SOVIETINĖ TEMIDĖ KLĖJOS RANKOSE
About Monikos Kareniauskaitės dissertation „Nusikaltimas ir bausmė Lietuvos SSR“ and it's defense.
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About Monikos Kareniauskaitės dissertation „Nusikaltimas ir bausmė Lietuvos SSR“ and it's defense.
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The article discusses the attitude of Poles towards the political transformation in 1989, based on opinion poll surveys, mainly those carried out by the Centre for Public Opinion Research (CBOS) over the last 25 years and focusing on those from 2014–2019. The author presents the conditions in which the opinions about the political transformation were shaped, as well as the factors that influenced this process. Next, she analyzes factors impacting the Polish society’s attitude towards the transformation. The article refers to the public discourse about the past, including the education and media coverage.
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Review of: Tomas Vaitelė - Rec.: Anna Mikonis-Railienė, Renata Šukaitytė, Mantas Martišius, Renata Stonytė, Politinis lūžis ekrane: (po)komunistinė transformacija Lietuvos dokumentiniame kine, videokronikoje ir televizijoje, Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2020.
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During World War II Lithuania was ruled by three completely different political regimes. In the first year Lithuania was authoritarian state ruled by group of nationalists, in 1940 Lithuania was occupied by Soviet Union and in 1941 State was occupied by Nazi Germany. All these political powers was undemocratic and propagated their ideologies. One of the most important aspect of every ideology is to suggest new concept of time. This change of perception of time could be seen in the change of cultural memory. Article try to analyze this change using the most popular Lithuanian periodical press of the period. This research analyzed main historical periods and the most popular themes represented in the main newspapers. Using theories of Anthony D. Smith and Raoul Girardet research showed what historical periods was seen positively and what negatively, what was main historical heroes and enemies; also how foreign history was represented in the periodical press. The quantitative content analysis showed that while representations of history in the so called independent Lithuania and in Lithuania occupied by Nazis was quite similar, historical representations during first Soviet occupation was unique. Qualitative content analysis showed that there was three very different paradigms of cultural memories, represented in periodical press. Lithuanian nationalist mostly tried to promote Lithuanian medieval times and especially Lithuanian dukes and historical capital Vilnius, also they tried to justify their politics creating myth of great welfare during their rule. They praised Soviet history, criticized Poland and poles, but wrote about most of the countries quite neutral. During Soviet occupation all Lithuanian history was harshly criticized and showed as negative times, this regime promoted only few Lithuanian heroes who died young or was known for their left wing politics. Main historical past represented in the newspapers was history of Soviet Union, other countries was ignored. Main enemies of Soviets was Lithuanian gentry, and Lithuanian rulers of the past.
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In this article we aim to present, based on sources from the former Soviet archives and contemporary Russian historiography, the way in which the Romanian communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej is reflected.Knowing these documentary contributions offers us the possibility of a better understanding, and a more accurate interpretation, of a series of moments that Romania went through during the period when he was in charge of the country.
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The present study is systematic research of the party education system in Romania, with a case study of two of its exemplary higher education institutions, namely the “Ștefan Gheorghiu” and the “Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov” School of Social Sciences. Party education in Romania was founded and organized following the Soviet model, which served as a source of inspiration; an attempt was made to acquire a national element as well. The image of this system could be retraced after 1989, given the unrestricted access to the documents of the former Communist Party. Our aim is to present the image of the Romanian party education and to show the role played by the two institutions in the process of forming the Romanian Communist nomenclature. The two institutions were symbols of party education in the first two post-war decades. These higher education institutions were genuine bulwarks of communist proselytism and served as indoctrination vehicles of party members; finally, they were a springboard for those who wanted to reach the top of the political hierarchy. This paper is based on numerous documents found in the archives but also on the works of some authors who dealt with the history of Romanian communism.
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Korea was a major battleground during the Cold War. Korean War represented a remarkable change in Asian politics of two superpowers (US and USSR) whose vital interests were not at stake in Asia. Moreover, the Korean War transformed Asia into the most important non-European area of the international system during the Cold War. After defeat of Japan in WWII, the US invaded Japan and reserved its right to determine the future of this country. The initial policy of the US in the first years of Japan’s invasion was the disarmament of this country and the evacuation of American forces from the country by insuring Japan would not become a menace again to family of peaceful and responsible nations of the world and to the US. However, Communist victory in China and the Korean War brought a “reverse discourse” in American occupation policy for Japan. Japan’s role during the Korean War and Tokyo’s active and passive support to the US and her allies turned Japan an ally to be won in the eyes of the US. The war revealed the strategic importance of Japan and sowed the seeds of the US-Japanese alliance, which has been at the center of the US security architecture called “hub and spoke” in East Asia. This study aims to analyze that the Korean War was a turning point for the US East Asian policy and therefore for the future of Japan.
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Stefano BOTTONI, Lungul drum spre Occident. O istorie postbelică a Europei de Est [Long Awaited West. Eastern Europe since 1944], Mega Publishing, Cluj‑Napoca, 2021, pp. 360, ISBN 978–606-020–301-8.
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This article presents an analysis of the formation of organized interest groups in the post-communist context and organizational populations over time. We test two theories that shed doubt on whether vital rates of interest groups are explained by individual incentives, namely, the political opportunity structure and population ecology theory. Based on an analysis of the energy policy and higher education policy organizations active at the national level in Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, we find that while the period of democratic and economic transition indeed opened up the opportunity structure for organizational formations, it by no means presented a clean slate. Communist era successor and splinter organizations survived the collapse of communism, and all three countries entered transition with relatively high density rates in both organizational populations. We also find partial support for the density dependence hypothesis. Surprisingly, the EU integration process, the intensity of legislative activity, and media attention do not seem to have meaningfully influenced founding rates in the two populations.
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This article presents the history of for-profit mobility from communist Poland, that is, transnational labor migrations and the movement of cross-border petty traders. On the basis of primary research in archives and new scholarship on the history of communist Poland, it presents the scale and dynamics of cross-border movements since the partial opening of the borders in the mid-1950s to the final erosion of the communist regime in 1989. It analyzes the main factors and patterns of the expansion of mobility in both its legal and irregular streams, including the relevant policies of the Polish government and the governments of migrants’ destination countries, the mechanisms of the gray and black markets, especially of hard currencies, and the development and diffusion of social practices of migration. It argues that for-profit mobility was a large part of the second economy as well as a form of disengagement from the communist state and its first economy, a way of selective opting out of socialism. Analyzing the relations between its expansion and the evolution of the communist regime, the article claims that for-profit mobility produced un-communist social spaces and was an important factor eroding the regime’s legitimacy and control over its subjects, thus paving the way to the post-1989 stage of Poland’s transformation.
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The article analyzes the biographies of the regional leaders of the Solidarity union and examines the process by which activists were recruited into the social movement and subsequently rose through its ranks. Though there exists an abundant body of research on Solidarity, the recruitment process for the trade union’s middle management has never been analyzed. Such an examination of the regional leadership is important given the significant diversity that existed in the selection process. Activists were selected in regions where strikes occurred (Gdańsk and Wałęsa) and in ones where there were no strikes. This article attempts to identify these regional leaders and their role in Solidarity. It poses questions about the social movement’s center of power. Did the regional leadership represent a grassroots social movement, or were they merely carrying out orders from the center? The subject of this analysis is a group of thirty-nine chairmen comprising the regional leadership of Solidarity. The article employs classical historical analysis methods combined with elicited sources (interviews conducted with selected leaders). It presents a prosopographical analysis based on statistical, historical, and sociological data. The questions posed in the article involve such issues as the Solidarity recruitment process, the social backgrounds of the leaders, their individual personality traits and biographical features, and the goals and motivations that led them to join the movement. The analysis reveals the qualities shared by the majority of the regional leadership of Solidarity.
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The article aims at contributing to the social history of the Solidarity movement by tracing the collective biography of its elected representatives. It will focus on the life trajectories of the 900 delegates to the First National Congress of Delegates. The convention, held in Autumn 1981, is commonly perceived as a focal moment in the history of Solidarity and plays a crucial role in almost every academic narrative on the anticommunist opposition. Often seen as a first genuine Polish parliament since pre-war times, its main task was to forge the political and economic programme thus furthering the revolution. The projected research will draw on genuine methodology, combining prosopographical and oral history approach. The research will address mainly the following issues: what social strata the elites came from, what was their cultural and educational background, what motives/causes/expectations drove them to engage with Solidarity, to what generations did they belong, how did they embrace the character of political transformation of 1989, and to what extent and how did they get involved in the political, economic, and social life of post-communist Poland. In general, the paper seeks to shed a new light on our understanding of Solidarity’s social roots—for instead examining to what extent the contesting, revolutionary elites were a product of the Stalinist social advancement. It also tries to depict the level of continuity between the elites of 1981 and post-1989—thus testing the common theories whether the Third Republic is (or is not) rooted in the legacy of Solidarity.
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Across Eastern Europe how the past is remembered has become a crucial factor for understanding present-day political developments within and between states. In this introduction, we first present the articles that form part of this special section through a discussion of the various methods used by the authors to demonstrate the potential ways into studying collective memory. We then define the regional characteristics of Eastern Europe’s mnemonic politics and the reasons for their oftentimes conflictual character. Thereafter we consider three thematic arenas that situate the individual contributions to this special section within the wider scholarly debate. First, we examine the institutional and structural conditions that shape the circulation of memory and lead to conflictive constellations of remembering; second, we discuss how different regime types and cultural rules influence the framing of historical episodes, paying attention to supranational integration and the role of technological change; third, we consider the different types of actors that shape the present recall of the past, including political elites, social movements, and society at large. We conclude by identifying several promising avenues for further research.
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The rise of historical memory, which began in the 1970s and 1980s, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. At its initial stage, the rise of memory contributed to the decay of self-congratulatory national narratives and to the formation of a “cosmopolitan” memory centered on the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity and informed by the notion of state repentance for the wrongdoings of the past. Laws criminalizing the denial of these crimes, which were adopted in “old” continental democracies in the 1980s and 1990s, were a characteristic expression of this democratic culture of memory. However, with the rise of national populism and the formation of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the politics of memory has taken a significantly different turn. National populists are remarkably persistent in whitewashing their countries’ history and using it to promote nationalist mobilization. This process has manifested itself in the formation of new types of memory laws, which shift the blame for historical injustices to other countries (the 1998 Polish, the 2000 Czech, the 2010 Lithuanian, the June 2010 Hungarian, and the 2014 Latvian statutes) and, in some cases, openly protect the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity (the 2005 Turkish, the 2014 Russian, the 2015 Ukrainian, the 2006 and the 2018 Polish enactments). The article examines Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian legislation regarding the past that demonstrates the current linkage between populism and memory.
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The article analyses the tactics and the strategy communists from the Polish Workers’ Party (and from the end of 1948 – the Polish United Workers’ Party) used to incapacitate and then liquidate social organisations dating back to the pre-war period. These structures had different formal and ideological positions in the political reality of the Second Polish Republic. An important role in promoting the so-called western borderlands, which at that time included Greater Poland, the Polish part of Pomerania and the Polish part of Upper Silesia, was played by the Polish Western Union which was close to nationalist national democracy. Another important interwar institution was the Maritime and Colonial League, which was associated with the then establishment. These institutions, which had been gradually revived since 1944, were formally independent, but under the pressure of communists, who wanted to take over power in Poland, they were being peopled by individuals who were ready to serve the communist Polish Workers’ Party. After the end of the war, PZZ focused on the so-called Recovered Territories. LM (now without the word “Colonial” in its name), on the other hand, concentrated on the issues associated with the 500 km stretch of the Polish sea coast and the problems related to the Polish merchant fleet. The Maritime League, which was reluctant to implement communist ideals and practices, had been, from the moment of its revival, infiltrated from within by representatives of branches of the new political power in Poland. The communists did collaborate with the League (and also with PZZ) in the first post-war years, but the cooperation on their part was short-lived and pragmatic, and so the Maritime League was doomed to dissolution after PZPR took full power over Poland.
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Greg Grandin, În umbra lui Kissinger. Moștenirea celui mai controversat om de stat al Americii, București, Editura Litera, 2017. 448 p. | David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. A Twentieth-Century History, Penguin Books, 2018, 720 p. | Astrid M. Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain. Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands, Oxford University Press, 2019. 444 p. | Petre Opriș, Aspecte ale economiei românești în timpul Războiului Rece (1946-1991), București, Editura Trei, 2019, 384 p.
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The Russian-Lipovan population represented a basic element in the ethnic picture of the historical province of Dobrogea even after 1945. After the arrival of Soviet troops, some of the Lipovan Russians who were attracted by the Soviet propaganda, from villages such as Jurilovca, Russian Slava, Slava Cercheza, Sarichioi, Dunavățu de Jos, Old Chilia, showed a strong tendency to emigrate to the U.S.S.R. In 1949, in order to get rid of the „gentry/nobility“, considered the exploiting class in the villages, the process of forced collectivization began, which also included the Russian-Lipovan communities from Dobrogea. Nicolae Ceausescu's era was characterized by a restrictive regime over minorities, which were referred to with the phrase „cohabiting nationalities", the policy of the communist state being one of assimilation of all ethnic groups, especially of those the least numerically significant.
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This paper discusses the activities of the Muslim Cultural Association “Preporod” from its foundation in 1945 until its abolition in 1949. The Muslim Cultural Association “Preporod” is practically a new national society, but in which two old pre-war “Bosniak” societies, Gajret and Narodna uzdanica, merged, which, as it stood out, eliminated divisions and divisions within the Bosniak people. However, the new society was not founded solely for this purpose, but above all to make it easier for the communist regime to win over the part of the Bosniak population that was not in favor of or was suspicious of the new authorities. The paper seeks, in the first place, on the basis of historical sources, to look more closely at these issues through the prism of the activities of the Muslim Cultural Association “Preporod”, especially its Main Board, the Sarajevo Local Committee, the state of society and the relations of the communist regime towards national societies in the period of 1945-1949.
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Ion Pantazi, author of the memorial volume “Am trecut prin iad” (I have been through hell), is one of the emblematic figures of the anti-communist resistance in Romania, being one of the organizers of the most spectacular escape from a labor camp: the escape from Mina Cavnic, June 6, 1953.He was born on July 26, 1920, in Bucharest. In 1940, he graduated from the Military High School in Cernăuți, in 1942, the Military School of Cavalry Officers with the rank of lieutenant. He fought on the front in the 9th Roșiori Regiment, being promoted to lieutenant on May 10, 1945. On March 1, 1946, he was removed from the active army and expelled as a law student due to his origin and training, considered dangerous by the newly installed political regime in Romania.
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Operating under a definition of authorial postures advanced by Jérôme Meizoz, the present study aims to identify the postures adopted by women prose writers who started asserting themselves in the interwar period and, later on, after 1948, partook in the doctrinal ratification process by publishing Socialist Realist novels. Thus, I have identified two overarching categories of postures that engaged literature written by women. In a first phase, I discuss a position that forcefully presses for the articulation of certain postures born of macho prejudice that have become established during the same period in the shape of such concepts as femininity and the feminine creative method, but which ultimately represent merely a strategy for the marginalization of the literary production of women. With the change of regime, which marked the capitalization of the creative space by the field of political power, the systemic adjustment of female prose writers is reified, at the rhetorical level, by revealing the social function of the text. The pretence of them being heroines of the proletarian class marks a radical change in behaviour and discourse from one epoch to the other. What we can conclude from this is that even at the level of an analysis of authorial postures, the minor community of women prose writers submits to predestined postural acts, rather than following the path of articulating an authorial posture, at least not as it was proposed by Meizoz.
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