Originile şi responsabilităţile Primului Război Mondial la un bilanţ istoriografic centenar

Author(s): Gheorghe Cliveti / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 51/2014

Probably, more than the factual register of the Great War, some historiographical issues, as those concerning the origins of that huge belligerent collision, are determining yet the intensive debates among scholars. Such debates seemed to be perpetuated on the alignments of the Powers which were involved by a war which tended to swell the entire World. The primary task for the scholars was to have the access to the hidden reasons, concentrated during the age of the secret diplomacy by the great alliances, as that Triple or that French-Russian, even that vaguely engaging Entente, which wandered through the origins of a World War. The debates on those origins became complicated because the manner in which the peace was achieved, in 1919, among the victor Powers and that which mainly suffered the defeat. Owing to the publications of the diplomatic documents, especially from the German, French, Austrian, Russian, and Italian Archives, the historical explanations of the origins of that War seemed to become more and more convincing. The impact of the Second World War was to be on the point to destroy the elaborating course of those explanations. And for at least a part of the historians colloquium, the impact of the Cold War was an even more destroying one. Recently, it is to be recognized, the process of Europe’s and, in time, of World’s integration is nurrishing a kind of formal or relaxing literature on so grave events, as those which covered the years 1914−1918. A more intensive approach or reference to the primary text of the origins of those events has to be the proper way for the revealing the historical truth.

Persons and Events in the Sarandapor Chronicle

Author(s): Denitsa Petrova / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

The National Museum of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, holds Lyturgion (Missal) No E 543 from the beginning of the 16th c. which was probably written in the St. Joachim of Osogovo (Sarandapor) Monastery near Kriva Palanka, in today’s Republic of Macedonia. It contains the short Sarandapor Chronicle which follows the world history from the Creation to 1512. The laconic notes mention some important moments of the Ottoman expansion and the subsequent period. The identity of the persons and the events included in the chronicle offer valuable historical information. The Sarandapor Chronicle is a copy of a Serbian work, but the history described in it is not just Serbian – it is pan-Balkan. The monks who compiled the text perceived the persons and events included in it as part of a common history.

Das andere Edirne. Typische und bleibende Abweichungen

Author(s): Ulrike Tischler-Hofer / Language(s): German Issue: 4/2015

It is argued that “typical and sticky patterns of Otherness” shape Edirne, the first Ottoman capital in Europe. This Otherness lies less in the amazing Selimiye complex alone than in the elder monuments and (proto-Bektaşi) traditions. The leading arguments are based on considerations concerning urbanity and human geography which characterize Edirne as part of the Eurasian Ottoman core. The examination shows that this old core-tradition inherent to Edirne and based on religiously motivated fighting spirit was conserved in an atmosphere of provinciality during the 400 years lasting pax ottomanica and revived in the late 19th century on the background of fundamental political, economic and social change that affected the Ottoman Empire and Edirne in particular.

Dwa spotkania z Emanuelem Ringelblumem

Author(s): Genia Silkes / Language(s): Polish Issue: 04/2015

Genia Silkes (1914-1984), a teacher and cultural activist, describes in this text, written in 1948, her two meetings with Emanuel Ringelblum. The first one occurred during a selection on 6 September 1942 and the second in the Restgetto during attempts to organize armed resistance in the ghetto. Genia Silkes’s text splendidly illustrates the evolution of the memory of the Holocaust in the first postwar years and the role played in it by Emanuel Ringelblum, a figure symbolic of both the murdered Jewish intellectuals and of civilian resistance in the Warsaw ghetto and, more broadly, in the time of the Holocaust.

A nemzetek típusai és kialakulásuk szakaszai

Author(s): Ignác Romsics / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 06/2013

A modern európai történelemben a nemzetek két alaptípusát különbözteti meg a szakirodalom, és egyben a mindennapi nyelvhasználat. Az egyikre a közös terület és az ugyanazon jogi-politikai keretekhez, tehát államhoz való tartozás a meghatározóan jellemzõ, a másikra pedig a nyelv és a kultúra azonossága, valamint a közös származás mí- tosza vagy valósága. Friedrich Meinecke, a 19. és a 20. század nagy német történésze 1907-ban Fichte és Herder megfigyeléseit elfogadva az elõzõ típust politikai vagy államnemzetként (Staatsnation), az utóbbit pedig kultúrnemzetként (Kulturnation) definiálta. E két típus földrajzi elterjedését alapul véve Anthony D. Smith, a nemzettel kapcsolatos kutatások egyik legjobb mai brit szakértõje legutóbbi könyveiben a nemzet Nyugat-Európára és az Egyesült Államokra jellemzõ nyugati, és a világ több más részé- re, így Európa keleti felére is jellemzõ keleti vagy etnikai modelljérõl ír.

Petre Borilă (1906-1973)

Author(s): Ionuț-Marian Filipescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3-4/2015

Based on archival sources recently released and on the second literature also; this article briefly underlines the most relevant points of Petre Borilă’s biography. A member of the inner circle of the communist power after 1945; Borilă had been a member of the illegal communist movement in interwar Romania. A Bulgarian from Cadrilater; a little province gained by Romania after the second Balkan War; in 1913; unsatisfied by the Romanian rule; he joined the Communist Party of Romania when he was 18 years old. Among many others party duties accomplished as a young professional revolutionary; he fought in the Spanish Civil War; he spent the Second World War in the Soviet Union; but after 1945; despite his common past with Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca; Borilă became one of the Gheorghiu Dej’s followers; political switch that allowed him to remain in power for a very long time.

Pisarstwo historyczne: trudne związki teorii z praktyką

Author(s): Anna Ziębińska-Witek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2015

Review: Ewa Domańska, Historia egzystencjalna [Existential History], Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw 2012

Around the Bloc: Former Lithuanian Holocaust Site Now a Wedding Venue

Author(s): TOL TOL / Language(s): English Issue: 08/02/2016

Critics say the local NGO running the complex has to do a much better job of marking the past of the former concentration camp.

Prispevek k zgodovini političnih sodnih procesov

Author(s): Žiga Koncilija / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1/2013

In the eternal struggles for power, political judicial processes represent one of the main manifestations of political violence or repression. We can discover various shapes and forms of such processes in almost all historical periods and socio-political systems. We can detect political judicial trials in Slovenia since the beginnings of organised political activities, that is since the second half of the 19th century. In his contribution the author refers to certain important political judicial trials in Slovenia. On the basis of archive sources he thoroughly analyses two of the more characteristic political judicial trials in two distinctively authoritarian periods of the 20th-century Slovenian history. The first example — the trials against Pavel Tepina and 28 co-defendants — belongs into the context of the most severe persecution of communists after the introduction of King Alexanders’ Dictatorship on 6th of January 1929, while the second one — the trials against Mirko Bitenc and 11 co-defendants — took place during the post-war purge, when judicial trials represented one of the main tools for the consolidation of the communist authorities and retaliation against their actual or potential opponents as well as for punishing the Nazi leaders and those who collaborated with the occupiers.

Represija na Hrvaškem po drugi svetovni vojni

Author(s): Zdenko Radelić / Language(s): Slovenian Issue: 1/2013

The repression originated and stemmed from the following essential elements: victory in the war, restoration of Yugoslavia, solving the national question and carrying out the revolution. This means that the casualties suffered during the war by the victorious side resulted in vengeance and retaliatory measures. However, revolutionary goals were most important for the formation of the repression system – in order to achieve these goals, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia retaliated against class-related, ideological and political opponents and rivals.

UNA ECO IN ITALIA DELLA PERSECUZIONE DELLE POPOLAZIONI MUSULMANE E DI LINGUA TURCA NELLA BULGARIA DEGLI ANNI CINQUANTA

Author(s): Giuseppe Cossuto / Language(s): Italian Issue: 4/2016

After the Communist takeover in Bulgaria, the new regime declared itself in favour of all minorities and inter-ethnic equality and fraternity. The new constitution had many provisions regarding minority protection and in particular guaranteed the right to mother tongue education and free development of culture for all national minorities.However, the deep social transformations organised by the new political system caused, amongst the Bulgarian Muslims, a huge emigration movement directed mainly towards the Turkish Republic.This movement was reported and analysed in its causes and effects by the Italian scholar Enrico de Leone.In the present paper has been illustrated the political actions of the Communist Government towards Bulgarian citizens of Turkish or Muslim origin during the first years of its rule.These actions, having the objective of a total assimilation firstly of the Bulgarian speaking Muslims (mainly belonging to the Pomaci minority) and of the very numerous Turkish minority of Bulgaria, has caused one of the most significative exodus of population after the Second World War.

Plagiatul lui Alin Mureşan

Author(s): Mircea Stănescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 6/2014

Our study is about the case of Alin Mureșan, researcher at the Institute for the Investigation of Communism Crimes in Bucharest, author of the volume Piteşti. Cronica unei sinucideri asistate [Pitesti, the Chronicle of an Assisted Suicide], who plagiarized our works on the reeducation, especially Procesele reeducării (1952-1960) [The “Reeducation” Trials], Bucharest, publishing house: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale “Memori” / Matrix Rom SRL, (October) 2008 and Reeducarea în România comunistă (1945-1952). Aiud, Suceava, Piteşti, Braşov [The “Reeducation” in Communist Romania (1945-1952). Aiud, Suceava, Piteşti, Braşov], Iaşi, publishing house: Polirom, (January) 2010. We identified several takeovers in contradiction to the scientific ethics, some of them bordering plagiarism, without being a specific case of plagiarism (e.g.: archive and bibliography references, in two forms, identical and exclusive, or others being added in order to cover the theft). Here, we publish only the fragments of specific plagiarism (cribs without specifying the source in page footer, when it is about ideas, concepts, chronology, thematic or wordings that are typical to an author). We subjected the case to the assessment of three persons with a reputation in the subject matter. They are the former dissident and writer Paul Goma, the political scientist and former editor of the North-American magazine ”East European Politics and Societies” Vladimir Tismăneanu, and Florian Banu, historian and researcher at the National Council for the Study of Security Archives, who analyzed, independently one from the others, our allegations. The three members of this commission took an unequivocal position, deeming that it is a case of massive, brutal and systematic plagiarism of our works. Before bringing the case to public knowledge, I notified the theft author, who –and this is significant– refused to answer. Finally, when the case became public, as a reaction strategy from the same register as his plagiarism itself, he and his associates claimed that I am jealous of his public success and suggested that my accusations were pathological in nature. An issue of Romanian context: instead of being penalized by the management of the institution where he is working, the author of the theft became later head of one of it departments.

Foreign and Security Policy of the Newly Independent States: Balancing between Two Power Centers

Author(s): Sergiy G. Fedunyak / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2014

The article is focusing on the interplay between foreign policy agenda of the post-Soviet states at the one hand and internal policy developments in these countries at the other hand. One of the main explanations why the post-Soviet elites in non-Russian republics are pursuing the so-called multi-vectorialism in the foreign policy is that it serves as a strategy to maximize the most from having good relations both with East and West, and thus trying to perpetuate the monopoly of the power. Uzbekistan is a country in case, as Ukraine (and Moldova) is (or was) indeed also. At the same time, the special relations between the elites of post-Soviet countries and Moscow are very important in shaping the foreign policy agenda of these countries as a result of the Soviet legacy, i.e. the ties of the former Communist nomenklatura with Moscow are still playing a very important role in the most of the former Soviet republics. Another relevant variable in explaining the current state of affairs in the foreign and security issues of the post-Soviet states and the still dominant role of Russia is the fact that the West (NATO and EU especially) are not very successful in trying to limit Moscow’s ambitions in the “near abroad”. This is making the leaders of most NIS to be obedient to Russia’s pretensions in lack of real support from the West in order to counteract these neo-imperial claims from the part of the former metropolis.

Belarus and its Flight from Democracy: Political Discourse and the People’s Choice at the 1994 Presidential Elections

Author(s): Natalia Koulinka / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2014

The article seeks to answer to the question: what defined people’s choice when they voted for the first time, in 1994, Aleksandr Lukashenko into office. While agreeing that there is a significant amount of research on this topic, the author aims to illuminate what exactly helped the electorate to navigate and choose between the nearly identical promises of social justice and well-being, which were made by all six candidates for the presidency in 1994. Correspondingly, the article explores key-texts created in the first years of the country’s independence (between 1991 and 1994) by the Belarusian Popular Front and its leader Zianon Paz’niak and by (and on behalf of)Aleksand Lukashenko, to date the only Belarusian President. As a result, an explanation that relies on the decoding of the voices represented by the candidates’ texts is offered. These voices were part of an ideology brought out by a new political discourse.

Restless Russia

Author(s): Andrew Wilson / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2014

This paper attempts to investigate how and why after a twelve-years period of stability Putinist social contract seemingly broke down and Russia stepped into a new period of uncertainty and crisis. The author underlines that, unwillingly, Medvedev’s presidency paved the way for the protests from the winter of 2011-2012 and fostered the regime’s crisis of legitimacy. Specifically, Medvedev’s relatively liberal rhetoric led to rising expectations among the ‘winners’ of first Putin-Medvedev era and to a growing gap between rhetoric and delivery. Moreover, the ‘Putin consensus’ was also fraying from below during the 2000s, given the population’s fading memory about the 1990s, flourishing of corruption, and migration becoming a hot issue in a booming economy and collapsing native demographics of Russian society. Finally, Putin made several crucial tactical mistakes in the run-up to the Duma elections of the 2011, failing to provide a coherent narrative for the elections, loosing some leading manipulators of the political system, and ousting some powerful regional bosses that ran powerful local machines which traditionally delivered the vote.

The Evolution and Features of the Post-Totalitarian Political Regime in the Republic of Moldova (1990-2012)

Author(s): Dorin CIMPOEŞU / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2014

This article discusses the evolution and main trends of the post-Communist political regime in the Republic of Moldova. The author’s argument is based on the premise that two opposing tendencies can be discerned in Moldova’s politics between 1990 and 2012. The first was defined by a ‘neo-Communist’ resistance and revival, while the second offered a democratic and reformist perspective, currently epitomized by the project of European integration. The author provides a comprehensive overview of the political transformations during the last two decades, focusing on Moldova’s successive governments and electoral cycles in the post-independence period. A special emphasis is placed upon the uneven, fragile and contested nature of the fledgling democratic processes, constantly weakened or thwarted by geopolitical uncertainty, corruption and the uneasy balance between political pluralism and post-totalitarian tendencies. The author’s conclusion is that Moldova’s lack of progress in comparison with its neighbors was due, on the one hand, to the persistence of ‘totalitarian mentalities’ and, on the other, to the nature of the country’s transition to democracy, which was plagued by the exponential growth of social inequalities, the aggressive and generalized corruption on all levels of society, by a state with politicized and inefficient institutions and by an incompetent and immoral political elite.

Russian Identities and the Idea of International Society 20 Years after the Fall of the USSR

Author(s): Andrey S. Makarychev / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2014

In the paper the author analyzes different Russian international identities of the post-Soviet period. Stressing that the Russian identity discourse cannot be simply reduced to the Soviet one, the paper emphasizes the plurality of Russia’s identity discourses. At the same time the menu of Russian foreign policy identities to a large extent depends upon a variety of international structures in which Russia may imagine to engage with. The paper suggests that there are four possible types (models) of the international society, which different Russian identities might be inscribed in. The author seeks to explain the range of Russian international identities by the variety of the patterns of international society which co-exist and offer alternative policy strategies for Moscow.

Ускользающая современность: постсоветская модернизация Азербайджана

Author(s): Sergey Rumyantsev / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1-2/2014

The article focuses on the debates situation of post-soviet modernization and transformation of Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani economy failed to become a market economy, and remains instead predominantly based on the extraction and sale of oil and natural gas. Cities are being ruralised instead of the urbanization of rural areas. In its turn, industrialization ended together with the Soviet Union. A more or less tangible individualization and fragmentation of social life are not part of the history of post-Soviet Azerbaijan either. The political and economic systems of Azerbaijan are an imitation of a modern state. It is an example of a simulacrum state and a total imitation of modern political institutions and relations. In other words: The political regime in Azerbaijan is a complex of imitative practices, relations and “institutional camouflages” that enable a broad international presentation of Azerbaijan, effectively privatized by a small group of people, as a modern state that exists in reality.

Igor Caşu, Duşmanul de clasă. Represiuni politice, violenţă şi rezistenţă în R(A)SS Moldovenească, 1924-1956, Chişinău, Cartier, 2013

Author(s): Petru Negură / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1-2/2014

Valentina Ursu, Politica culturală în RSS Moldovenească. 1944-1956, seria Monografii ANTIM, XIV, Chişinău: Pontos, 2013

Author(s): Larisa Noroc / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1-2/2014