We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
A successful businessman during the so-called First Czechoslovak Republic, a member of the anti-Nazi resistance and post-war MP for the People’s (Christian) Party, Eduard Jan Fusek had to flee abroad in February 1948. He established himself in Washington, where he directed the work to complete the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and was a pro-active participant in exile work.
More...
An ice hockey forward, coach and a prisoner of the communist regime – this is a brief introduction to Augustin Bubník. When on the ice, he was technically highly skilled, a great skater and reader of the game. His versatility allowed him to play in several different positions. He played 25 matches for the national team, scoring 16 goals, and a further 76 goals in the national league. He was a World Champion, an Olympic silver medallist, and the holder of four national championship titles. However, he spent his best sporting years in a prison on nonsensical charges. He did not leave ice-hockey after he was released. He is listed in the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame and also in the Hall of Fame for Czech and Finnish ice hockey.
More...
An interview with Franz Olbert, the organiser of (not only) literary support for the Czechoslovak clergy.
More...
After the appointment of Gottwald’s new government on 25 February 1948, the reappointed foreign secretary Jan Masaryk made several public appearances. While he only attended some of them, he gave public addresses at others. Coincidentally those addresses were made to soldiers. An interesting testimony has been preserved from one of these appearances, as one of its participants, Justice Lieutenant Colonel JUDr. František Masařík, kept a diary for many years, in which he made his own notes on the daily affairs. That’s why he also took careful and detailed notes describing his impressions of Jan Masaryk’s address delivered at Bajkal cinema on 4 March 1948.
More...
There have been serious debates about the origins, systemic features, and interpretations of the Cold War that led to the establishment of a set of diverging schools. The term détente, though not less intriguing, have not yet resulted in such a divergence of opinion. This article aims at giving an overview of Cold War historiography at the systemic level into which different ideas, chronological boundaries, and interpretations of détente might be fit. As détente is an easing of tensions within the Cold War, a clear view of the former demands a sound understanding of the latter. This article argues for a three level approach to détente with three major distinctive features: the demand to restore order in Cold War societies; the return of nation-state logic to international relations; and the impact Chinese developments had on European politics, all of which are essential elements to détente.
More...
Since the decolonization of South Asia, India is one of the most remarkable actors in the international relations. In the beginnings of its independent history, the South Asian country did not want to be a part of the Cold War confrontations. The first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru declared the doctrine of positive neutrality and non-violent foreign and security policy. In his point of view, the rivalry of the superpowers was one of the most dangerous processes of the world and undesirable phenomenon in the wider region. After its experiences on the great and superpowers’ South Asia policies and the 1962 border conflict with China, the Indian government, however, decided to search for a strong supporter of its security, territorial integrity and international position. Finally, India became the ally of the Soviet Union with the 1971 Friendship Treaty. Nevertheless, it maintained its strategic autonomy as well. This study offers an overview of the historical background and important milestones of this process.
More...
Self-restraint of elites prevails in Finland. Cultural background of self-restraint in this Northern country includes lutheranism and its pietist movement. The most effective economic systems are those that have inclusive institutions and are strongly defending property rights. In Finland, right of private property remained intact after 1945, since Helsinki avoided sovietization in 1948. I also examine the handling of critical economic turning points and the social embeddedness of the Finnish elite, and how these phenomena correlate with economic success. I try to model Finnish economic development between 1945–90 by the challenge-response-theory of Toynbee. The Finnish elite gave good responses to five challenges, thus Finland had to face new and even newer challenges, each after the other. I found that consensually unified elites in Finland endorsed the constant and consistent economic growth of the country. Influence of the Kremlin on economic and political decisions can also be observed in Finland between 1945 and 1990.
More...
The main characteristic of Arab states gaining independence has been the instability of the regimes which came to power. The incapability to settle the inherited and newly formed problems led to violent solutions initiated by the military and often accompanied by mass movements, too. The article analyses this phenomenon through 27 events in five Arab countries: Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya. In spite of the army’s involvement in the changes of regimes, they were followed in each case by important social developments. Thus the question often asked concerning the nature of these turbulent events, i.e. whether they were coups or revolutions, cannot always be answered unequivocally.
More...
J. Nagy László: Magyarország és az arab világ 1947–1989. Szeged, JATEPress, 2017. 341 p.
More...
The study outlines the main events of the political changes in Poland and Hungary after 1956 that influenced the possibilities of social resistance. It highlights the differences that existed within the socialist camp between the domestic policies of certain countries and the different paths they followed. As a result, Poland and Hungary developed fundamentally dissimilar political and social environments for resistance. On the other hand, the study sheds light on the relationship between Polish and Hungarian opposition groups, despite the divergent progresses. It also reveals that not only the Hungarian but also the Polish opposition is heterogeneous, ideologically and culturally divided the same way as the Hungarian one. The study is an attempt to write a parallel and entangled history of socialist countries.
More...
In some communist states of East-Central Europe the main decisions relating the transition to capitalism and pluralist democracy were made in the course of the negotiations (commonly known as Round Table Talks) between the representatives of the regime and the constructive opposition. Critics of such discussions with the state parties arised in every of these countries (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria), but Poland was the only one, where the often called “radical” organizations could create–at least for a short time–a common platform, the Congress of the Anti-system Opposition. The participants, including the Fighting Solidarity or the Confederation of Independent Poland, either were excluded from the political safe space guaranteed by the communist authorities to Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity Citizens’ Committee, or never even wanted to be engaged in dialogue with the politicians responsible for the Martial Law (or, more broadly speaking, for the events of 1956, 1970, etc.). During the two meetings of the anti-system congress (on the 25th of February and on the 21st of May 1989), in parallel with constant mass protests against the round table talks, the organizations declared that the only way to reach democracy is breaking the monopoly situation of the Polish United Workers’ Party and holding free, democratic constituent elections. However, participants were unable to form a closer unity on account of ideological differences, the lack of elaborating an economic alternative and the enormous success of the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee at the legislative elections of 1989. Therefore, in the newly-born state all the concerned organizations became marginalised at some extent.
More...
In this paper, I analyze different situations in which the doctor-patient relationship, the knowledge/information produced within this framework, and the practices of medical questioning came to the fore in the work of the state security services, one of the typical institutions of social observation and surveillance of the Hungarian socialist state. I examine work and recruitment dossiers opened from 1956 to the 1980s which document either physicians’ uses in state security observation of information which they gained about their patients during their professional (medical) activities in or in which the physician-patient relationship appears as a context of the physician’s recruitment. I discuss how physicians constructed the patient when the gaze of the state security forces was also arguably part of their medical gaze. I contend that medical knowledge and, more generally, information revealed in the professional (medical) context and used in the framework of network surveillance, taken out of their strict medical context, constituted a gray zone of power. On the one hand, this information was a useful tool with which the regime could exert some measure of effective social and political control beyond the borders of healthcare, while on the other hand, it could help physicians develop a certain degree of social resistance.
More...
Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania. By Alina-Sandra Cucu. International Studies in Social History 32. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019. 266 pp.
More...
Post-war Bucharest was the capital of Greater Romania, even though Greater Romania had ceased to exist in the autumn of 1940. Within two decades, Bucharest had experienced turbulent modernization and development, especially during the reign of King Charles II. At the same time, in a Bucharest with well-defined arterial roads, with avenues and boulevards, lofty buildings were built. A defining feature of the interwar Bucharest, but also of the post-war one, was the politeness, considered by Baltasar Gracián “the most beautiful part of the culture”.
More...
The main character of this study is Countess Anikó Bethlen from Târgu Mureş, who started to collect ethnographic pieces in the late 1960s, once she realized the importance of safeguarding the diverse cultural heritage of Transylvania that was about to be lost due to the gradual emigration of those belonging to non-Romanian communities, in particular of the Germans and the Hungarians. Her file of informative surveillance, which is currently preserved in the Archives of CNSAS, illustrates that she was constantly observed by the Securitate during the 1970s and the 1980s. Countess Bethlen was subjected to operative surveillance, which means that the secret police used informants to collect information about her and her activities, listened her phone calls and home, retained her private correspondence, and provoked her with anonymous letters. She was warned by the local branch of the Securitate in Târgu Mureş, in 1981, for allegedly carrying out a “hostile activity against the regime”. However, the secret police monitored rather her relations abroad than her activity of collecting.
More...
The Indo-Pakistani conflict was sparked in 1971 by the Bangladesh Liberation war, a long conflict between the traditionally dominant West Pakistanis and the majority East Pakistanis. The Bangladesh Liberation war ignited after the 1970 Pakistani election, in which the East Pakistani Awami League won 99% seats in East Pakistan and secured a simple majority in the lower house of the Parliament of Pakistan. The beginning of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 is considered to be the Pakistan’s preemptive strike on 11 Indian airbases (3 December 1971). During the war, Indian and Pakistani forces clashed on the eastern and western fronts. The war effectively came to an end after the Eastern Command of the Pakistani Armed Forces signed the document of surrender (16 December 1971) following which East Pakistan seceded as the independent state of Bangladesh. Romanian authorities sympathized neither Pakistan, nor India and Nicolae Ceauşescu tried to explain the equilibrium necessary for everybody involved in the conflict, to stop the war and start the negotiations about the autonomy of East Pakistan.
More...
Mitrovits Miklós – Bencsik Péter: „A Szovjetunióval örök időkre és soha máshogy!” Az 1956-os magyar forradalom csehszlovák dokumentumai. Bp., MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont Történettudományi Intézet, 2018. 927 p. (Magyar Történelmi Emlékek. Okmánytárak.)
More...
The exponential development of the “Solidarity” trade union and thepermanent hesitations of Warsaw authorities, who avoided to enforce themartial law and to intervene in force for the repressing of popular movements inthe entire country, determined the leaders of WTO’s states to meet at Moscow(4-5 December 1980) for convincing Stanislaw Kania to utilize harder means tore-establish the order in Poland. The respective reunion started on December 4, 1980 without theparticipation of the leader of the Polish communist party, only one day afterMarshal Viktor G. Kulikov solicited the agreement of General WojciechJaruzelski to start in Poland the common military manoeuvres “SOIUZ-80”.During the second session (December 5, 1980), Stanislaw Kania was the firstwho presented some point of view regarding the events from Poland. At thefinal of his speech, the Polish communist leader committed himself to annihilate,helped by the party he led, “the contra revolutionary activity” on the whole hiscountry and declared he was disposed to put in practice other measures, too,besides the political ones (this practically being a veiled allusion to theintroduction of martial law). The reunion in Moscow continued with thespeeches of Todor Zhivkov, Gustav Husak, Erich Honecker, NicolaeCeauşescu, Janos Kadar and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.
More...
The article briefly reveals some of the main actions that establishedthe soviet military occupation on Romania since World War II and by thesummer of 1958 and also pursues the steps that have made possible this eventtaking place successfully, which will undoubtedly foster a new direction in theRomanian politics. Unless subsequent Albania, Romanian People's Republicwas the only member country of the Warsaw Treaty of which the Soviet Unionwithdrew its troops. Also on this issue are different views: was it the result of thesubtlety of Romanian Workers' Party leadership, especially Gheorghiu-Dej, asevidenced in memoirs, or higher was for economic and military purpose of theSoviet Union, especially Nikita Khrushchev, as researchers considered in termsof studying the Romanian and Soviet archival sources?
More...
In this article, I examine foreign investment in the socialist enterprise in the former Yugoslavia based on the case study of Kolektor in the context of the liberalized communist social and economic order. Foreign investments were allowed in the form of joint ventures. I present these investments from the viewpoint of economic reforms, the concept of socialist enterprise, and the concept of economic development, which enabled foreign investments and shaped regulation and the structure of foreign investments in Yugoslavia. The history of the case of Kolektor began at a time when Slovenia still belonged to the former Yugoslavia, which was arguably a liberalized type of communist economic system. This was during the Cold War, when both Europe and the rest of the world were divided essentially along the lines of the communist east and the capitalist west. The Kolektor Company was established in 1963 as a state socialist enterprise for the manufacture of the rotary electrical switches known as commutators. From the outset, the company tried to establish international cooperation to acquire modern technology. In 1968, it reached an agreement with the West German Company Kautt & Bux, which at the time was the technological and market leader in the production of commutators. Kautt & Bux invested in Kolektor and became an owner of 49 percent of the company. The investment proved very profitable for both partners. The Slovenian side got access to modern technology and expertise, and the German side got additional production facilities, skilled workers, and low-cost production, which increased its competitiveness on international markets.
More...
