising novels by Julian Barnes, not only because it is quite traditional in its form and style, unlike other novels he wrote, but also because of the topic he deals with and his approach to it. The novel offers a presentation of a postcommunist society from the perspective of an outsider who studied the phenomena and developments in that society so thoroughly that it is difficult to call him an outsider in the first place. To the frequent themes he deals with in his works - elusiveness of truth and impossibility of an objective history, Julian Barnes adds the themes of difficulties of transition in post-communist world and the responsibility for what happened in the former communist countries, raising thus some of the most provocative and most sensitive questions that trouble this part of the world..
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With the interwoven influence of internal factors and the international situation in the second half of 1939 and over the course of 1940, events in Yugoslavia became exceptionally dynamic and took on the character of social and political turmoil. The identity of the basic course of shifts and regroupings of the working masses within the framework of this turmoil, which are somewhat specific in Bosnia and Hercegovina, with the new course of independent policy of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) is confirmed and embodied in a revolutionary-democratic movement of great potential. After considerable oscillation during the previous two decades, the organization of the CPY - including its section in Bosnia and Hercegovina - was then going through a stage of definitive consolidation and began to constitute the most vital anti-fascist political current in the country. Considerably divested of dogmatism, the realistic treatment of the unsolved social problems, as well as the adoption of the view of »people's autonomy« of Bosnia and Hercegovina as part of the complex modernized •revolutionary democratic concepts of the CPY, considerably strengthened the political prestige of the communists, in as much as such an orientation - as the principled negation of the bourgeois nationalist policy - suited the vital interests of the people of this area and of the entire Yugoslav community. The regional party conference of July 27-28, 1940, represents an important event in the development of the CPY in Bosnia and Hercegovina. After thorough preparations, that gathering took place in Sarajevo, in strictest illegality. For nearly 24 hours the 20 delegates from Sarajevo, Tuzla, Banja Luka, Mostar, Zenica and Bugojno critically considered the activities of communists in all fields and, with a great deal of inventiveness, established adequate methods of further revolutionary work under the complex and delicate conditions of the prevailing social processes. The participants of the conference finally unanimously adopted a resolution which in 15 points established the direction of policy and operative tasks of the CPY in Bosnia and Hercegovina and then elected a new regional committee and 5 delegates to represent them in the national conference of the CPY. With its program built and affirmed before the war, the CPY reached the level of a first-class political power completely overshadowing the conformist socialist right and eliminating the previous monopoly of bourgeois elements over the leading positions in national movements. The acquired social power and influence of the Communist Party for all practical purposes debilitated the anti-communist law concerning the protection of the state. Identifying with the most progressive liberation movements in the society, communists were to acquire the mandate of history in the crucial events of 1941 to assume the decisive role in the actual revolutionary disentanglement of the crisis on the Yugoslav soil.
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This paper aims to sketch a discursive typology of memoirs recounting the traumatic carceral experience of former political prisoners under communism. This is a body of literature which in Romania is at best marginal in studies of communist repression by historians and political or social scientists, as it has attracted more interest from literary people. Students of prison-time memoirs under communism usually operate with a dichotomy between “factual” accounts that supposedly document actual prison life and “literary” accounts that obscure the factual truth by embellishing it for aesthetic rather than documentary purposes. Unlike them, and in keeping with the views of post-Freudian trauma critics like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), or Leigh Gilmore (2001), I posit that traumatic experiences (re)present themselves to our subjectivity as always already translated into a discursive template and, as such, they are already committed to memory as simultaneously “factual” and “literary”. This is a process which I call “traumawork” (Traumaarbeit) and which helps me modify the sequential model of dreamwork transformations (Traumarbeit) from classical psychoanalysis and suggest that the latent and manifest contents are in fact not just coincidental in the written memoirs, but that they were simultaneously scripted (discursively encoded) from the start. I adhere to a subjective constructivist model that insists on the centrality of discourse in the constitution of our subjectivity. This prompts me to conclude that our memories consist of the mnemic imagos which are discursively processed through traumawork. This means that they are poured into different discursive matrices that differ from each other by virtue of the different “master tropes” which they involve (Hayden White 1973, Bogdan Ștefănescu 2018) which function as structuring principles for our representations of traumatic events. These discursive matrices or templates are constitutive of the psychological and ideological profile of each author and furnishes the memorialist with different manners of inscribing carceral life experience in testimonials. By looking at the memoirs by Ion Ioanid, Aniţa Nandriş-Cudla, Ion D. Sîrbu, Nicolae Steinhardt, and Constantin Noica, I exemplify here three such discursive paradigms the realist approach of antithesis-driven radicalism, the lyrical perspective which pursues inner harmony by means of metaphoric anarchist type of scripting, and the mannerist concern with thought-provoking antinomies and paradoxes voiced in an ironic-conservative mode.
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The difference between theory and practice is sometimes defining when we analyze a subject, regardless of its nature. This is also the case between the political theory and political practice, and in this paper, we will further restrict the field of study to the difference between political utopia and how it was reflected in the political practice of the twentieth century, more specifically we will try to discover how the political utopia of Plato was applied by the Romanian communism.
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The article represents part of a monography in which the author analyses the attitude of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina towards the national problem beginning from the foundation of the Party in 1909 until its inclusion in the Socialists Workers’ Party (of communists) in 1919. The introduction is 'devoted to representing the economical relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the turn of the century, the development of important industrial centres and industrial workers in the first decade of the 20th century which led to the appearance of economical workers organisations, and the foundation of the main Workers’ Union in 1905.
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The organizational and ideological division of the working class movement occurred at the beginning of 1926, leading to the forming of The Socialistic Workers’ Union (S. R. G.), The nucleus of this group was made up of so called opponents of the K.P.J. (Communistic Party of Jugoslavia) and it was excluded from the Party at the end of §1924. The ideologist of this group, Života Milojković, famous left wing politician from the period of legal work of the K.P.J., started a publication called »The Workers’ Unity« at the beginning of 1925.
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Ustanak austrijskih radnika protiv neustavne fašističke vlade u februaru 1934. godine predstavlja, kako kaže jedan austrijski istoričar, slavnu stranicu u istoriji austrijskog i internacionalnog radničkog pokreta. Ni u jednoj drugoj zemlji srednje Evrope u to vrijeme nije se dogodio ni sličan primjer otpora nastupajućoj fašističkoj opasnosti.
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In der Zeit zwischen den zwei Weltkriegen hatten die Hauptführer der Arbeiterbewegung in Bosnien und der Herzegovina - kommunistische wie reformistische - in ihren politischen und gewerkschaftlichen Organisationen eine sehr kleine Anzahl von Mitgliedern vereinigt. Nach dem erhöhten Zustrom der Mitgliederschaft in alle Organisationsformen der Arbeiterbewegung, zufolge des starken Einflusses der Kommunistischen Partei Jugostaviens in den Reihen der Arbeiterklasse und anderer Sozialschichten im Laufe der Jahre 1919 und 1920, gleich nach der Verlautbarung der »Obznana«, kam es zu einer raschen Schwächung, Zersplitterung und Demoralisation. Sollte der Terror der Verhaftungen und anhaltenden Verfolgungen denen die revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung ausgesetzt war, als einer der Gründe seiner Schwäche angenommen werden, so stellt sich die Frage warum zu gleicher Zeit die reformistische Richtung, die mit ständiger Unterstützung der Behörden rechnete, eine unwichtige Rolle spielte. In der Suche nach der Antwort auf diese Frage geht der Autor von der Analyse der Grundvoraussetzungen für die Entwicklung der Arbeiterbewegung in Bosnien und der Herzegovina aus.
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The paper presents an analysis of relations between Yugoslavia and the two most important parties of the Italian left: the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) at a time when relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union deteriorated again. It is an effort to explain the way in which the dispute between Belgrade and Moscow affected the relations of the Yugoslav communists with those Italian parties.
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Publikowany dokument jest nietypowym przekazem historycznym. Owszem, przynosi ważne informacje dotyczące aktywności Romany Granas w środowisku polskich komunistów okresu międzywojennego, odsłania relacje łączące ludzi, opowiada również o atmosferze, w jakiej przyszło im działać. To jednak, co decyduje o jego wyjątkowości, to bardzo prywatny ton wypowiedzi i emocje, jakie towarzyszą jego powstaniu oraz temu, co autorka chce przekazać swojemu synowi. Adresatem wypowiedzi jest bowiem wybitny matematyk Andrzej Granas, urodzony w 1929 r. ze związku z Wacławem „Bolkiem” Butkiewiczem.
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