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The paper presents observations on the pilgrimage of Bulgarians in Romania. On the one hand, the research interest focuses on pilgrimages of representatives of the Bulgarian communities in Romania to famous monasteries and churches in the country. At the same time, the tendencies in the crossborder pilgrimages of Bulgarians from Bulgaria visiting churches and monasteries in neighbouring Romania are presented. Personal observations and field interviews, as well as materials in the media on the topic under consideration, are used as source material. Bulgarians visit in Romania religious topoi popular among the Christians, especially places related to Bulgarian history. In this sense, these pilgrimages are an expression of religious feelings and of national identity. Observations on pilgrimage as a religious practice show that this traditional form offers to believers meaningful messages for their spiritual world and social life.
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The article examines the Peace Corps programs in Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War, based on archive documents. After developing volunteer programs in Asia, Africa and Latin America for 30 years, in the early 1990s, the Peace Corps received a historic chance to expand its activities in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and help strengthen American influence in the region. The historical reconstruction of the organization’s activities in the different countries makes it possible to outline the main goals of the Peace Corps and to determine its effectiveness as a “tool” of American “soft power”.
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Established in September 1980, NSZZ “Solidarność” was not only a trade union, but also a great social movement, and a school of democracy for its own members. Starting from the democratically elected works committees, through National Coordinating Commission, the apogee of this social movement was the 1st National Congress of Delegates of NSZZ “Solidarność” which took place in the autumn of 1981.
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This article discusses the evolution of the Polish agricultural sector, its struggle for survival since 1945, and the effects of this struggle on the Polish economy. The article provides insights and conclusions about the flaws of the communist economic system and central planning policies, the successes and problems of the Polish transition to a free market system, the effects of EU policies on the agricultural sector, and the depth of the relationships between the agricultural sector and the national economy. The article concludes with a discussion of the impact of the Poland-EU Association Agreement and the effect of preaccession policies on the agricultural sector. The analysis indicates that EU accession has not solved the structural problems of the Polish agricultural sector such as overemployment, farm size, and lack of capital. However, EU accession provides the potential for a better future if a stable economic environment is created and if foreign capital is attracted.
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The review of: 1) Christopher Clauge and Gordon Rausse, eds., The Emergence of Market Economies in Eastern Europe (Cambridge Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1992). 2) Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3) Janos Kornai, Highways and Byways in Reform and Post-Communist Transition (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 4) Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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In the summer of 1993, an American businessman friend negotiating privatization deals in East Central Europe questioned me about gender inequality in the region. He said he was surprised to find that several of the top financial executives of large, state-owned enterprises he met at the negotiating tables were women. Since this is one of the most important and prestigious positions in a capitalist corporation, he concluded that women in newly democratized East Central Europe have achieved a level of gender equality unheard of in other parts of the world. [...]
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The article presents an analysis of historical memory narratives conveyed to high school students during history classes. Of particular interest is the way in which history teachers shape their in-class narratives in the context of narrative conflicts between the cultural memory and the politics of history of the country’s government and the historical consciousness of the national group the teacher belongs to. The article claims that, in such cases, the way teachers shape their narratives pertaining to the past is a product of their agency and the strategies they adopt regarding the official narratives. The article distinguishes three strategies concerning government narratives (Hall1980): hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional. The article is based on observationof history classes conducted in a Vilnius school with Polish as a teaching language, as well as interviews with history teachers employed by the school. The research carried out shows that, when it comes to selecting the strategy, a key role is played by theteachers’ emotions resulting from their personal experiences. In the Vilnius school, the experiences connected with one’s national group were the deciding factor.
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The article aims to analyze the history of Bulgarian-American relationship after the end of the Cold War with an emphasis on the changes that occur in the scientific and educational contacts between the two countries. The study is based on unpublished documents from the Scientific Archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Science (BAS),Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the „Commission for Disclosure of Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgarian Citizens with the State Security and the Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Armed Forces“, official documents and published data of American educational and research institutions, as well as the research of leading authors and participants in the events. The analysis of the changes in the bilateral cooperation after the end of the Cold War found the educational exchange programs of the U.S. Nongovernmental Organizations to be incapable of rapid transformation in line with the new political realities. Their place was taken by the American universities, which proved to be far more “flexible” and able to respond to the changing needs of time.
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After the Second World War, according to the agreements between the victorious Allies in the war, the greatest powers in the world, Romania was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. Because of this, the historian must analyze this period as an objective situation of history, avoiding the politicization of the situation and regarding things as if they should have been different, and Romania would have had development alternatives outside the strict framework imposed by world power which controlled the area of influence.From the beginning of the historical period of the state socialist regime, improperly called ”communist”, within the Romanian Communist Party, two camps emerged: that of the communists who spent many years in the regime's prisons during the two decades after 1924, when the Communist Party of Romania was outlawed and the communists who were in exile in the Soviet Union, under the protection of the Kremlin authorities and who did not know the persecutions, harsh investigations, beatings and sometimes death, in Romanian prisons.The article explains that Communist Party dignitaries and important Securitate commanders, as well as their agents in the military, remained loyal to the Soviet Union and secretly sabotaged the political line of national independence promoted by Romania's collective leadership, led by Nicolae Ceaușescu. They acted in this way despite the explicit orders given.At the forefront of the saboteurs of Romania's independent national policy were the ethnic minorities of the Communist Party, primarily Jews, Gypsies and Hungarians and the Securitate leadership, which was the most important opponent of Romania's nationalist leadership, especially Nicolae Ceaușescu.The result of this sabotage of the policy of national independence was the collapse of Romania in December 1989, its plunder almost in its entirety and the transformation of the country, in the period that followed, into a colony of multinational economic companies.
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The year 2020 saw the centenary of the return of Pomerania to Poland, which regained access to the Baltic Sea. This event, along with many other issues connected with the establishment of the Polish state after the First World War, has been the subject of historians’ research for years. This also applies to history educators who analyse the contents of school textbooks. The author of this article, which is consistent with this research trend, decided to analyse dozens of the most popular textbooks for teaching history in secondary schools used by Polish pupils over the past 30 years, i.e. in the period from 1990 to 2020. The article primarily uses the philological and comparative methods. The undertaken analysis helped to distinguish from the school textbooks three main threads concerning Poland’s return to the Baltic Sea, namely the speech by the President of the United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson of 8 January 1918, the resolutions of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Poland’s Wedding to the Sea of February 1920. As a result, it has been shown that these issues have an adequate place in textbooks, as far as it was required by curricula for teaching history in the 1990s, as well as the later reformed curricula created during the first two decades of the present century. This results from the fact that practically all analysed textbooks provide basic facts concerning the circumstances of the retaking of part of Pomerania by the Republic of Poland after the end of the First World War, which are presented with a short commentary and sometimes with additional content for learning, and with particular consideration of international conditions of this process. What should be noted in the analysed textbooks is that they are free of ideological influences, which had been visible in Polish history textbooks before 1990.
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“The Law on Freedom of Religion or Beliefs and Legal Status of Religious Communities of 27 December 2019 is becoming a problem of “national survival”. The Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) has not shared or accepted the efforts of the authorities in Podgorica to establish a Montenegrin identity. The authorities have qualified the attacks on the law as a challenge to Montenegro’s national, cultural and religious identity. The opposition claims that the Law is an offhand attempt to expropriate lucrative church properties. SOC has organized mass protests “in defense of the holy places against lawlessness”. Citizens are forced to choose among religious affiliation, national identity and affiliation to patronage networks. In 2020 the ruling party suffered its first electoral defeat in the past 30 years. The new government repealed the contentious provisions on church properties. Nevertheless, the dramatic “conflict of identities” in Montenegro remains unresolved.
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The exploration of the Romanian communist experiences and memories has generated several collective representations ranging from trauma of the past to everyday life images and narratives, communist memorabilia and nostalgic feelings. The role of literature and art in addressing the communist past has been increasingly more often included in the current debates. This paper argues that based on its visual constructions, comics expand the general knowledge of the past by targeting a segment of audience that may engage more deeply with visual expressions than with other memory media. Therefore, comic books can mediate the transgenerational transmission of memory and the reading of past narratives. Using as a case study a collective volume dedicated to the 1989 Romanian Revolution, this paper questions the use of graphics and narratives in (re)working past events and explores the dynamic of trauma, fear and violence in comics. Special attention is given to the way in which meaning is produced or conveyed and to the strategies used to address past events. Based on three interconnected instruments – content analysis, close reading and mise en scène – the graphics and narrative of the represented events are examined in relation with both the memory and the postmemory of the communist past.
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This article describes the methodology and the findings of a research about women, former political detainees, memory discourse about the communist period and political persecutions. It points out the difficulties and the unexpected results of such sensitive work. It argues that the narratives of former political detainees about their life experiences are influenced by both frameworks of memory as well as by their habitus of modern women belonging to the Romanian interwar middle class.
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In this paper, we have analysed the authentic testimony of Goli otok prisoner Smilja Filipčev. We interviewed Smilja during multiple encounters from 2011 to 2013. Our second source for this paper was her short book Open Door to Life. Chronicle of a Family. We had chosen Smilja Filipčevʼs testimony because her suffering was a precedent since it had been extended through most of her life. At the time of the Resolution of Informbureau in 1948, all members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had to opt for or against the Resolution. On the party meeting, Smilja said that members of the Party should attend the meeting in Bucharest and defend the Partyʼs stance. Those words were her verdict which affected not only her life, but also the life of her entire family. The sufferings of Smilja Filipčev and her family had begun during the Second World War, had its peak during the Resolution of Informbureau 1948 – 1956 and its concentration camps and they even stretched into the period after her internment.Our main hypothesis was that the most loyal Communists who uncompromisingly believed in their idols of the equality and truth were being most heavily punished in the camps for re-education of convicts. We have shown and proved our hypoth- esis with the life experience of Smilja Filipčev and her family. We selected Smilja because her life had been full of sufferings and because she was willing to talk about it – other women victims we had met were not. We had not found the official evidence of torture and maltreatment done by investigators, managers or revised women prisoners in the prisons and camps, and that fact was the main reason for writing this paper. Everything Smilja said during our encounters and interviews and wrote in her book represents an authentic document worth of our attention.
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Following the regime change of 1989/1991, the cultural infrastructure has also undergone significant transformation in most Eastern European countries. Two "foreign", i.e. transregionally and transnationally operating donor organisations have played a significant role in this transformation: the Soros Foundation (later Open Society Foundations / OSF) and the ERSTE Foundation. Their initiatives have led to the creation and increasing professionalisation of the field of contemporary arts in the region. Given that the organisations in question have provided corporate philanthropy, a potential tension arises between the progressive social content of the objectives promoted on the one hand, and the more conservative economic policies enabling the wealth being donated, on the other. This is particularly relevant in the case of the Soros Foundation/OSF, which, unlike the ERSTE Foundation, has a decades-long history of political philanthropy and currently efficiently advocates, on a global level, a range of progressive social causes. This paper explores this tension and weighs the kind of democratic deficit inherent in philanthropy, especially in its politically motivated forms.
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The study provides an overview of the crisis in Kosovo in the 1980s, which is analyzed from an economic, political and international perspective. The period from Tito’s death until the mid-1980s was characterized by growing discontent among the Albanian population and a gradual escalation of tensions in Kosovo. On the other hand, after the death of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha on April 11, 1985, Ramiz Alija became the head of the Albanian Labor Party and Albania entered a new stage of internationalization of the problem of the situation of the Albanians in Yugoslavia. The negative phenomena and trends in the development of Tito’s Yugoslavia in its last decades and especially after the death of the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito brought the country to a serious crisis. The contradictions in the Yugoslav society, the economic and political problems and the inter-ethnic tensions were exacerbated significantly and questioned the unity of the Yugoslav federation, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) and the future of the “Yugoslav model of socialism”. The general crisis in Yugoslavia, which encompassed the different areas of life found expression in the extreme aggravation of the economic, social, political and interethnic relations in Kosovo. The political processes, the exacerbation of the inter-ethnic relations, the developments in Kosovo and especially the introduced emergency measures had a negative effect on the international reputation of Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s the multinational Yugoslav federation faced the problem of its further existence.
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The present review article explores the question of whether the post-Soviet Ukrainian historians have shown any interest in the history of liberties in their own country, and if so, what have they discovered on the subject. Firstly, I discuss the way in which Ukrainian historiography re-evaluates the country’s original ‘reunification’ with Russia during Khmelnitsky’s uprising (1648-1654). The uprising is today interpreted as the foundation of an independent hetman state. However, the main change has occurred in the evaluation of what is called Hetman Orlik’s constitution of 1710. It is considered today as the culmination of independent Ukrainian development. It has achieved cult status and is regarded as the first constitution, which introduced the separation of powers and safeguarded the Cossacks’ liberties. The critical interpretation of early modern history by Natalya Yakovenko is appreciated here; because she put early modern Ukraine back into the Polish context, she also developed a specific realistic method of history-writing and critically evaluated the impact of the Cossack wars. The Rzeczpospolita’s place in Ukrainian history has been further defended in the works of Mikola Krikun and Oleksandr Vynnichenko from the University of Lviv. However, it is in the realm of constitutional history that a fixed rights-centred historical narrative has been developed. In the last section, we recall some topics of the era after the loss of independence which are neglected in the Ukrainian research. These are the codification of 1728-1743 and the philosophical work of Yakiv Kozelskiy connected to the Legislative Commission of 1767.
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