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The article discusses the process of strange transformation of Marxists into Putinists and Marxism in Putinism. This process is traced as a transformation of communist utopia and ideology into Orthodox fundamentalism and neo-eurasianism; the transformation of the totalitarian regime into a regime of "rival authoritarianism" and the communist nomenclature in a pseudo-capitalist oligarchy. The conclusion is that post-communism in Russia resembles Nazism rather than former communism.
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Before starting its rocky transition to democracy, Bulgaria was one of the economically more successful Soviet-bloc nations. Its postwar social and economic record supports the insights and lessons of modernization theory. The Bulgarian case attests to the causal relationship between socio-economic development and political democratization. Between 1945 and 1989, the communist government modernized Bulgaria through a combination of accelerated economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, and mass education. The postwar Bulgarian economy was transformed from an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural one to a predominantly urban-industrial and service economy. [...]
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The review of: 1) Opozytsiina osobystisf: druha polovyna XX st. Politychnyi portret Bohdana Horynia [An opposition personality in the second half of the twentieth century: a political portrait of Bohdan Horyn’]. By Taras Batenko. Ľviv: Kafvariia, 1997. 350 pp. 2) Polscy Zieloni. Ruch spoleczny w okresie przemian [The Polish Greens: a social movement in the transformation period]. By Piotr Gliński. Warsaw: lnstytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1996. 457 pp. 3) Život v slove a Život slovom. Zjavne a skryté súvislosti slovenského samizdatu [A life in words and a life for words: open and hidden continuities of Slovak samizdat]. By Jolana Kusá, Raisa Kopsová, and František Fundárek. Bratislava: Nadácia Milana Šimečku, 1995. 126 pp. 4) Pacyfizm w Polsce [Pacifism in Poland]. By Wojciech Modzelewski. Warsaw: lnstytut Studiów Politicznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1996. 186 pp. 5) Opozice, moc, spoleenost 1969/1989, Příspěvek k dějinám "normalizace” [Opposition, power, and society 1969-1989: a contribution to the history of normalization]. By Milan Otáhal. Prague: Maxdorf, 1994. 123 pp. 6) Svetlo z podzemia. Z kroniky katolíckeho samizdatu 19691989 [Light from the underground: from the history of Catholic samizdat,1969-1989]. By Ján Šimulčfk. Prešov: Vyd. Michala Vaška, 1997. 276 pp. 7) Ugoda i Rewolucja. Wladza i opozycja 1985-1989 [Agreement and revolution: the authorities and the opposition, 1985-1989]. By Jan Skórzyński. Warsaw: Presspublica, 1995. 303 pp. 8) Nedalo se tady dýchat. Ekologie v českých zemích v letech 1968 ai 1989 [One couldn’t breathe here: ecology in the Czech lands, 1968-1989]. By Miroslav Vaněk. Prague: Maxdorf, 1996. 170 pp.
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Since Edward Said's Orientalism, segments of the academy have become increasingly sensitive to the ethnocentrism and the subtle undertones of racism that have come to be synonymous with the study of the non-Western world. Despite this postmodernist discourse, I will demonstrate how a number of important residuals of the cultural and economic vision polemicized by Said, among others, and the tendency to write for "the market, " have taken root in the production of academic and diplomatic analyses of the post-communist Balkans. [...]
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The review of: 1) Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism After Communism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), 276. 2) Leszek Balcerowicz, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), 377. 3) Kazimierz Z. Poznański, Poland's Protracted Transition: Institutional Change and Economic Growth in 1970-1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 334.
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With one exception, all former Soviet republics have been proclaimed "national states" or nation-states. They are not, however, homogeneous in the cultural or ethnic sense; all of them have numerous ethnic minorities. In some cases, such as in Latvia, the dominant ethnic group numbers barely half of the total population. In such a situation, any attempt at nation building based on the language, culture, and traditions of the dominant group alone will inevitably clash with the aspirations of the minority groups, the vast majority of whom want to retain their distinct identities and at the same time to possess an equal say in political and social life. [...]
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The postsocialist transition in Hungary has offered possibilities for dealing with old and new problems in the field of social policy. The new possibilities include the task of creating a sui generis social policy hitherto unknown under state socialism. After the elections in 1990, the Antall government and the Parliament put together the program of the reform, but this program as a whole has not yet been realized . The delay may have to do with the consequences of a radical reform of social policy: these consequences would combine growing financial burdens with changing or even diminishing social services for large segments of the population. [...]
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More than four years have elapsed since the velvet or non-velvet revolutions in East Central Europe. It is time and timely to draw the first balance sheets of these glorious and hectic years. But it is easier to state the importance of this project than to achieve it, for various reasons: Events and developments in these four years display such a confusing complexity that it is not at all easy to disentangle the main trends, patterns, and relationships. [...]
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Eastern Europe has been for the past half-century a major proving ground for experiments in both the social organization of gender and the attempted redefinition of national identity. Early pronouncements by socialist regimes in favor of gender equality, together with policies to increase women's participation in the workforce, led optimists to expect important gains for women; the internationalist bias of Soviet socialism promised to resolve the "national question, " making national conflicts obsolete; and the Party's broadly homogenizing goals bade fair to erase difference of almost every kind from the social landscape. Had these promises borne fruit, socialism would have given "gender" and "nationalism" a wholly novel articulation. [...]
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Historical periods have different meanings and implications when seen from the vantage point of women rather than men. For instance, feminist interpretations of the French Revolution show how the social theories, cultural constructions, and ideologies that inspired and guided events were "emancipatory" for non-aristocratic men, licensing their greater participation in public life, but the very same theories. Introduced a new gendering of politics that worked to exclude women of the popular classes and women of the aristocracy who had been powerful in the Old Regime. Similarly, while the Italian Renaissance is usually seen as a time of general expansion in many such cultural spheres as knowledge, artistic expression, and novel forms of social relations, the very changes which brought these for men resulted in a contraction of social and personal options for women. [...]
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This essay describes the conditions faced by the rural population of Hungary during the three-year period beginning in 1990, when free elections, held for the first time in forty-some years, introduced a democratic political system and brought hopes of improvement in the lives of the villagers. Antecedents are dealt with only where they throw light on the current situation. This focus demanded that our sources come mostly from contemporary Hungarian newspapers and recent issues of periodicals, as well as participant-observation by us and by other Hungarians willing to consult with us and to confirm, correct, or deny our perceptions. Like many of the writers of the newspaper articles, they are social scientists who apply their expertise to the study of conditions in rural society. [...]
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Of all four concepts that are enumerated unimaginatively in the title, and whose definitions have been passionately contested, Eastern Europe, for all the controversy over its identity, seems the easiest to define. It is, therefore, appropriate to begin by introducing the terms that are the basic objects of this paper. Because so many wars have been fought over nationalism and communism, both real ones and wars fought with words, it is necessary to inspect and display one's conceptual tools before beginning to use them; in a word, to state where one stands, in very broad terms, within the theoretical debate. [...]
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There were moments in Romanian culture, after 1990, when the interwar cultural heritage was evaluated in a counter-motion as to the way it had been during the communist regime. Everything that had been rejected then became apt for recognition and furthering. Cioran,Eliade, Noica, Vulcănescu, or Vintilă Horia, who had been forbidden during this or that period of communism, now had their public memory glorified. Although some of those authors had been found guilty of war crimes or others had shared the values of Romanian fascism and had been their active supporters, there are public intellectuals nowadays who think that their cultural role was far more important and have therefore turned them into idols. Right-wing extremists have symbolically called “saints of the prisons” those who haddied as detainees during the communist regime. The case of Vintilă Horia aims at proving that the support given to his memory by certain intellectuals lacks ethical and ontological arguments, since the essayist partook of the anti-democratic values to the very end of his life.
More...Remembrance in Post-Holocaust Romania. The Recent Case of General Nicolae Macici (I)
Starting from the most recent rehabilitation request in Romanian justice (General Nicolae Macici, one of the coordinators of the 1941 Odessa massacre), this study examines the case of the rehabilitation of war criminals during the communist regime and after the 1989 Revolution. In 1945, the post-war trials, in which many members of the Antonescu regime were tried, disappeared as subjects from the public sphere, though the trials went on. The series of rehabilitations began in the mid-1960s, when the communist regime put in practice a thaw and the release of political prisoners. Analyzing concrete cases of Romanian military, intellectuals, and dignitaries who obtained legal and social rehabilitation during communism, the present study shows that those rehabilitations were made with the tacit consent of the Romanian authorities. However, the trials were not retried and the convicts were not considered not guilty. The collapse of communism paved the way for the legal rehabilitation of many war criminals by the justice system through retrying the trials and acquitting those guilty of war crimes and genocide. In general, the legal rehabilitations were aimed either at honoring the memory and restoring the honor of those considered to have been victims of the Soviet occupation, or at allowing their heirs to reclaim the confiscated property of the convicts. The study shows that these posthumous post-communist rehabilitations were made possible due to the general current within Romanian society in the 1990s. This trend, maintained by a political and historiographical agenda, was stopped in the 2000s,with Romania’s access to NATO and the European Union. Although public campaigns to rehabilitate war criminals have continued, the justice system has not allowed any rehabilitation of those convicted of war crimes and genocide after 2000.
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Eastern Europe can boast of only one political patent of international and historic grandeur: bolshevism. We know that even the Russians regard it as something imported-but we are willing to regard everything we do not like as an import. However, what we like the least belongs to us the most. We do not have intense feelings about the hell of fascism, and yet it happens to be our intellectual property more than many other things. We consider it alien, but we are j ust passing the buck here as usual, though in an intellectual and not moral sense. It is true that the Communist party dictatorship was brought to the small East European countries by the victorious troops of Stalin, but we should admit that we were ready for it. [...]
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The phenomenon of "political capitalism" described in this article should be seen in a broader theoretical perspective. Nearly all in Eastern Europe agree with Fukuyama's thesis on the "end of history. " In the economic dimension it would mean to come back somehow on the capitalist road, for the myth of the Third Way is openly rejected. What is more, the capitalist system has to be built from above: one cannot expect that the expansion of the small private sector will accomplish this task by its own dynamics. In such a situation we have to answer two questions: first, what does it mean to create a capitalist economy; in other words, what are the steps that the state has to undertake? [...]
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In recent months much attention has been given to changes in the economies of Eastern Europe. Ideas of restructuring and privatization have received publicity in the West and, perhaps more significantly, have become a focus of discussion in these societies themselves. But notions of reform and experimentation are not new to the state socialist economies. At various times many of the East European socialist countries have experimented with reforms of the basic economic mechanism. Hungary is one of the socialist countries which has been at the forefront both of discussions and of real attempts at alternative forms of economic integration. [...]
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Economic reform in Eastern Europe has been made impossible by the very conditions that make it necessary. The economic promises and failures as well as the political realities and lessons of forty years of communist rule have undercut every basis of reform, especially in Poland where communist rule has been marked by periodic popular revolts that bring in their wake public discussions of the extent of the system's failure. Poland's 30-year tradition of some privatization in small-scale industries and agriculture, along with the disinclination or inability of the rulers to limit independent discussion, have provided a base for reform, but they have also contributed to Poles' sense that their leaders are powerless to follow through. [...]
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The article examines the ideological preconditions and traces the development of the process of Bulgarian “opening” to the West in the 1990s. The emphasis on the “western” spatial dimension in the country’s foreign policy after the change of power on November 10, 1989 is purposeful and provoked by the natural logic of historical analysis. In her attempt to outline the ideological parameters of this process, the author places the problem in a broader international context. This has allowed her to look from an unusual angle at known but still poorly studied facts and events of political life in post-socialist Bulgaria, as the country sought its new worthy place in the dynamically changing world order after the end of the inter-bloc confrontation.
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