Gustul amar al libertății
Interview with Jurgen Habermas and Adam Michnik by Adam Krzeminsk.
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Interview with Jurgen Habermas and Adam Michnik by Adam Krzeminsk.
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Nimic mai supărător decît provincialismul marilor culturi. „Comment peut-on être Persan?” este o exclamație tipică a provincialului blazat de apartenența sa la o Mare Cultură. Există și astăzi occidentali cumsecade pentru care Europa se oprește la Rin sau cel mult la Viena. Geografia lor este prin excelență sentimentală ; pînă la Viena au ajuns ei în călătoriile lor de nuntă. Mai departe începe o lume stranie, uneori agreabilă, dar nesigură ; puriștii aceștia sînt ispitiți să descopere sub pielea rusului faimosul tătar de care li s-a vorbit la școală. în ceea ce-i privește pe balcanici, cu ei începe, li se pare, inextricabilul ocean etnic al indigenilor, care se prelungește pînă la Australia...
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The article explores the formative period of the Czech underground in the mid 1970s as portrayed by a lesser known book Mařenická kniha by Pavel Zajíček. It presents its distinct point of view of the whole process and draws basic comparison with other influential ways in which underground’s semiotic space was being described.The article explores the formative period of the Czech underground in the mid 1970s as portrayed by a lesser known book Mařenická kniha by Pavel Zajíček. It presents its distinct point of view of the whole process and draws basic comparison with other influential ways in which underground’s semiotic space was being described.
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TBMM Hükümeti ile Sovyetler Birliği arasındaki ilişkilerin başlangıcı, Birinci Dünya Savaşı sonrasında Avrupa’nın yeniden düzenlenmesi sürecinde yer alır. Birinci Dünya Savaşı’ndan sonra Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Türk-İslâm coğrafyasındaki gelişmeleri Enver, Talat ve Cemal Paşa aracılığıyla takip etti. Bu süreçte Sovyetler Birliği’nin izlediği dış politika ikiye ayrılabilir. 1917-1921 ve 1921-1923 arası dönem. Birinci dönemde iç savaş koşulları hüküm sürerken ikinci dönemde devrimin ihraç edilmesi söz konusu olmuştur. Yani Doğu halklarıyla işbirliği süreci başladı. Sovyetler 3 Aralık 1917 tarihli kararıyla Doğu Müslümanları aleyhine yapılan bütün anlaşmaları tanımadığını beyan etti.
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The Tsarist Russian government implemented a policy of Russification in the field of education under the pretext of bringing civilization to the Turks living in Turkestan. In the Russian Tuzem schools established for this purpose, it was aimed to educate students who would instill Russian culture to the local people. After the start of the Soviet period, the decision of the Soviet People's Commissariat of the Turkestan Republic was passed regarding the right of all workers to receive education regardless of their nationality, age and religion. Educational policies were built in order to disintegrate the Turkishness that is being lived in Kyrgyzstan and all of Central Asia. The task of the first Soviet teachers was not limited to teaching. According to this education policy, teachers were charged with actively participating in the life of the society and making the public adopt the policy of the Soviet power. The decree to eradicate the ignorance of the peoples of the Russian federation, created after the October revolution, played a major role in education policies. Accordingly, the education policy was determined in line with the needs of the new Soviet government. With the decision of the People's Soviet Committee of the Turkestan Republic to "eliminate ignorance among the people", the campaign for the education of the whole people was strengthened. Short courses were opened for Party and Soviet workers. In the history of Kyrgyzstan, the 1920’s passed with the search for education and propaganda. The establishment of the Kyrgyz state and the increase in educational activities played an important role in the development of Kyrgyz culture. School books, newspapers and magazines began to appear in the Kyrgyz language. The number of libraries and cinemas has increased. However, there were serious problems such as the shortage of teachers, the absence of school books in the mother tongue and the lack of regularization of school hours. In 1930, a social cultural mobilization began to eradicate ignorance. In 1931, education was prepared in a programmed way and primary education was compulsory. In this study, the implementation and development process of education, literature, art and language policies in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist People's Republic will be examined.
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Established on a set of scientific and utopian principles reflecting the long path of master ideas of the 18th and 19th centuries such as Romanticism, ecology is the embodiment of an ideal that seeks to put nature back at the forefront of history and societies instead of dismissing it. Instead of an “inauthentic life” in which man has lost his own freedom due to the tragic and alienating grasp of modern civilisation and its hypocritical social conventions, nature is meant to be salvation. Millennial and immaculate, it would also constitute a base of absolute values and references for societies in search of meaning. While some idealists, like Henry Thoreau (1817–1862), have found in the oneiric and metaphysical contemplation of wide open spaces an escape from the “evil of the century”, others have taken refuge in a much more political and religious radical reading.
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This work reviews the judicial process directed against Catholic priests in Osijek in the period immediately following the Second World War. The main characteristics of Church-State relations at the time of these trials is described in the introductory part of this article, and a short review of criminal law in postwar Yugoslavia is provided, which was the legal basis by which the regime carried out its revenge against people who did not share its political views. In the next part of the work the author presents six individual cases substantiated by available archival documents, of which the authentic transcripts of the court are particularly interesting.
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The author analyzes letters written by prisoners, detainees, and their relatives to authorities of the communist Yugoslavia. Today, these letters are being kept as archival material, and the author has analyzed the material of several archives in Belgrade and Zagreb. By using content and discourse analysis, it is revealed who were the authors of these letters, what was being asked for in the letters and in which way, and to which addresses were the authors reaching out to, as well as what was the attitude of authorities towards individuals addressing them in letters. With this paper, the author endeavors to present values of the aforementioned historical sources for researching social history and history of everyday life of the communist Yugoslavia, as well as the functionality of the historical-anthropological approach to research of history of the second half of the 20th century. In the appendix, the author provides several letters, mostly in the form of facsimiles.
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The Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement of Croatia was established on September 25, 1961 by a decision of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia and the Executive Committee of the Main Board of the Socialist League of the People’s Republic of Croatia with the principal task of studying the history of the workers’ movement in Croatia and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the history of the people’s liberation war, and the socialist revolution. The task had not been officially changed for the entire time Tuđman served as the Institute’s director (1961-1967), but the Institute’s research was nevertheless expanded to economic, cultural, and educational subjects. Tuđman, however, lacked experienced staff, and his methodology of setting a goal first and then proving it later was not the best of choices. Excessive recruitment transformed the Institute into the most expensive scientific institution in Croatia. Attempting to justify the existence of this young institution, Tuđman decided to make the Institute publicly active, which proved detrimental to its future. The Institute was blacklisted and its results belittled or attacked. Tuđman was forced to leave the Institute, and his successors cut down the number of Institute’s associates from 126 to only about fifty. Tuđman’s activity at the Institute is a self-contained unit with its beginning, its development, and its end. A troubled end followed the initial good idea and the brilliant beginning, and it altered Tuđman and all of his co-workers, but also had a considerable impact on the historiography of modern Croatian history, which only sprung to life again after the arrival of new people who had no memory of the Institute from Tuđman’s era. Tuđman had a vision of the Institute’s task, but objective causes prevented him from putting his vision in effect. Still, he helped raise the historical awareness of everyone who researched history, politics, culture, economy, literature, and other aspects of life. 1971 and everything that happened afterwards was thus more or less marked by traces of Tuđman’s efforts.
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Franjo Tuđman, the first president of the Croatian independent state, was the central figure of Croatian politics in the 1990s. His personal views on politics and his intellectual preoccupations, characterized by strong influences of historicism (as defined by K. Popper), had the decisive influence on all important aspects of Croatian politics and social life in the period of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the constitution of the Croatian state. In this historical context, the process of Croatia’s positioning in the international community was closely tied with the problem of articulating the legitimacy and legality of Croatian demands for national independence. The problem of self-determination of peoples surfaced in the argumentation of Croatia’s position and the position of other successors of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As it had been the case at the time of Yugoslavia’s establishment, the self-determination of peoples became the subject of political, legal, historical, and other debates in which different understandings and interpretations of this principle surfaced. This article considers and analyzes individual aspects of Tuđman’s views and of his political articulation of the idea about the self-determination of peoples in this context. The article is a part of a broader study that discusses the self-determination of peoples in the context of the establishment and disintegration of the Yugoslav state.
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Historical researcher Franjo Tuđman addresses the war and political developments in Croatia and the countries of former Yugoslavia during World War II (1941-1945) in several of his published books, studies, encyclopedia articles, and discussions, investigating the beginnings of the anti-occupation fighting and the People’s Liberation Movement (NOP), the formation of the People’s Liberation Army (NOV), the progress of the People’s Liberation War (NOR), and the socialist and communist revolution and the establishment of the socialist and communist authorities, as these ideas and processes were named in communist terminology. In his first historical book, War against War (Rat protiv rata), published in Zagreb in 1957, Tuđman discusses the general anti-occupation struggle against the Axis Powers in World War II (1941-1945) in the territory of former Yugoslavia in the article People’s Liberation War and the Socialist Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941-1945 (Narodnooslobodilački rat i socijalistička revolucija u Jugoslaviji 1941.-1945.), setting it in the context of the conditions and circumstances that resulted from the dominant factors of the «social and political development of the peoples of Yugoslavia» of the time. Tuđman addressed the same issues in his study The Formation of Socialist Yugoslavia (Stvaranje socijalističke Jugoslavije), published in Zagreb in 1960; in his texts about the People’s Liberation War in Croatia; in his entry about Croatia published in The Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia and The Military Encyclopedia, published the same year; in his article The New Yugoslavia (Nova Jugoslavija) in The Military Encyclopedia (1961); and in his book Occupation and Revolution (Okupacija i revolucija), published in 1963, with two papers. The aforementioned Tuđman’s writings are characterized by all the ideological features of the time and are a part of contemporary Yugoslav historiography by their time setting and by their concepts alike. In his works written after 1963, however, he laid a greater emphasis on Croatia’s importance and contribution to the overall progress of the People’s Liberation War and the People’s Liberation Movement in Yugoslavia. Tuđman thus broke free from the ideological burdens in the lecture Discussions about the Causes of Monarchist Yugoslavia’s Breakdown and the Prerequisites for the Development of People’s Liberation Struggle in Croatia, which he delivered in Split on October 9, 1964 and in Karlovac on March 2, 1965, in his presentation On the General Conditions and Characteristics of the Development of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement in Croatia, which he held in Ljubljana at the end of April 1966, in his paper The National Question in Modern Europe, published in 1981, and in his book Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti, published in Zagreb in 1989, and translated to English as Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy...
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Based on his speeches and other statements, the article analyzes Croatian president’s Franjo Tuđman’s views about the Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito. We many conclude that Tuđman’s opinions about Tito had been for the most part positive, occasionally encroaching on noncritical apologia of the communist Yugoslavia’s former leader. We may also conclude that Tuđman’s partialness to Tito was, among other reasons, motivated by the fact that Tuđman had been a part of Tito’s Partisan movement in his young days, and that he had later been a member of the Yugoslavian communist nomenclature. To give a better illustration of Tuđman’s interpretation of Tito, the article also describes Tuđman’s insistence on the politics of national reconciliation of the Croatian people, with which he planned to overcome the ideological differences between Croats stemming from the events of World War II.
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Vladimir Bakarić was at the helm of the Communist Party of Croatia and the League of Communists of Croatia since September 1944. The function, combined with the fact that he was one of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito’s most trusted men, made him the person of highest authority and the personification of the communist regime in Croatia. Some authors feel he had very skillfully walked the tightrope between loyalty to Yugoslavia and the efforts to protect Croatia’s interests, between Marxist dogmatism and relative liberalism. He supported Franjo Tuđman’s struggles for the affirmation of the Croatian Partisan movement in The Military Encyclopedia in Belgrade as early as in the 1950s, and in 1961 he arranged for Tuđman to be moved to Zagreb and appointed the director of the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement. Bakarić supported Tuđman’s efforts as a counterbalance to Belgrade’s centralist and unitarianist ambitions, but still judged that Tuđman had veered from the «line» of the League of Communists of Croatia in his comments about The History of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1964, having started to advocate nationalist ideas. He was particularly troubled by Tuđman’s favorable disposition toward the Cvetković-Maček agreement of 1939, which Tuđman proclaimed to have practically solved «the Croatian question». Bakarić felt that the politics of the Croatian Peasants’ Party (HSS) and their allies at the Court in the eve of World War II not only had not solved the Croatian question, but had also brought Yugoslavia closer to the Axis Powers and had sabotaged the Partisan uprising. Bakarić attacked Tuđman fiercely at the meeting of the Commission for History of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in the spring, but Tuđman would not be dissuaded; he even managed to secure the support of several high-ranking officials of the League of Communists. After Tuđman promoted his ideas in a number of lectures he delivered in 1964 and 1965, Bakarić opened up Party investigation against him, and Tuđman quieted down for the moment without suffering any consequences. Bakarić had him removed from the helm of the Institute only in 1967 when he set out to eradicate «nationalism» from Croatian cultural institutions after the publication of The Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language.
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There are few historians whose historiographical pursuits were so closely intertwined with their personal fates as Franjo Tuđman’s had been. Few people ever met the prerequisites for it in the way Tuđman did. A distinguished and loyal follower of the Marxist ideas, devoted to socialism and socialist development, and a high-ranking official of the Communist Party and the Yugoslav Army, Tuđman started to break free from the control of the Party, which had kept a close eye on the interpretation of historical events, in particular of modern history, in his historiographical research, finally bringing himself to a point where the Party was forced to discipline him. Tuđman’s views clashed with those of the Party leaders when he stood up against certain interpretations of recent Croatian history that had been built on political hypotheses and definitions, for instance, interpretations about the Ustasha concentration camp Jasenovac, the number of casualties in World War II, the alleged historical guilt of the Croatian people, and the alleged negative role of the Catholic Church. In short, when Tuđman attempted to rectify the distorted image of Croatian history, he himself became the target of persecution. It left a permanent stain on Croatian historiography, since some historians joined in the persecution driven by motives that had little to do with historiography. By distancing himself from the Party, Tuđman gradually distanced himself from Marxism as a philosophical system and from the socialist system of the country, in which Marxism and the Party dictated all aspects of life, historiography included. There are indications that he started to approach Catholicism, or better still, the Catholic Church as its historical embodiment. In the last phase of his intellectual pursuits, which coincided with the fiercest attacks on everything Croatian, Tuđman wrote a systematic defense of the Catholic Church, offering sound arguments against the theses of many Serbian historians and publicists, who slandered the Church and its leader at the time of World War II, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac. As Croatian president, he evoked the historical connections between Croats and the Holy See in his dealings with the Pope, emphasized the Croats’ historical orientation on the West, and confirmed their devotedness to the Holy See and to the Catholic values. He expressed his gratitude to the Holy See for the favors they did to the Croats in decisive moments, and he promised that Croats would remain on this course. Tuđman’s life path distanced him from Catholicism, but his suffering gradually brought him back to it. His life and career are a story about intellectual pursuits fueled by curiosity, about a great sense of justice and truth, about an extensive opus as a writer, dedication to the idea of Croatian sovereignty, an acute sense of political moment, and the grand establishment of an independent Croatian state. Without a shadow of doubt, his life had been lived to the fullest, and fulfilled the hopes of many!
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The concept of “dissidence’’ is most often used to denote critical activities directed toward the communist governments of the countries of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in the time after Stalin’s death. Its connection to the politics of the Cold War speaks to the fact that the definition was subjected to the widest interpretations and that dissidents were considered individuals or groups ranging from deserters from the communist movement to all those who were dissatisfied with one party rule. From a research point of view the selection of the best definition complicates the politicization of the historical context to which dissidence belongs, the question of value judgments, the problem of “measuring’’ dissident activities, and the personal perceptions of participants/dissidents. For the purposes of this conference a suitable definition of dissidence is any activity which attempted to constitute an autonomous public sphere outside of the official institutions of the party state and by which it opposed the desire of the regime to completely control the public sphere. This opens the possibility of analyzing the complexity of the mosaic of themes exploring different segments of activism in politics and culture: critical approaches, creative detachment from prevailing or official positions – whether the fruit of personal initiative or a group of like-minded individuals – in the recent past. While on a theoretical level dissidence is relatively clear, the attempt to apply some of the concepts in the analysis of historical practice in Croatia/Yugoslavia, or to compare these to situations in other countries of realist socialism, raises many uncertainties, which indicates caution in using historiographical models without regard to specific historical context or period.
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Just as the governments of the other communist countries in Europe, the Yugoslavian government operated within the formula of “challenge and response’’, which was first devised by the once fashionable yet today almost totally forgotten British philosopher of history, Arnold Toynbee. For a long time dissidents were a relative minor threat to the powerful and proud Yugoslav authorities, but gradually, owing to the combination of internal and external events, the dissidents gained in importance and came to play a significant role in the defeat of the political system and the destruction of the Yugoslavian state. This process is the theme of this article.
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The work deals with the phenomenon of political repression in Yugoslavia and the analysis of the state`s attitude towards dissidents in the context of complex and changeable inner and foreign factors. One can notice the diversity of dissident front in Serbia and Yugoslavia as well as the levels of ideologically and hierarchically limited criticism and a number of other specific qualities wich result from the special nature of Yugoslav regime after 1953. Also an effort was made to distinguish the similarities and differences in treating the dissidents in relation to the countries of real socialism as well as different attitude towards political delinquents in different republics of Yugosloavia.
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Political changes in 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, though called forth by similar social and economic conditions, had fundamentally different historical, psychological, and functional characteristics. There are three basic internal-political factors which led to changes within the political system in Bulgaria: political ambitions within the ruling elite, ethnic conflicts in the ea-stern parts of the country, and social dissatisfaction which was most prominent among intellectual circles. Unlike other eastern European countries, in Bulgaria the dissident movement was not strong until the end of the 1980s and the influence of traditional bourgeois parties and the political emigration on everyday life in the country before 1990 was likewise rather limited. This article presents the historiographical research done on this theme in Bulgaria to this point in time.
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If certain of the determinants that appear in the literature dealing with the Yugoslavian dissident movement which label as dissidents all those whose thinking opposed the ruling majority are accepted, including anti-communists and nationalists, that is to say, if all those who were able to contribute to the subversion and destruction of communism while creating a new space for culture and information delimited from the state are labelled dissidents, then we can place the activity of the Churches or religious communities within the framework of dissident activity or the arena of semi-legal opposition. There was a difference in the manner in which the Catholic and the Serbian Orthodox Churches expressed opposition to the regime, in terms of approach, degree, and form. These differences grew out of the varying structures of the Churches, their objective strength, the historical experiences, their size and so on. The only matter in which there was no difference was in the length of the opposition. The nature of the opposition expressed toward the regime by the Catholic and Serbian Orthodox Church changed and adapted to the conditions in the country as well as the state of international relations in which Yugoslavia existed, but these were not applied at the same time. During Yugoslavia’s existence, the Churches represented the ultimate challenge to the Party, be-cause they offered an alternative philosophy of life and, for longest time, the only possible opposition. This drew all those who thought differently to them. The Churches themselves in varying degrees worked to draw opponents of the regime to them, and the youth, and in this process they utilized different means and methods. With time “the latent dissatisfaction expressed through turn toward the Church and religion began to take on a political complexion.” The terrain required for rehabilitating the past, and with it the Churches and religion itself, was prepared far earlier than the decay of the socialist system and ideology began and for this reason the Churches during the 1980s rather easily embraced the opportunity to carry out their revitalization.
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On the basis of transcripts of conversations of Vladimir Bakarić and his comrades during the period 1964-1968, which are held among the Bakarić papers in the Croatian State Archive, it is possible to trace the attitude of the leadership of the Communist Party of Croatia (SKH) in quite close detail regarding the dissident Marxist circle gathered around the journal Praxis. Bakarić looked very negatively upon the activities of this group, which among other things had sharply criticized the economic reforms carried out in 1965 that introduced some elements of market economy in Yugoslavia calling for a return to utopian ideals of socialism, and he orchestrated a media campaign against them in the mid 1960s. After student demonstrations took place in Belgrade and Zagreb in 1968, which Bakarić believed were inspired by the group around Praxis, he was personally engaged in the Party’s discipline of individual sympathizers and the group at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb.
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