Как да мислим социологически режима и обществото на комунистическа България?
(П. Кабакчиева, Комунистическите модерности: Българският случай, УИ „Св. Кл. Охридски“, 2018)
book review
More...We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
(П. Кабакчиева, Комунистическите модерности: Българският случай, УИ „Св. Кл. Охридски“, 2018)
book review
More...
W artykule odniesiono się do zagadnienia polszczyzny tiuremno-łagrowej. Autor skupił się na prezentacji słownictwa należącego do kategorii tematycznej „denuncjacja”. Materiał wyekscerpowano z polskojęzycznych relacji i wspomnień Polaków przebywających w więzieniach i obozach sowieckich. Na jego podstawie zaprezentowano faktograficzny charakter leksyki – dosadnego dowodu zbrodniczego systemu totalitarnego, mechanizmów nim rządzących. W tekście omówiono źródła poszczególnych historyzmów (z reguły będących pożyczkami z ruszczyzny), ich sensy zilustrowano cytatami ze wspomnień więźniarskich. Wywodowi językoznawczemu towarzyszą komentarze odnoszące się do społeczno-politycznych uwarunkowań zachowań językowych w okresie stalinowskim i związanych z donosicielstwem. Autor zwrócił uwagę na fakt, że postawy więźniów są wiernym odzwierciedleniem działań i ich motywacji spotykanych w świecie pozawięziennym i pozaobozowym. The article discusses the issue of Polish as it functioned in Soviet prisons and camps. The author presented the lexis belonging to the thematic category of "denunciation". He excerpted material from the stories and memories of Polish inmates. The author presents the factual character of the gathered historical terms – he claims that the words are robust evidence of the criminal nature of the totalitarian system and its mechanisms. The author discussed sources of individual lexemes in the text (they are mainly Russianisms), and illustrated them with quotations from prisoners. The linguistic argumentation in the text is accompanied with comments on sociopolitical conditions of the denunciation-related linguistic behaviours in the Stalinist period. The author emphasized the fact that attitiudes of prisoners closely reflected the actions and motivations of people living in the world outside of prisons and camps.
More...
Civilizacija koja nije sposobna rješavati probleme koje stvara svojim djelovanjem, propada. Civilizacija koja bira zatvarati oči pred svojim najvažnijim problemima, boluje. Civilizacija koja izigrava svoja načela, umire. Riječ je o tome da takozvana »europska« ili »zapadna« civilizacija, oblikovana tijekom dva stoljeća buržoaskog režima, nije sposobna riješiti dva glavna problema koja je svojim postojanjem stvorila: problem proletarijata te kolonijalni problem. Takva se Europa nije u stanju opravdati pred sudom »razuma« ni pred sudom »savjesti«, pa stoga sve češće pribjegava licemjerju koje sve manje uspijeva zavarati i tim postaje sve mrskije. Europa je neobranjiva.
More...
The review of: Katherine Verdery. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
More...
Nineteen ninety-nine was a crucial year for democracy in Romania. Two violent assaults by the coal miners against the legitimate power in Bucharest were stopped at the last moment, and the conflict in Kosovo profoundly divided the country into two camps. The pro-western camp gathered together those political leaders and intellectuals who favored integration into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) and the intervention in Kosovo in opposition to the Milosevic government. They also advocated pro-market economic reform and economic shock therapy, even if it entailed high social costs. On the other side were those political leaders who always thought that Romania should look for political friends in Moscow and Beijing. [...]
More...
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. [...]
More...
Yugoslav political ideology had a continuously ambivalent approach to history during the period after 1945. At one extreme was the interpretation of party ideologists who viewed their party (and especially events after Josip Broz Tito became its leader in 1937) in the context of the "centuries-old" desire of the South Slavs to live in a common country. This ideopolitical interpretation had its basic precondition in the "national liberation war" and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia's (CPY) leadership in the struggle against Nazi-fascist occupation from 1941 to 1945. This approach accentuated the continuity of the historical process and the Communists both as the "final" interpreters of the "laws of history" and as those who achieved their "historical role." At the other extreme was the interpretation that considered the victory of the "National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia" in the war with the Nazi-fascist occupiers and "domestic traitors" (Ustashe, Chetniks, Ballists, and so forth) as the end of the prehistory of the Yugoslav people and the beginning of their true history in the Communist paradigm. [...]
More...
Toward the end of 1991, Croatia defended itself desperately against the manifestly superior aggressive power of the predominantly Serbian forces of the Yugoslav People's Army. The calls to the international community co recognize Croatian independence, legally declared six months earlier in accordance with the Yugoslav constitution, finally were answered. The European Community announced in the middle of December that on January 15, 1992, they would recognize all former Yugoslav republics that complied with international standards regarding the protection of human and minority rights. [...]
More...
On March 12, 1990, one day after Lithuania's declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, Polish Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski said that "what happens in Lithuania is relevant to us .... We have historic relations with Lithuania. We have a long (common) past. This is not insignificant ...." Echoing this statement, Polish Sejm Deputy and Gazeta Wyborcza Editor Adam Michnik argued that Poland's historic ties to Lithuania place special obligations on it "to respond to the aspirations of the Lithuanian nation with particular sensitivity." The historical ties alluded to by Skubiszewski and Michnik refer to the union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the end of the fourteenth to the end of the eighteenth century; their statements suggest a desire to reinvigorate these ties. [...]
More...
Materials in the archive of the Institute of Slavic Studies-the premier Soviet academic institution charged with directing the transformation of East European and Polish historiography-do not greatly alter the basic story we have known , that between 1948 and 1952 the Communist regime in Warsaw undertook to reinterpret the nation's history with the help of paradigms supplied by Moscow. The new, official version of Poland's past set out to present history as a predestined march toward socialism , to depict first Russia and then the USSR as Poland's unfailing friend , proclaim class struggle as the motive force of change, and judge all scholarship-past and present-in terms of rigid class concepts. [...]
More...
Professor Robert M. Hayden's recent Comment, "Balancing Discussion of Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History" (EEPS 6: 2 [Spring 1992], pp. 207-12), raises some important questions concerning scholarly discussion. In his supposedly "balanced" discussion Hayden uses several unusual scholarly "techniques." Let us examine them in order. [...]
More...
The tragic experiences of prisoners of the second largest ghetto organized by the Germans on Polish lands (after the Warsaw ghetto) were seldom incorporated into the sphere of official commemorations of World War II in communist Poland. This text attempts to retrace the increasing marginalization of collective memory in the Łódź ghetto during 1945‒1989 and point to the peculiar niches where its cultivation was permitted. The author is interested predominantly in the issue of the communist politics of historical memory with regard to the history of the ‘closed quarter’ in Łódź, that is manifestations of the top-down formatting of collective perceptions of the occupation-period history of the Bałuty quarter, which was isolated from the outside world. In the background of these reflections appears the issue of tension between official and popular memory and a question as to when and in what contexts the content of the latter could manifest themselves in the public space of the People’s Republic of Poland. The article’s source base is publications, periodicals, and selected documentation of institutions co-creating the communist politics of historical memory.
More...
The images that come to mind when we think about the 1989 "revolutions" are, on the one hand, the victory sign and the smiling crowds and, on the other, the overthrow of idols: of such real ones as Ceaușescu in Romania and Honnecker in East Germany and of the monuments of the dead ones, gigantic granite Lenins and Dzerzhinskiis towed away and the squares around them renamed for old kings or insurrectionary leaders. New monuments are built, new (or pre-Communist) geographic names appear on the changing map of East Central Europe and the former Soviet Empire. Schools and streets are getting new names, as if in a powerful effort to sweep history clean, and the same expressions of rejection are directed against yesterday's heroes-the dissident intellectuals. [...]
More...
Professor Ljubo Boban's recent Note on "Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History" (EEPS 4 [Fall 1990}, pp. 580-92), raises important points concerning current controversies over the concentration camp of Jasenovac. Professor Boban's treatment of the issues, however, is less than well balanced. This Comment on his Note is written as an effort to further Professor Boban's aim, to "prevent all manipulations of [the] tragedy" of Jasenovac. [...]
More...
It is easy to agree with Mr. Hayden that the magnitude of a crime cannot be measured by numbers and accounting alone. Nevertheless, it is possible that Mr. Hayden does not know that, there have been explicit attempts since the war, to bring forward the numbers and the accounting of victims as the issue of foremost importance. This was surely not done without a certain aim, and not without a certain method. The logic of this accounting was rather simple: the larger the number of victims, the greater the responsibility of perpetrators. If the number of victims is very large, then the perpetrators cannot be individuals or groups, but the whole people. [...]
More...
The notorious concentration camp of Jasenovac, established and run by the Ustaša regime of Ante Pavelić in wartime Croatia, has been the subject of enormous controversy in recent Yugoslav historiography. Two authors who have exercised a notably negative influence in this controversy are Vladimir Dedijer and Milan Bulajic. The purpose of this article is to disentangle some of the contradictory claims about Jasenovac and related questions that form the underbrush of historical and parahistorical literature in present-day Yugoslavia. Further, it is to establish the actual facts about the scope of Ustaša massacres at Jasenovac. Historians and the wider public need to know the truth about Jasenovac for its own sake, for the sake of appreciating the true dimensions of this human tragedy, and to prevent all manipulations of this tragedy. [...]
More...
This study discusses the role of the Russian diaspora in the instrumentalization of the Russian Federation’s public diplomacy. The main research question of this article is constructed on how Russia instrumentalizes the diaspora in its public diplomacy. Being among the countries that have the highest diaspora population due to population density,Russia applies public and diaspora diplomacy in order to strengthen its cultural and historicalties with the Russian and Russian-speaking citizens who live around the world, mainly in the old Soviet countries through the Rossotrudnichestvo Agency which was founded on 6September, 2008.
More...
For at least three decades, the relationship between politics and the writing of history in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has been a subject of interest to historians, political scientists, and others. Recent publications show the continuing strength of this interest. These writings document changes in the degree of ferment within one or another country's historical profession and in how various themes are treated, seeking to relate these to political developments; some contributors then go on to ask whether historical debates reveal evidence that socialism's scholars have some autonomy. [...]
More...
Prior to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a GRU officer named Oleg Penkovsky attempted to contact the West multiple times. He did it to such an extent that initially he was regarded as a provocateur. After his recruitment, Penkovsky was handled by a joint team of CIA-MI6 team and provided information that compromised the Soviet intelligence operations in Western countries. He also helped identify the operational readiness of nuclear missiles deployed by the Soviets in Cuba. Officially, his role was in equal parts exaggerated and downplayed by the UK and the Soviet Union. The former sought to protect the sensitive information that was obtained, the latter attempted to limit the damage he caused. Conflicting accounts identified him as either a Soviets plant or as someone who saved the West and the world. This article presents the reasons that determined him to choose the West over his own country; it discusses some of the accusations he was subjected to, particularly those that claimed he was working for the Soviets the whole time he spied for the West. Finally, it attempts to explain the importance of the information provided prior to the Cuban crisis. All these arguments support the assessment that Penkovsky was a genuine spy who offered his services to the West.
More...
In Brazil, different ethnic and social minorities (Quilombolas, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, the elderly) have expressly got recognition in the Federal Constitution of 1988 and other normative instruments as subjects of human rights. This scientific article deals with one such minority: the Gypsies. This article adopts the following problem of research: what is the relationship between colonial policies that aimed at the management of the Gypsy and the construction of the political-legal status of these peoples in Brazil? This research has made use of the following methodological resources: the participant observation of the authors in view of the legislative process of Bill 248/2015; the documentary research on the records of colonial and post-colonial laws that had directed to the management of Gypsies in Brazil; as well as the literature review, which intertwines the studies on the Gypsy question with decolonial theory.
More...