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Review of: Ovidiu Pecican, Românii. Stigmat etnic, patrii imaginare. O căutare istorică, București, Humanitas, 2022.
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Review of: Tatianei Niculescu, Englezul din Gara de Nord, După o poveste adevărată, Humanitas, 2023.
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The Austrian Monarchy, and later the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, paid a lot of attention to the economic situation in the European part of the Ottoman Empire, and to that of Macedonia in particular. Reports of diplomatic representatives in Bitola (Monastir) between December 1871 and July 1878 can serve as a confirmation of this interest. The reports by Petar Okuli and Franc von Knapich, its two consuls at the time, are proof of how important the information on the economic life of the city and its immediate surroundings was to the Monarchy. Detailed reports on trade traffic and economic life in Bitola were regularly sent from this consulate, to the higher instances, first to the Austro-Hungarian Consulate in Salonica and later directly to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria-Hungary. In this article we rely on archival documents to present an overview of the goods that were imported and exported from the city, and of its economic life.
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The Report on the work of the board and management of the Jewish religious municipality in Skopje during the election period from 1936 to 1939, which is the subject of elaboration in this paper, represents a valuable historical source that captures rather vividly the engagement of the municipality throughout this period. The text of the Report is presented in fifteen pages and consists of an introductory part, thirteen chapters and a conclusion. What is clearly visible from its content is the dedication of its board and management to deal with the challenges they faced such as the internal conditions of the municipality itself, its members, and its finances; the issues related to municipal administration and to providing aid to its poorer members in medicines, food and clothing; the cultural and educational work it engaged in, especially with respect to the education of the students, and the work of various associations it assisted – cultural, musical, and sports associations, clubs, funds, etc.
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Artykuł przybliża represyjną politykę Związku Sowieckiego wobec obywateli polskich na budowie połączenia kolejowego Akmolińsk–Kartały. Z dokumentów archiwalnych oraz wspomnień deportowanych mieszkańców przedwojennej Polski wyłania się przerażający obraz tragedii pracowników budowy najważniejszej linii kolejowej powstającej w Kazachskiej SRS w latach II wojny światowej.
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W bankowości, inaczej niż w przemyśle, władze komunistyczne wycofały się z programowej nacjonalizacji, a przyjęły formułę likwidacji prywatnych instytucji kredytowych. Uważały, że w ten sposób uzyskają kontrolę nad systemem bankowym bez konieczności ponoszenia kosztów odszkodowań dla silnie obecnego w kraju kapitału zagranicznego. W przekonaniu tym utwierdzało je występowanie, jeszcze w okresie międzywojennym, licznej grupy banków państwowych (np. Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego, Państwowy Bank Rolny i Pocztowa Kasa Oszczędności), którą wzmocniło powołanie w 1945 roku Narodowego Banku Polskiego jako banku centralnego. Nie bez znaczenia było także podporządkowanie państwu licznych banków i kas spółdzielczych. W konsekwencji do 1949 roku władze komunistyczne w pełni opanowały bankowość i przebudowały ją zgodnie ze wzorcami sowieckimi, dostosowując do tworzonego systemu gospodarki centralnie kierowanej.
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The paper examines the Soviet Union’s repressive policies against Polish citizens during the construction of the railway connection between Akmolinsk and Kartaly. Archival documents and memoirs of the deportees from prewar Poland present a terrifying image of the tragic fate experienced by those who worked building the key railway line established in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic during the Second World War.
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The people’s courts were special judicial bodies in Hungary in the wake of the Second World War, operating between February 1945 and 1 April 1950. During this period, more than 59,000 people were brought before people’s courts under Act VII of 1945. However, the people’s courts, in tandem with the prosecution of war criminals, became the controversial instrument of a regime change intended to be democratic. On the one hand, the people’s courts tried to convey the democratic values of the new political order to society, while on the other hand political justice increasingly became a tool for the Hungarian Communist Party’s aspirations for power. So far, no comprehensive summary has been published on the history of the Hungarian people’s courts. In the present article, I focus primarily on the most recent works of historians, including those who have become familiar over the years with a significant amount of proceedings from the people’s courts
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In banking, unlike in industry, the Communist authorities withdrew from programmatic nationalization, and instead decided to liquidate private credit institutions. They considered that this would allow them to achieve control over the banking system without having to pay compensation to foreign capital, which was strongly present in Poland. Their belief was reinforced by the existence, already in the inter-war period, of a large group of state-owned banks (e.g., Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK), Państwowy Bank Rolny (PBR), Pocztowa Kasa Oszczędności (PKO)), which was strengthened by the establishment of Narodowy Bank Polski (NBP) as the country’s central bank in 1945. Another significant element was the subordination of numerous co-operative banks and credit unions to the state. In consequence, by 1949, the Communist authorities had taken complete possession of the banking sector and rebuilt it along the Soviet pattern, in line with the requirements of the centrally planned economy.
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The present article examines the transformation of banking systems in the occupied eastern territories of the Second Poland Republic in 1939–1946. It briefly discusses the banking policies of the Soviet and German occupiers and the essential role they assigned to the financial institutions they established. The text is divided into three main sections: the first presents the issue of banking during the first Soviet occupation of Poland’s eastern territories in 1939–1941; the second outlines Germany’s occupational banking system in the parts of the Second Republic that were incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland and Ukraine; the third is devoted to the second Soviet occupation in 1944–1945.
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The paper explores the fates of ethnic Germans who were Polish citizens from the Pomeranian Voivodeship prior to the Second World War and who were incarcerated in KL Stutthof due to their pro-Polish and anti-German attitudes. They represented a small percentage of the group of camp inmates described as Volksdeutsche. These were people who were entered in the second category of the German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste, DVL). It has been determined that members of the group of Volksdeutsche under consideration were sent to KL Stutthof for the following reasons: on suspicion of involvement in the resistance or providing help to partisan units, as well as having knowledge about such activities and failing to report it to the German police, obtaining entry in the second category of the DVL by means of deception and slandering German police forces. Attention is drawn to the possible correlation between the pro-Polish attitudes of inmates from the second category of the DVL and the intensity of their sense of Germanness, as well as their religion. The need for in-depth research on the national identity of both the prewar German minority and the people entered in the DVL during the war has been emphasized. In order to facilitate understanding, the situation and attitudes of the German minority both before and after 1 September 1939 were analyzed in addition to the German People’s List in Pomerania and the KL Stutthof camp as a site of repression against Germans.
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The subject of the study is the constitutional regime of the independent city of Fiume during the authoritarian rule of Gabriele D’Annunzio (September 1919 — December 1920). His power was based not on legal norms, but on the will of the commander known as the prophet (vate) or the leader (duce), supported by the strength of his army. Nevertheless, in September 1920, D’Annunzio proclaimed the Charter of Kvarner — the constitution of the small state, which never came into force. The author analyzes its provisions using the formal-dogmatic approach, pointing to the modernity and originality of its regulations: gender equality, guarantees of social rights, protection of work, secularity of education, society divided into corporations, elements of direct democracy, division of powers between legislative chambers, and a lack of the head of state. Constitutional institutions are presented with consideration of the history of Fiume, studied by the historical approach. The author concludes that D’Annunzio did not belong to the fascist movement, but was rather a rival of Mussolini, with a different vision of the state and methods of rule. His Charter of Kvarner can therefore be seen as a concept for the new Italy. At the same time, the commandant was a forerunner of the methods of communicating with society which were later used by the leaders of totalitarian states.
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After the Red Army entered Poland in the summer of 1944, and the installation of a new system of power began, the communists were faced with a general social disapproval of the transformations they proposed. This was especially true of the peasants, who constituted the vast majority of Poland’s inhabitants at that time. They were afraid of introducing general collectivization of land and their forceful inclusion in the agricultural production cooperatives under strict state supervision. Meanwhile, gaining the support of at least some of the peasants seemed to remain an indispensable element in the takeover of power by the communists, who always presented themselves as representatives of the interests of economically disadvantaged social classes. An equally important intention of the authorities was to eliminate all influence of the gentry in the countryside because of their hostility to the new political order.The purpose of this article is to present the principal aspects concerning the use of the State Land Fund as an instrument for the justification of the communist government’s approach, as well as for legitimizing the social revolution in post-war Poland. Attempts were made to indicate the use of this institution to make profound transformations regarding the model of property relations in Polish agriculture, previously shaped over centuries. It was also pointed out that the above-mentioned approach was aimed at simultaneously destroying the landed gentry as an elite social class and winning the support for the communists from the peasants, who were given the land taken from the landowners. Thus, in the political reality of the time, the State Land Fund became one of the most important (and at the same time often underrated) instruments in constructing the system of totalitarian power in post-war Poland. The primary goal of the article is to show how the instrumental treatment of the legal solutions regulating the functioning of the fund was used in practice by the communist authorities acting on the Kremlin’s behalf. It seems that in the literature on the subject, there are still deficits in the search for the bases of legitimization imposed in Poland by external political and military factors of the communist government.The most important conclusions from this analysis include the negative economic effects in terms of perpetuating the defects of the agricultural system and the inability to deal with the indicated legacy of the totalitarian system within the contemporary political and socio-economic reality.
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As it might seem, the seemingly trivial event, which was the creation of employee allotment gardens by the Act of March 9, 1949 on Employee Gardens, served the Polish United Workers’ Party to strengthen its authoritarian rule. With the help of generally applicable law standards contained in the above-mentioned act, the communist authorities gained and strengthened public support, eliminated independent structures, and confiscated private property.
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The article constitutes the second part of a series devoted to analyzing the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States with respect to the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression and politically extremist speech. The author discusses the seminal case of Schenck v. United States wherein Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes established the famous “clear and present danger” standard as a means to determine the constitutionality of legislation pertaining to speech. The test allowed for criminalization of expression which had been deemed to cause such a peril. The article analyzes the original meaning of the standard, pointing out its speech-restrictive impact.
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The article discusses the roots of revolutionary totalitarianism in the thought of Edmund Burke, who is considered to be the founder of Anglo-Saxon conservatism. The author of Reflections on the Revolution in France insightfully outlined the totalitarian implications of the French Revolution at its initial stage. According to the authors, Burke accurately diagnosed the most important elements of the future totalitarian state, affecting not only institutions, but also the overall social relations and the interplay between the authority and the individual. His reflections on revolutionary ideas and revolutionary practice make him a prophet of future totalitarian regimes, which operated according to the paradigm he diagnosed. Although Burke’s theses seem commonly known, a closer analysis shows not only the depth of the inquiry into the French revolution, but also the universality of the argument applicable to other similar social upheavals, a topic the authors of the text would like to present together in a separate form.
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The participation of the SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger in the pacifications of the partisan movement in occupied Belarus remains a topic that, despite some discussion in Polish, Russian, English and German sources, demands further scholarly attention. The article brings into focus the events taking place in the summer of 1943 in the German-occupied territory of the Nowogródek and Wilno Voivodeships of the prewar Republic of Poland, which were included the German-occupied General District of Belarus (Generalbezirk Weißruthenien/Генеральная акруга Беларусь) during the war. The anti-partisan operation (Unternehmen “Hermann”) carried out by the Germans with the participation of units consisting of Germans, Austrians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians was directed against the Soviet and Polish partisans. Of course, apart from the extensive use documents of German archives, we drew attention to documents of Polish and Soviet provenance, and in particular to the memories of Polish witnesses inhabiting the area of Naliboki Forest. The aim of this article is to present the latest scope of research on the activities of the SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger in comparison with other counter-insurgency (anti-partisan) units carrying out ruthless pacification measures as part of “Bandenbekämpfung”.
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