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Right after WWII, Eastern European countries stood at a crossroads, witnessing, to name but a couple, communization of the state and transfer of millions of ethnic minorities, most notably Germans. Postwar Czechoslovakia was no exception. Czechoslovakia had had three republican periods: the first republic from its independence in 1918 to the collapse in 1938, the second from 1938 to the Nazi occupation in 1939, and the third from 1945 to the beginning of Communist Party rule in 1948. The third republic in particular embraced many alternatives for future social policies, neither capitalistic nor communistic. Focusing on the housing policy from 1945 to 1948, this article aims to elucidate postwar Czechoslovakia’s search for the optimum social policies, addressing the difference between the prewar and the postwar period. I also examine the policy of the transfer of the German population and the settlement of Czechs in the Czech border area, as it was against this backdrop that the new housing policy took form. While the last president of the first republic, Eduard Beneš, returned as president of the new Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party was dominant in the government. On the one hand, the new republic resembled its prewar predecessors in terms of parliamentary democracy. On the other hand, undertaking the nationalization of large enterprises, land reform, and a planned economy, the postwar government attempted to differentiate itself from the prewar regime that had resulted in the Nazi’s invasion and the collapse of the state. The Communists as the largest group in the government could propose their own postwar reforms disposed not toward Soviet-type socialism, but toward “the Czechoslovakian way” or “the bridge between the East and the West.” The highest on the agenda for postwar reconstruction was the housing policy. The postwar government launched a “two-year plan,” the first planned economy for the reconstruction of Czechoslovakia. Notably, the government planned to build and supply 125,000 houses from 1947 to 1948. The government and architects worked in tandem to upgrade the poor prewar housing conditions by revising prewar housing laws. On the one hand, socialist parties and architects criticized the prewar liberalist housing market, exhorting the introduction of state control of the market. Some architects were enthusiastic about grand apartment buildings containing small houses as the socialist type of housing of the future. On the other hand, based on the housing law of 1921, the government decided to provide subsidies for family houses with 80 m2 of floor space, instead of 34 m2 as had been stipulated in 1937, with a view toward improving the housing environment. Moreover, the new government adhering to the Czechoslovakian way, neither liberalist nor socialist, even allowed private properties, while some architects influenced by Soviet architecture insisted on the entire socialization of houses and land.
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This article aims to analyze the forest policy of the Habsburg government. Bosnia-Herzegovina was mainly agricultural land under the Habsburg monarchy. According to the census in 1910, about 88 percent of the inhabitants were engaged in agriculture. In addition, the surface area of Bosnia-Herzegovina was 51,155 square kilometers of which more than half was forest. Negatively evaluating the governance of the Habsburg authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina in general, historiography considers its agricultural policy a particular failure. Although the forest (including the pasture) was essential for the annual revenue of Bosnia-Herzegovina and for the farm management and livestock breeding of the peasant population, only slight attention has been paid to the forest policy. For example, Sugar and Begović studied the national forest development policy under Habsburg rule but did not engage in study of the forest administrative system and regulation of the inhabitants’ usufructuary rights (in German, Servitut). Imamović explains this problem, but he does not handle the entire policy. Under such research conditions, this article focuses on these problems.
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After World War II Poland experienced a drastic change in the ethno-national composition of the state as a result of the exclusion of national minorities following the shift of her frontiers. The new Polish-Soviet frontier follows quite closely the so-called Curzon line that was considered as the ethnographical borderline between Poles and Ukrainians. In consequence of this shift of frontiers most Ukrainians, the largest national minority in prewar Poland, found themselves on the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, or Soviet Ukraine, while it is estimated that there remained as many as 700,000 Ukrainians on the Polish side. By the summer of 1947, these Ukrainians had been excluded from Polish society. The purpose of this article is to examine how the Ukrainian minority problem was settled in postwar Poland and to demonstrate the decisive role played by the Communists in this settlement.
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This paper elucidates the plans for Korea’s neutralization by Russia between 1900-1903 and evaluates its connection with Count Witte’s Manchurian policy It deals with a series of three attempts to realize Korea’s neutrality under the auspices of a “joint guarantee by the Powers,” which was invented by the Russian government. In most of the literature reviewed, discussions about Russia’s Korean neutralization plans have failed to view them as policies initiated by the government as a whole, and tended to interpret them only as impromptu, unauthoritative proposals by Russian Ministers on the spot. Witte, as the Russian Minister of Finance who had the greatest influence in Russian East Asian affairs, sought to strike separate under-the-table deals with Japan concerning K orea’s neutrality. Japan in fact wanted a free hand for itself in the Korean peninsula, however, which seemed to Russia absolutely unacceptable in view of Korea’s paramount strategic significance. This study shows that Korea’s neutralization was Russia’s ultimate goal, and this goal conflicted with lapan’s stance on the Korean and Manchurian issues. In the end, these tensions contributed to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.
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In Russia, the printing press began to develop rapidly during the era of the Great Reforms under the reign of Aleksandr II (1855–1881). At the same time, readership expanded, implying not only a rise in the number of readers but also a change in the readership structure. A. I. Reitblat analyzed this changing readership structure in his Ot Bovy k Bal’montu (Moscow, 1991), in which he divided readers into three groups: (1) intellectual readers (scholars, students, and intelligentsia) who read voluminous academic journals and polite literature; (2) semi-intellectual readers (merchants, middle and lower class officials, servants, intellectual workers, etc.) who read illustrated journals and popular novels; and (3) village readers (peasants and migrant workers) who read religious books, educational pamphlets, and lubki (booklets with illustrations and short texts on wood blocks or copper plates). His study provides important insight, particularly related to the inadequately studied Russian readership in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, his study has two shortcomings: One is that his scheme is too static to demonstrate the emergence of new readers and the accompanying change in the readership structure, and the other is that he relates each group of readers to one particular printing medium too clearly. This paper aims to resolve these problems and further explore the readership analysis of the period after the Great Reforms.
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It is common knowledge that the northeastern Chinese port of Dalian was constructed by the Russian Empire between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. However, previous studies in Russia and Japan only focused on the plan of the city. Hence, answers to questions such as why this port was constructed and what kind of trade was conducted under Russian rule (1898-1904) are still unclear. Although many researchers reported, without finding statistical evidence, that Dalian’s trade had limited success under Russian rule, their opinions are subject to debate. The purpose of this paper is to examine the trade in Dalian under Russian rule from the statistics sourced from the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), and analyze the economical conformation changes in the Russian Far East, which was caused by the rise of Port Dalian.
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This article examines the Czechoslovak way of parliamentary democracy as it confronts the World Depression, specifically during its first phase from the outbreak of economic crisis until 1932. Three features were characteristic of political structure in Czechoslovakia. First of all, there were more than 15 parties reflecting the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of the Republic. Political parties were widely spread on the two dimensional space. The first dimension was ethnical, setting the Czechs in the centre and the Slovaks, the Germans and other smaller ethnic groups on the sides. The second dimension was socio-economic, namely, labour, agricultural, catholic and industrial. From more than these 15 parties, at least five were necessary to form a majority coalition for government. The second feature was the predominance of the Agrarian Party, which became the mass political party of the Czech organized agricultural interest. Largely due to the support from the agricultural Slovakia, the Agrarian Party became the biggest party in Czechoslovakia and used its power to enforce policies for the benefit of agriculture. Its interest-oriented political style influenced the entire Czechoslovak political scene between the wars. The last feature was the multiplicity of parties representing the working class. In addition to the multiethnic Communists, there were socialist workers, who were first ethnically divided, and then further split along dogmatic lines, such that the Czechoslovaks and the Germans had two socialist parties each - the Social Democrats and the National Socialists.
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