Katyń: The Kremlin’s Double Game

Author(s): Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov / Language(s): English Issue: 04/2015

Using the cover of state secrets in order to suppress and conceal the conclusions of the Katyń investigation is a violation of current Russian law. And yet Russian prosecutors have engaged in a cover-up of the documentation involved in the long-standing international investigation into the Katyń Massacres of 1940. The outcome of the investigation is a far cry from a truthful accounting, instead attesting to the prosecutors’ eagerness to avoid any indictment of the USSR’s former top leadership, and more generally to their attempts to sweep the entire affair under the carpet. First, the Katyń Massacres are characterized not as a war crime but merely as an abuse of power by authorities. Second, the scope of culpability has been deliberately circumscribed: both Stalin and the Politburo members who approved the massacres have been absolved of blame. Third, the inquest shows serious lapses, as no complete list of victims has been made public—an essential step for both completeness of the investigation and for the possibility of the victims’ subsequent rehabilitation. This article explains in detail the political and legal logic behind this treatment of Katyń-related documentation by the Russian political establishment since the dawn of the twenty-first century.

INTERPRETATIVNI NARATIVI I PERSPEKTIVE PROŠLOSTI

Author(s): Safet Bandžović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 85-86/2020

History is a multifaceted process. Everything that occured has many perspectives. The past is more complex from all research models and ideological learnings. Thanks to different methodological interventions which also depend on chosen viewing angles, they can be identified in many ways. They cannot be changed, but they can be seen in many ways. Contemporaries are a great source of knowledge about different events, epochs and its contents which do not have many traces in documentary material. Funded journalism is related to history and it is one of the benchmarks of social maturity. Ramiz Crnišanin (1925-2017), a witness and a chronicler of his time, gave through his literary and intellectual involvment a great contribution to multiperspective study of the newer history of Sandžak and Bosniaks, as well as their valorization and interpretation.

Transitions Online_Around the Bloc-Monday, 26 October 2020

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English Issue: 11/02/2020

Regional headlines: Czech PM again mired in conflict-of-interest charges; Catholic Church under fire in Poland; Russia and chemical weapons.

“Capital of Despair”. Holodomor Memory and Political Conflicts in Kharkiv after the Orange Revolution

Author(s): Tatiana Zhurzhenko / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2011

The Great Famine of 1932–33, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor and silenced for decades by the Soviet regime, holds a special place in national memory. It was after the Orange Revolution that the Holodomor became the core of a new identity politics, which conceptualized the Ukrainian nation as a “postgenocide” community, a collective victim of the Communist regime. But the official interpretation of the Famine as a genocide met ambivalent responses in the regions. While formally complying with the official political line, the regional political elites in Eastern and Southern Ukraine often refused to accept the official interpretation of history and sabotaged orders coming from Kyiv. The present article focuses on the official commemoration of the seventyfifth anniversary of the Holodomor in Kharkiv, the former capital of Soviet Ukraine and epicenter of the famine. The “memory wars” in Kharkiv during 2006 to 2009 have revealed more than just tensions between the center promoting a new national identity and a reluctant “Sovietized” region adhering to its political mentality and commemorative culture. In fact, the official narrative of the Holodomor as a genocide and the corresponding memory regime have been contested, renegotiated, and modified on the regional level, through the conflicts and the bargaining of the local political actors. The borderland identity of Kharkiv, its geographic proximity to Russia, added an international dimension to the local memory wars as the Holodomor issue became a stumbling block in Ukrainian-Russian relations.

The Issue of Genocidal Intent and Denial of Genocide. A Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Author(s): Edina Bećirević / Language(s): English Issue: 04/2010

This article discusses the issue of special genocidal intent and, within it, the relevance of judicially established truths to the wider historical context. It suggests that genocide researchers should not rely only on verdicts—which either deny or confirm genocide—as historical truth but, rather, use the judicial process and trial evidence as signposts to direct their research. The author uses the case study of Serbian genocide against Bosnian Muslims from 1992 to 1995 to illustrate the failings of judicially established truths in determining wider historical truth. Wartime documentation, interviews with witnesses, and court transcripts are analyzed to illustrate how this wider truth is sometimes lost when focus on the importance of supporting documents is overshadowed by a final verdict. The case of Srebrenica is outlined to illustrate how documents used in trials, as well as witness testimonies, can contribute on their own to the understanding of historical truths. In this case, a selection of trial narratives and documents is used to examine not only if there was “special intent” among Serbian political leadership to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as early as 1992, but also to determine if international community representatives were aware of that intent and ignored it consciously.

The Strange Silence. Explaining the Absence of Monuments for Muslim Civilians Killed in Bosnia during the Second World War

Author(s): Max Bergholz / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2010

Newly available documentation from the State Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina indicates that the majority of sites where Muslim civilians were killed during the Second World War remained unmarked as late as the mid-1980s. The existing scholarship, most of which argues that Yugoslavia’s communist regime sought to “de-ethnicize” the remembrance of all of the interethnic violence of the war, has failed to notice and explain this apparent bias against Muslim civilian war victims. This article seeks to answer the question of why so many sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina where Muslim civilians were killed remained unmarked after the war. It does so through the reconstruction and analysis of the wartime and postwar history of Kulen Vakuf, a small town located in northwestern Bosnia. The analysis of the dynamics of mass killing in the region reveals that the communist-led Partisan movement absorbed large numbers of Serbian insurgents who had murdered Muslims earlier in the war. The transformation of the perpetrators of the massacres into Partisans created a postwar context in which the authorities, to avoid implicating insurgents-turned-Partisans as war criminals, and the Muslim survivors, out of fear of retribution and a desire to move on, agreed to stay silent about the killings. The end result was the absence of monuments for the victims.

The Final Solution in Bulgaria and Romania: A Comparative Perspective

Author(s): Ethan J. Hollander / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2008

Accounts of the Final Solution in Bulgaria and Romania often stress the differences between the two countries, attributing Bulgaria’s relatively low victimization rate (18 percent) and Romania’s relatively high one (approximately 50 percent) to differing levels of anti-Semitism or local attitudes toward Jews. This article argues that, broken down by region, Bulgaria and Romania were actually quite similar, in that both countries participated in the victimization of Jews in newly acquired territories while protecting those in the “home country.” By investigating the complex negotiations between Nazi Germany and local officials in each of these countries, the author shows that because of their close alliance with Nazi Germany (and not despite this), the governments of Bulgaria and Romania were both able to protect their own Jewish citizens. Both countries essentially traded loyalty in military and economic affairs for concessions, delays, and limitations in the Final Solution. This observation has fascinating moral implications, since it suggests that countries could only protect their own citizens by cooperating with Nazi Germany. It also illustrates that far from being passive subjects of coercion, weak states in imperial relationships can actually bargain to change the terms of their own subjugation. Imperial hegemony is partly a product of negotiation and international contracting, not unmitigated coercion.

The Final Report on the Holocaust and the Final Report on the Communist Dictatorship in Romania

Author(s): Ruxandra Cesereanu / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2008

On 22 October 2003, with the initiative of Romania’s president Ion Iliescu, the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (ICSHR) was set up. Nobel laureate for peace and American writer of Romanian origin Elie Wiesel was appointed as its president. In spring 2006, with the initiative of Romania’s president Traian Băsescu, the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (CPADCR) was formed. Vladimir Tismăneanu, the American political scientist of Romanian origin, became its president. Both commissions were established with the purpose of producing a final report on the two forms of totalitarianism in Romania: the extreme right totalitarianism between 1940 and 1944, and the extreme left totalitarianism between 1944 and 1989. Both commissions rested on legal and ethical grounds and they addressed Romanians’ expectations and dilemmas linked to their recent traumatic history.

Narrative, Identity, State: History Teaching in Moldova

Author(s): Vladimir Solonari / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2002

There exists considerable confusion in post-Soviet Moldova about what kind of history to teach in schools. This argument is part of a wider problem of Moldovan national identity: do Moldovans constitute a separate people and (ethno)nation or should they be considered part and parcel of the single Romanian nation, torn from it by a hostile external power, that is, Russia? In accordance with this latter point of view, Russian and then Soviet authorities forcefully instilled "false consciousness" in the minds of the local population about their national identity and this false consciousness must be done away with, including by means of teaching "true" history. [...]

»Rasa«, vrijeme i revizija modernosti

Author(s): Homi Bhabha / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 25/2020

Kadgod se te riječi izgovore u bijesu ili s mržnjom, bilo za Židova u onom estaminetu u Antwerpu, za Palestinca na Zapadnoj obali ili studenta iz Zaira koji jedva spaja kraj s krajem prodajući lažne fetiše na Lijevoj obali; bilo da su rečene za tijelo žene ili obojenog muškarca; bilo da su tobože službeno izrečene u Južnoj Africi ili su službeno zabranjene u Londonu ili New Yorku, ali su ipak upisane u stroge statističke prikaze uspjeha u školi i zločina, zloupotrebe vize, imigracijskih nepravilnosti; kadgod »Prljava crnčuga!« ili »Pogledaj, crnac!« uopće nije izrečeno, ali to vidite u nečijem pogledu ili čujete u solecizmu šutnje; kadgod i gdjegod bio kad čujem nekog rasistu ili uhvatim njegov pogled, prisjetim se Fanonovog poučnog teksta »Činjenica crnačkosti« i nezaboravnih uvodnih redaka.

War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia

Author(s): Wolfgang Hoepken / Language(s): English Issue: 01/1999

Wars everywhere have always played a major role in historical memory. "Even the oldest myths and traditions deal with fighting and killing," the German novelist Hans-Magnus Enzenberger said recently, recalling this simple but no less basic historical fact. While collective memory in premodern societies was largely based on wartime experiences, the advent of nationalism in the late eighteenth century increased the importance, the political role, and the cultural significance of war memories in societies everywhere, not only in the Balkans. War memorials, celebrations, cemeteries, and other symbolic, expressions of memory were not only "sites of mourning," but, more important, they became the means of fostering a collective national identity; education, textbooks, and public discourse all combined to remind people of the duty of sacrificing for one's own nation by recalling former wars. [...]

Double Memory: Poles and Jews After the Holocaust

Author(s): Piotr J. Wróbel / Language(s): English Issue: 03/1997

Contemporary Polish-Jewish relations resemble a vicious circle. On the one hand, most Poles firmly believe that Poland has always been one of the most tolerant countries in the world and that anti-Semitism has existed only on the margins of Polish society. As far as they are concerned, there has been no such phenomenon as Polish anti-Semitism, for Poland has always been a true paradisus Judeorum. On the other hand, most Jews, especially those on the American continent and in Western Europe, claim that Poland is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world. Jews have often shared the former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir's belief that virtually all Poles received their anti-Semitism "with their mothers' milk." Often, this unfortunate polarization makes any reasonable communication, let alone consensus, quite impossible. [...]

The Cold War and the Appropriation of Memory: Greece after Liberation

Author(s): Mark Mazower / Language(s): English Issue: 02/1995

Everywhere in Europe the obsessions and polarities of the cold war era imposed themselves upon people's understandings and memories of the Second World War, but in few, if any, countries can they have done so with greater force or speed than in Greece. Well before the Truman Doctrine revealed Greece's importance as a locus for the cold war, perhaps even before the December 1944 fighting between the British and the National Liberation Front/Greek People's Liberation Army (EAM/ELAS), the left-wing resistance movement, the conflict between communism and anticommunism had overlaid and superseded the struggle against fascism. [...]

Outrageous Rehabilitations: Justice and Memory in the Attempts to Restore the War Criminals’

Author(s): Andrei Muraru / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

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.

The Reparations Game

Author(s): Petre Matei / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2020

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Romania tried to obtain West German compensation for its Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Unlike other states, Romania’s attempts failed. This can be explained not only by the dynamic of the Cold War (which imposed certain restrictions on how West Germany related to the communist states in Eastern Europe), but also by the superficial approach Romania adopted towards compensation. Generally speaking, the Romanian authorities viewed the Jewish victims in Romania merely as a number of people whose persecution could be capitalized on, following a rather rudimentary strategy. Aware of the existence of certain legal obstacles, Romania acted unofficially (through Jewish proxies) between 1967 and 1970, but formalized its actions in 1970, when it started to discuss the compensation issue directly with West Germany. During both phases, the institution in charge was the Securitate, the notorious Romanian secret police. Its representatives made serious mistakes, such as misinterpreting the German compensation legislation and wrongly assumed that they could negotiate with West Germany from a position of strength. Until the collapse of communism, West Germany refused to even begin negotiations with Romania on the compensation issue.

Ekstremizm polityczny w Nowej Zelandii

Author(s): Marcin Wałdoch / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

In this paper an author state a hypothesis that political extremism in New Zealand is a permanent phenomena that is present in New Zealand, which derives itself from globalization processes and evolves as the effect of idea’s diffusion. System theory is used as a theoretical perspective and a priori assumption that political extremism deepen state-phobia is made. Research methods such as lexical analysis and comparative analysis are used. During the research main extremist political trends are reveal, such as leftist, rightist, pro-ecological, islamic and postcolonial, and „lone-wolf” extremism. These phenomenon are highlighted in the perspective of potential security threats to the state. Ideological sources of extreme attitudes are revealed and shown in the most current political trends.

Katharina Schuchardt: Zwischen Berufsfeld und Identitätsangebot. Zum Selbstverständnis der deutschen Minderheit im heutigen Opole/Oppeln.

Author(s): Bernard Linek / Language(s): German Issue: 4/2020

Review of: Bernard Linek - Katharina Schuchardt: Zwischen Berufsfeld und Identitätsangebot. Zum Selbstverständnis der deutschen Minderheit im heutigen Opole/Oppeln. (Kieler Studien zur Volkskunde und Kulturgeschichte, Bd. 13.) Waxmann. Münster – New York 2018. 364 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-8309-3901-6. (€ 34,90.)

ROLUL POLITIC AL CORONIMELOR „PRIDNESTROVIE" / ”TRANSNISTRIA"

Author(s): Alla Ostavnaja / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

In the self-proclaimed Pridnestroviаn Moldavian Republic takes place the thorough regulation of the name of the republic in different languages: in Russian – "Приднестровская Молдавская Республика"(short form «Приднестровье»), in Moldovan (with Cyrillic spelling) – "Република Молдовеняскэ Нистрянэ" (short form "Нистрения"), in Ukrainian - "Придністровська Молдавська Республіка" (short form "Придністров'є"), in English "Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica", "Pridnestrovie", "Pridnestroviаn Moldavian Republic", they are also allowed choronyms "Pridnestrovien Moldavian Republic", "Transdniestrian Moldavian Republic", "Transdniestria". However, in parallel with officially established choronyms, other choronyms areused. It is primarily about the choronym "Transnistria".Thebenumerated choronyms not only express the translation / transliteration of the official name of the region, but represent an important part of the political symbolism of the self-proclaimed republic. Through the choronyms used, subjectivity is asserted in the formation of state identity and positioning in international relations. This topic is approached from the point of view of critical toponymy. The study showed that the conflict between Moldova and Pridnestrovie is also taking place in the toponymy area. The "toponymic struggle" fortheuse of certain choronyms pursues political objectives, as they reflect the interests of the parties to the conflict. In the Pridnestrovie weins is to the use of official choronyms, which affirm the self-proclamation of Pridnestrovie. In the Republic of Moldova, naming Pridnestrovie with choronym "Transnistria", the perception of the region as a continuity of the Transnistrian Government by the Kingdom of Romania (1941-1944) was expressed. But more of ten in the Republic of Moldova are used toponyms that require the perception of Pridnestrovie as a territory part of the Republic of Moldova.

Recenzja książki: Paweł A. Leszczyński. (2018). Irlandia Północna. Między przeszłością a nadzieją trwałej regulacji pokojowej. Gorzów Wielkopolski: Wojewódzki Ośrodek Metodyczny, ss. 116.

Author(s): Grzegorz Mathea / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2019

Pravaštvo u Gospiću od 1880-ih do 1914.

Author(s): Mislav Gabelica / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1/2018

In the article the author deals with the development of the right’s organisation in Gospić and analyses the social and ideological differences amongst its followers, which according to his judgement caused permanent conflicts within this organisation. The author observed two rights’ groups in Gospić in the period from 1895 to 1914: one which gathered together members of Gospić’s higher social class and where high ranking merchants on the property ladder were dominant, and the other, which in relation to the first group gathered together the lower social class and where alongside merchants of a lower income the clergy of Gospić’s surroundings participated to a greater extent. Although both groups are considered as having members of the Party of Rights, the author notes the social differences amongst them as well as the great ideological differences, which were particularly visible in the national section of the Party of Rights agenda. The first, more affluent rights’ group, in which Marko Došen and Lovre Pavelića nd his sons stand out, placed the constitutional part of the rights’ agenda in first place, and aspired to the realisation of Croatian state independence in collaboration with the Croatian Orthodox population, recognising, in turn, the population of Serbian national character. The second group, in which Ivan Bušljeta, Dragutin Smojver and the priest Stipe Vučetić standout, placed the national part of the Party of Rights’ agenda in first place, in accordance which it negated the Serbian national character to the Croatian Orthodox population, and it avoided any kind of contact with the political representatives of that population, due to which they were forced to give it national concessions in Croatia. The conflict between these two groups in Gospić culminated in 1908, when on a national level there came the split of Starčević’s CroatianParty of Rights, within which both Gospić’s Party of Rights groups had operated to that time.The author noted a calming of this conflict in the years leading up to the First World War and considers whether amongst other things it happened because of the fact that in that time Pavelić-Došen’s group also assessed that its policy of a Croatian-Serbian accord had failed.