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Trajectories of Violence in a Failing Nation State, 1918–1940
Interwar Romania was infamous for its many violent political and social scenes. Some of these scenes represented exclusionary violence in its basic form, such as riots against Jews (and sometimes against other minorities) in 1922 and most prominently in 1927. But many other forms of violence were customary in Greater Romania. Clashes between villagers, destruction of memorials and statues, armed violence against the opposition electorate, beating up of politicians and occasional revolts against the authorities concerned an ever-growing state security apparatus that was rarely able to control these eruptions. Their persistence makes them suspicious of being a systemic phenomenon. In this article I argue that violence in this widespread form was a structural characteristic of Greater Romania, the result of systemic factors in the new state. A loosening of moral constraint due to the preceding first world war, subsequent revolutions (and paramilitary endeavours) and the deficiencies of the state together had a decisive impact on the formation of a political culture that fostered violence from time to time. These factors on the one hand legitimized violence as a form of political action and, on the other hand, they resulted from and impeded successful nation building, and the realization of the state’s promises for the nation. Thus, interwar Romania became a failing nation state and as such it facilitated popular forms of violence that was widely felt being justified by the legitimacy enjoyed by the ideology of the nation-state.
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This article discusses the way in which three different generationsof Lithuanian patriots defined their relationship with the Czech nationalmovement; how the Czech national movement influenced the developmentof the Lithuanian national movement in the 19th century. The article ismethodologically based on a three-stage periodization of the national movementprovided by historian, Miroslav Hroch. It draws information primarily on thebasis of text analysis of the journals Teka Wileńska, Aušra, and Varpas, whichcan be regarded as generational ideological platforms, and correspondence andmemories of activists. The author researches the difference in the motivation ofLithuaanian-Polish patriots on one hand and, on the other, by later generationsactivists of the Lithuanian national movement.
More...Election System and Practice in Interwar Hungary
At first sight it may seem that the process of democratization in Hungary was markedly different than in the rest of the Central European region. The political system had not been democratic since 1919, and the open balloting, that was no longer used in other European countries, was restored in 1922. But on the eve of World War II, when in the most part of Central Europe democratic systems and free elections had already been eliminated, a parliamentary election were held with secret ballot in Hungary in May 1939. Taking a comprehensive look at this process and the Hungarian political-social system itself, however, important, opposing phenomena can be detected. Despite the antidemocratic election system set up in 1922, a multi-party parliament was operating and, mainly in the capital city, Budapest and in the major cities, the intellectual and cultural life was diverse and pluralistic. Compared to this, the restrictive, authoritarian elements of the system were strengthened in the second half of the 1930s, and the 1939 election, as in the past, was a non-democratic one, because apart from the voting method, the victory of the hegemonic government party was ensured by countless measures within or beyond the boundary of law. The study describes these features in the Hungarian electoral system starting in 1922 (open balloting, the use of government-dependent public administration, limitations on the right to vote, the restrictive nature of the nomination system, the disproportionate allocation of mandates, etc.) and demonstrates their corrupting influence on the voting behaviour, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about actual political preferences and opinions from the election results.
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Historical and cultural memory is put into practice through narratives. As a narrative medium, literature plays an important role in the process of transformation of the past events in cultural memory. This transformation includes critical reflection or affirmation of various aspects of memory and its social context. Literary texts in this paper include short stories of Jan Drda, Josef Škvorecký and Zdeněk Rotrekl which deal with the final days of the World War Two.
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The article aims to show fundamental changes in one of hundreds of example published in Postila katolická (1691) by a Czech Jesuit Matěj Václav Štajer. The plot, worldwide known as the “awakened sleeper” (number 1531 in Aarne-Thompson-Uther system), appeared in literature in two basic forms: the older one was included into The Arabian Nights Entertainments, but all early modern versions are based on newer precedent of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy: he carried a drunken peasant into his own palace and celebrated him as a lord for one day. In the evening, all changes were put back and the sleeping peasant (again drunk) was returned into the street. Undoubtedly, this plot has a carnival character in Bachtin`s meaning, but all literary interpretations of early modern humanists (especially Ludovicus Vives) and religious writers (e. g. Ludowicus Hollonius, Christian Weise, Johannes Masenius, also Matěj Václav Štajer) put extraordinary moral and anagogic emphasis on parallel between one exceptional day and a whole life – dream; paradoxically, Philip the Good was mentioned as a typical example of a virtuous, pious and prudent aristocrat. Interpretations of this plot in lower social classes were free of all moral aspects: low urban and also rural texts put emphasis on the superordinate mockery of the drunken peasant, his immorality and incapability. In the early 17th century, a very clear example of this attitude is a Polish farce Peasant became a king: this comedy with a drunkard is organised by Polish soldiers. Drama Jeppe of the Hill (1723) by Ludwig Holberg is undoubtedly very important, because we can see a shift to a new matrimonial derision and morality: Jeppe (after a “dream day”) was sentenced to ludicrous death, but after he had been hanged at gallows, his life started in the same way again. Plots rather analougous to Holberg`s attitude appeared in Czech literature in the18th century in a farce Hašteřivá žena a zoufánlivý manžel (A Shrewish Wife and a Desperate Husband, 2nd half of the 18th century) from Kravaře in north Moravia and in the prosaic form in two jest books written by a teacher Antonín Borový from Zlatá Koruna in southern Bohemia (1792, 1796). Both versions are very similar and propably have a close relationship: a drunkard (Gibsa in Moravian text, Rylps in Borový`s version) was put in a dark room with various infernal signs at first, and later he awakes up in bright room with eternal look – so he thinks he was in the hell and heaven. This experience brings about a reconciliation with his wife and changes his all life, especially in the Moravian version. In my opinion, the changes in the plot of “awakened sleeper” mentioned above show a fundamental shift in early modern thinking. At first, it shows the difference between a late medieval spontaneous carnival and humanistic moral commentaries (with emphasis on the state order and the idea of an exemplary Christian ruler). It also discloses a shift of the social target of the mockery: it is a drunk peasant in older texts and a foolish hen-pecked husband in the late 18th century.
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This article deals with the literary portrayal of a Turk as a hero and with the thematization of Turkish battles and Turkish life in Slovak literature of the 16th and 17th century. We will examine genres of Latin humanistic poetry such as hodoeporicon, epigrams, civic-political compositions (including works of a Czech exile Jakub Jakobeus); historical poetry in its developmental transformations with a reflection of the Czech press about the Battle of Mohács; and Baroque memoir prose (Štefan Pilárik senior). The picture of a Turk is rather prevailingly a picture of an enemy, a cruel murderer or a traitor; in a religious poetry depictions of horrible deeds of Turks are as a “Turkish scourge” connected with the traditional scourges of famine and plague and with appeals to do penance.
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In this article I sketch out the general outlines of the so-called ‘Great Polish Emigration’ after the November Uprising (i.e. after 1831) from the (broadly understood) intellectual history perspective. Subsequently I present the wider intellectual background, attempting to place the output of the émigrés in the longer-term intellectual perspective of Polish history. I focus on the main dimensions and reasons underlying the ideological and conceptual evolution of the Polish community that emerged in exile. By evoking the most striking examples of their conceptual and organizational innovations and examining the scale of their publishing activity, I conclude that they brought about substantial changes in many spheres of action and reasoning. In the last part of the article I compare the Great Polish Emigration with similar phenomena in Europe, as well as with precedents and succeeding emigrations in Polish history. In conclusion I try to answer the question posed in the title, i.e. whether the emigration after the November uprising was really ‘great’.
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Based on the analysis of documents from the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav archive collections, the paper deals with the emigration of Czechoslovak citizens to the West through the territory of socialist Yugoslavia. Even though this phenomenon appeared already in the 1960s with the boom of Czechoslovak mass tourism on the Adriatic coast, our chronological focus lies on the 1970s and 1980s. During this period of so-called “normalisation”, the Yugoslav road became one of the most important paths of emigration to the Western countries. The paper argues that despite the efforts of Czechoslovak communist government to hinder the emigration, the urgent need to grant the raising consumption demands on the side of citizens, drove Husák’s leadership to gradually loosen the requirements for tourist trips to Yugoslavia. Thus, in the mid-1980 far more than half a million of Czechoslovaks were allowed to spend their vacations on the Yugoslav sea per year, even if thousands of them used this opportunity to flee to the West.
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The study focuses on the statistical evaluation of data on crime in1882–1911 published in contemporary records. Firstly, a descriptive analysis is used to compare selected characteristics of persons condemned to death. Secondly, a multinomial logistic regression model is used to identify and statistically test factors determining whether a felon deserved pardon or was eventually executed. The final evaluation of the results of both analytical methods points out the differences in various parameters of criminal behaviour and its treatment on the side of the state across the lands of the Cisleithanian part of the Habsburg Monarchy.
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The issue of crime and the underworld at the time of the establishment and stabilization of the socialist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia remains a seldom addressed topic. After the Second World War, Czechoslovak elites wanted to establish a perfectly virtuous and harmonious society that would avoid the mistakes and vices of previous political-economic systems. The ethos of the struggle for a better world characterized the postwar media discourse as well as the specific administrative, legislative, and legal actions of the postwar governments. Following their takeover of power, the Communists continued the “pursuit of a virtuous society,” which culminated in radical effects. But in practice, political elites were confronted with the indisputable fact that crime had not disappeared and showed no signs of its early extinction.The aim of the presented text is to outline the basic features of postwar crime, both in terms of its representations in the public space and in terms of specific acts and the involved actors. The aim to start directly after the war is the chronological and the conceptual starting point of this text. The second limit is the adoption of the new Criminal Code in 1961, an updated version of the 1950 code, which, with various amendments, was in effect until 2005 inSlovakia and until 2009 in the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, the Constitution of July 1960 declared Czechoslovakia to be a socialist state. The analysis uses audio-visual sources and the press, which are subject to a contextual examination, and the reports and statistics from the funds of the Ministry of the Interior and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as the daily records, protocols, and files stored in the Archive of the Security forces and thePublic Security Corps Fond.
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In the end of October 1967, a spontaneous demonstrations of students protesting against poor living conditions in Prague´s Strahov Dormitory, was quashed with force. The author asks a question why something seemingly as trivial as a power blackout in a student dormitory resulted, at the end of the day, in the disintegration of structures of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth at universities. In doing so, he follows the grammar of the social conflict through a prism of social movement formation and of the so-called politics of the street. The author describes a shift in the attitude of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia toward students in the 1960s, as the latter started assigning greater importance to intelligentsia than before, embarking upon the so-called policy of trust toward students, its aim being to make them more involved in solutions of university and social problems. The author also notes a step-by-step emancipation of students and the emergence of an idea of self-governing students´ bodies, independent on official structures which were criticized as non-functional. In this respect, the author analyses conflicts with security forces during youth and students´ festivities in Prague (such as May Day gatherings in the Petřín Park and later during Majáles (“Coming of May festivities”) processions, ultimately ending in punishments of students labelled as “rioters”. He states that the confrontations taught students to adopt strategies helping them avoid repressions (such as avoiding any “disorderly conduct”, not criticizing the ruling party and the Soviet Union directly, having their own stewards to maintain order); on the other hand, the security machine learnt to respect the students´ authority and to behave with restraint. The result was a consensus on how to manage the social conflict and keep it non-violent. The tacit agreement of university students, police, and leaders of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth collapsed when policemen intervened with force against an unplanned and peaceful demonstration of students from the Strahov Dormitory, who had long been trying in vain to resolve their accommodation problems. After two months of investigations, none of the protesters or the intervening policemen were punished; however, requirements of students, such as the right to similar protests or inviolability of the academic soil, were not granted as well. Students blamed the leadership of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth for the unsatisfactory outcome, and started to leave its structures en masse. In 1968, they founded their own self-governing organization, independent on both the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Czechoslovak Union of Youth.
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Petro Shelest (1908–1997), the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was one of the strongest advocates of an armed invasion of Czechoslovakia among Soviet leaders in 1968. The Soviet leadership tasked him to maintain contacts with the so-called healthy forces in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; in the beginning of August, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Vasil Biľak (1917–2014) secretly handed over to him the notorious “letter of invitation” in public lavatories in Bratislava. The author asks a fundamental question whether it is possible to identify a specific Ukrainian factor which stepped into the Prague Spring process and contributed to its tragic end. He attempts to capture Shelest’s position in the decision-making process and describe information that Shelest was working with. To this end, he has made use of reports of the Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti – KGB) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on developments in Czechoslovakia and reactions thereto among Ukrainian citizens produced in the spring and summer of 1968, which were being sent to Shelest and other Ukrainian leaders. These documents have lately been made available in Ukrainian archives and partly published on the website of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Their analysis brings the author to a conclusion that they were offering a considerably distorted picture of the situation. Instead of relevant information and analyses, they only present various clichés, ideological rhetoric, inaccuracies, or downright nonsenses. Their source were often members of the Czechoslovak State Security who were often motivated by worries about their own careers and existence and were acting on their own. The uncritical acceptance of the documents contributed to a situation in which in the leader of the Ukrainian Communists and other Soviet representatives were creating unrealistic pictures of the events taking place in Czechoslovakia, believing that anti-socialist forces were winning, anti-Soviet propaganda was prevailing, and Western intelligence agencies were strengthening their position in Czechoslovakia, and that there was a threat that the events that had taken place in Hungary in 1956 would repeat themselves again. As indicated by his published diary entries and other documents, Petro Shelest was using these allegations both in discussions inside his own party and during negotiations with Czechoslovak politicians. Just like in the case of the leaders of Polish and East German Communists, Władysław Gomułka and Walter Ulbricht, respectively, the principal reason why Shelest was promoting a solution of the Czechoslovak crisis by force was, in the author’s opinion, his fear of “contagion” of his own society by events taking place in Czechoslovakia which the Ukraine shared a border with.
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This article discusses to what extent can historians use literary fiction as a historical source for their research on technocracy in state socialist Czechoslovakia. This case study focuses on the literary work of Czechoslovak economist and writer Stanislava Vácha. Since the 1950s to 1990s Vácha wrote numerous novels about socialist managers and economists. This article argues that Vácha’s novels are unique historical sources providing valuable insights in the mentality of professional middle class in Czechoslovakia before 1989. While using Vácha’s novels and similar materials as historical sources historians are able to expand our knowledge of social and cultural history of expert cultures in state socialist era.
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The ten-member team of authors, under the lead of Jiří Knapík and Martin Franc, in their collective volume entitled "Mezi pionýrským šátkem a mopedem: Děti, mládež a socialismus v českých zemích 1948–1970" [Between a Pioneer Scarf and a Moped: Children, Youth and Socialism in the Czech lands in 1948–1970] (Praha, Academia 2018) deals fairly successfully with the task of sketching a comprehensive picture of childhood and growing up in the Czech lands in the period between the communist coup and the beginning of the normalization era in Czechoslovakia. In the chapters thematically focused on the perspectives of state, party and parents as authorities, on the world of children and youth under Czechoslovak socialism ,on the transformation of youth organizations, and on school and the extra-curricular life and activities of the actors, they seek to trace how an attempt at a radical change in educating the young post-war generations, shifting from liberal individualism to collectivist ideals in building the new social order, developed and was applied in practice. The volume also deals with contemporary problems, such as social pathology and the social protection of children and youth in the Czech lands. For the reviewer, the most valuable contribution of the work is the authors’ success in proving continuities in the approach to educating children and youth after the communist coup, which resisted ideological pressures for a radical revision of values and mentality and which merged with a more general change in lifestyle that formed a socialist consumer society in the 1960s.
More...Post-1989 Privatization in Poland through the Eyes of Factory Workers
The subject of this review is the monograph "Cięcia: Mówiona historia transformacji" [Cuts: An Oral History of the Transformation] (Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej 2020) by Aleksandra Leyk and Joanna Wawrzyniak. The book is the output of a larger project conducted at the University of Warsaw between 2010 and 2018. The project gathered the life stories of workers of initially socialist enterprises in Poland, which were then privatized through foreign direct investment in the 1990s. The review argues that although the volume lacks a comprehensive analytical and interpretive framework, the highly readable oral histories that form the core of the book are an invaluable historical source in themselves. The review briefly compares the book to the somewhat similar publication "Telling the Great Change" (eds. Kaja Kaźmierska and Katarzyna Waniek, Łódź 2020), which attempts to capture the experience of the post-1989 systemic transformations in Poland on three generational cohorts, using the sociological method of biographical research. While the latter publication offers a robust conceptual framework, "Cuts" leaves the burden of interpretation to the reader. Both approaches, the reviewer suggests, are valid and complement one another. The value of Leyk and Wawrzyniak’s monograph lies in creating a rich historical source that does not offer clear-cut answers and demonstrates the complexity of lived experience in an era of rapid modernization, both socialist and capitalist.
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In the introductory essay to the thematic section “Citizen Complaints in Communist Czechoslovakia”, the authors present the theoretical background of this project as well as foreign research into complaints made to official institutions in communist dictatorships (especially in the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union). They draw on the concept of the “shifting boundaries of dictatorships” that has emerged in German historiography since the 1990s in an attempt to clarify the embeddedness of communist rule in the interactions and interrelationships between power structures and society in the GDR and how it played out primarily in the space of the everyday. As an authentic and largely preserved source, citizen complaints provide a number of valuable impulses for the analysis of the functioning of the communist system and the problems that resonated in society, despite their considerable degree of subjectivity. In doing so, they focus on the main interpretative frameworks for interpreting this type of source as inspired by foreign research. The first framework interprets complaints and suggestions as a specific, “top-down” directed way of resolving and dampening social conflicts, which in principle did not undermine the position of the ruling party, but on the contrary supported it. As soon as this method stopped meeting the expectations raised, however, it ceased to function as a “safety valve” and may have contributed to the destabilization of the system. Another scholarly approach views grievances more as a tool for advancing personal and group interests, in which space for negotiation opened up and in which the pragmatic use of ritualized language was applied. In this context, the authors conclude that the purposeful appropriation and use of ideological discourse had an ambivalent effect on the stability of communist rule and depended mainly on how rigidly or flexibly the official institutions were able to respond. The authors find the approach of analysing shifts in the content and style of grievances particularly productive, as it attempts to reconstruct changes in communist everyday life, values, attitudes and the collective mentality of actors. The last part of the text presents the terminology and methodology used by the authors in their research project "Pohyblivé hranice diktatury ve světle stížností a anonymních dopisů československých občanů v letech 1948 až 1989" [The Shifting Boundaries of Dictatorship in the Light of Complaints and Anonymous Letters from Czechoslovak Citizens Between 1948 and 1989] and introduces the articles in the thematic section.
More...Výbor lidové kontroly SSR a agenda stížností, oznámení a podnětů občanů
The People’s Control Committee of the Slovak Socialist Republic (Výbor ľudovej kontroly Slovenskej socialistickej republiky – VĽK SSR) was the highest control body in the eastern part of the Czechoslovak Federation from its establishment in 1971 until its termination in 1990. An important part of its work was monitoring the agenda of citizen complaints, statements and suggestions, which represent an important source for our understanding of society and its interactions with the state authorities and bodies during the period of Czechoslovak normalization. The People’s Control Committee dealt with submissions directly addressed to them, but also kept records of submissions addressed to all Slovak ministries, other central bodies and national committees. The study outlines the Committee’s competences, staffing, its legislative framework, the scope of its activities and its functioning. It follows the development of the number of submissions and their handling in detail, as well as the Committee’s methodological and control activities in relation to the people’s control bodies at lower levels. These activities were carried out by the staff of the Complaints Department alongside other departments of the Committee, sometimes in cooperation with other state and party institutions and also with the assets of the Complaints Department, whose members were released from their jobs to participate in the inspections. Based on contemporary analyses and summary reports on the handling of the complaints agenda, the author observes that despite the officially declared importance of this activity and repeated efforts to streamline the process, the Committee was not satisfied with the results it achieved and criticized the numerous shortcomings both in the handling of complaints and in the approach of the authorities. The author concludes by recalling the situation after the fall of the communist regime in November 1989, when the Committee had to deal with a significant increase in the number of complaints and returned to reviewing some previously rejected submissions. The Committee’s activities were terminated at the end of August 1990, when it was replaced by the Ministry of Control of the Slovak Republic.
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The heroes of the book "Vzdorovali nacistům: Sharpovi a jejich válka", originally published in English as "Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War" (Boston, Beacon Press 2016), are the Unitarian reverend Waitstill Sharp (1902–1985) and his wife, Martha Sharp (1905–1999) of Massachusetts. Both received outstanding credit for humanitarian missions commissioned by the American Unitarians to provide asylum, on the eve of and during the Second World War, to those at risk in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Vichy France. The author of the book is the American publicist and documentary filmmaker Artemis Jukowsky, the Sharps’ grandson. In his biography he concludes that his grandparents saved at least 125 lives and significantly helped hundreds of others at risk. Jukowsky uncovers in a popular and readable style a fascinating story that remains in the shadow of Sir Nicholas Winton’s famed rescue mission, but much remains unsaid of the post-war fate of the Sharps and the story of their private lives.
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