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The documents offer an insight into intelligence gathering and spyware methods used by the Soviet security agency.
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The article describes the process of three symbolic chartings of an influential book by Rebecca West Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey through Yugoslavia. The first, anti-colonial charting of the book took place in Great Britain and the USA in 1941/42 (during World War Two), following its publication. The second charting took place in the Western countries during the secession wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, from the colonial point of view. The third charting is only to be expected given the publication of an integrated translation of West’s book into Serbian in 2004. The envisioned process of a new, post-colonial reading of her text from the position of different post-Yugoslav nations could be intellectually and politically reinvigorating one.
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The play Baja i drugovi is a comedy in three acts with elements of the vaudeville. This play is at the same time Sušić’s attempt to disperse the canonical macro-model of cultural memory by means of (partisan) war theatre. Partisan theatres were being founded within all district and municipal boards of the People’s Liberation Movement (NOB) whose primary goal was to “educate the masses” in the spirit of the People’s Liberation Movement (NOB). The cultural policy at the time, and the theatre as well, was expected to boost the number of consumers of culture, to emancipate ignorant and illiterate masses and strive towards focusing their energy to the benefit of further social and political awareness-raising with the aim of reaching canonical aesthetic-ethical single-mindedness. By using the counterpoint, a modern dramatic device, and by juxtaposing the tragical and the comical, throughout this play, which is mostly permeated with elements of comedy, Sušić maintains a tragic note by introducing the characters of Baja and Pisac, which will culminate at the end of the play in Baja’s death and Pisac’s psychological demise. However, even though the play unfolds towards a resolution, it unexpectedly and in a slightly ironic way changes the pattern present until a point when it suddenly turns bleak and brings us to a tragic end, which, after all, leaves us, in an imperatively ironical way, filled with cathartic ideological optimism that mocks the inevitable ideological optimism of single-mindedness.
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The creative biography of the film director Jānis Streičs includes 22 feature films, 13 of which are devoted to the present day and nine are about the past. From among historical films, one depicts Latvia at the turn of the 19th century, another focuses on the Russian Civil War, two deal with the inter-war period, three depict World War II, and two are about the 1940s. These films offer Streičs’ views about the past, his own interpretation of the texts of history. At the same time, events, people, environments and life situations of the past are viewed from the present-day perspective, which includes issues and values from the present day within the space of the past. This paper examines two films made by Jānis Streičs during the Soviet era, both of them focusing on Latvian history – “The Boys of Līvsala” (1969) and “Strange Passions” (1983), and both of them are set in 1946. The films are different because of the 14 years that passed between the production of the first one and the second one, but they differ even more by the way in which the director sends messages about the past, also displaying his relationship to history and regimes. “Strange Passions” is a challenging film in terms of the history of cinema and the Soviet occupation of Latvia, bringing up the question of whether such a film could have been produced and shown in cinemas and on television. The era that is reflected in the two films is part of Jānis Streičs’ own biography. He was a child in 1946, and there was a great deal of tragedy caused by the Soviet regime, its cultivated violence, and the lack of value for human lives. The paper reviews the history interpretation in these films, and the research is based on documents from the Riga Film Studios materials that are stored at the Latvian State Archives. The conclusion is that “The Boys of Līvsala” and “Strange Passions” provide brilliant evidence of the director’s “magical realist” style. They demonstrate his great skill in transforming the childhood and youth period of his generation into a part of Latvia’s cultural memory.
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The aim of the article is to present the meaning of axiological and moral education in the process of building social order in the so-called post-modern era. The need to maintain social order and moral culture is an essential condition of social life, since it is intrinsically encoded into a human being’s nature. The disconcerting tendencies to undermine the foundations of this order, which appear as axiological and moral weakening, prompt its protection, through teaching values which build this order and ensure its stability, predictability and continuity. These values include: religion, taboos, dialogue, community, collective memories. Therefore, if we wish to live in a truly human world, we need to defend and protect these values in particular.
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Morawiec Arkadiusz, The Holocausts. “Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne” 12. Poznań 2017. Publishing House of the Poznań Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, pp. 225–239. ISSN 2084-3011. The article examines genocide as a category that has been used and abused in various, especially historical, political, and ideological, discourses. It considers whether the extermination of Jews (the Holocaust) should be studied in the context of other mass crimes. I investigate various sources of twentieth-century organized violence and their literary representations. I also discuss the works of Polish literature (by Nałkowska, Gębarski, Woroszylski, and Margolis), which depict twentieth- -century acts of genocide (the extermination of Jews and Armenians, in particular) in the context of other mass crimes.
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The issue of women’s work in Polish government institutions in London during World War II has not been a subject of historical research. Additionally, we have not seen the publication of the memoirs written by these women. Current research allows us to state that among about a thousand employees of Polish ministries in London there were about 300 women. Most of them worked in the Ministry of Information and Documentation (116), the Ministry of Internal Affairs (63) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (60). On the other hand, the percentage of women was the highest in the Presidium of the Council of Ministers (41.38%), the Ministry of Information and Documentation (38.54%) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (28.98%). In the Ministry of Internal Affairs, women were employed in all organisational units, including the ones that carried out secret activities: Department of Social (National) Affairs or the Department of Continental Action. Apart from being secretaries and typists, women performed the very important tasks of radiotelegraph operators, cryptographers, couriers and emissaries during the war. It would be no exaggeration to state that they played a very important role in the tedious everyday functioning of Polish government institutions in London in that difficult time. Another important fact is that a significant portion of these women remain unknown. Their names and surnames are written down in documents, but we know virtually nothing more about their lives during the war. Let us hope that further research will allow us to fill these important gaps in our knowledge.
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W artykule poddano analizie podstawowe kierunki interpretacji zjawiska terroryzmu we współczesnej nauce o polityce oraz filozofii politycznej. W świadomości społecznej terroryzm jako jeden z najważniejszych czynników współczesnej polityki traktuje się, na ogół, bardzo powierzchownie. Wiele współczesnych interpretacji terroryzmu, przy całym ich pozornym zewnętrznym obiektywizmie, w rzeczywistości stale odtwarza szablonową logikę historyczną, opartą na czysto zewnętrznym pojmowaniu terroryzmu jako akcji wywrotowych jednostek i niewielkich grup, kierujących się przeróżnymi motywami politycznymi. Dana tendencja stale posługuje się środkami masowej informacji, utrwalającymi w pamięci politycznej szablonowe obrazy terrorystów i tym samym fałszywe pojmowanie zarówno rzeczywistych celów, które starają się oni osiągać, jak i realnych struktur korporacyjnych, które finansują i ukierunkowują ich działalność. Powszechnie występujące dylematy w zakresie interpretacji aktywności terrorystycznej w wielu regionach świata wiążą się z panowaniem we współczesnym dyskursie politycznym praktyk przemocy, braku swobody i sytuacji nadzwyczajnych, stale zasilających retorykę „wojny z terrorem”. Praktyki te same z siebie nakładają ograniczenia na subiektywną swobodę opinii, sprzyjając formowaniu struktur „władzy dyscyplinującej”, której podstawowe mechanizmy były swego czasu wszechstronnie przebadane w filozofii politycznej M. Foucaulta. W artykule sformułowano tezę, zgodnie z którą, wbrew stabilnym stereotypom liberalnym, terroryzm państwowy należy rozpatrywać w planie teoretycznym w charakterze uniwersalnej zasady lub „matrycy”, podczas gdy inne formy terroryzmu indywidualnego i grupowego, niezależnie od ich orientacji socjalnej, klasowej lub ideologicznej, jawią się jako wywodzące się z tejże podstawy. W artykule zauważa się, że adekwatne naukowe określenia terroryzmu sprzyjają zburzeniu niektórych koncepcji historiozoficznych, które w ciągu ostatnich dziesięcioleci przekształciły się w stabilne mity polityczne.
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The ‘Kike Communism’ cliché holds a special position in Polish antisemitic discourse, where it has different functions. Having been replicated over time, it has been reinforced and become a social platitude, a matrix of popular thinking about history, a descriptive category applied by journalist and academic discourses and a keyword in discussions on Polish-Jewish relations. “Kike Communism” is a cultural topos and a condensation of meanings and interpretations that have been adopted and familiarized so well that it is difficult to see, let alone undermine its roots. Apart from the narration about the harm suffered by Polish patriots at the hands of Jewish Communist torturers the names of those torturers hold an important place in the structure of this topos. It is actually difficult to imagine its content without the symbolic figures such as Jakub Berman, Anatol Fejgin, Roman Romkowski, Stefan Michnik, Helena Wolińska-Brus, Julia Brystiger and Józef Różański. For years they have played the iconic roles assigned to them in the Polish antisemitic discourse. Julia Brystiger, or rather her mythologized image, deserves particular attention in this group. Nicknamed ‘Bloody Luna’ she surely is among the most demonized female Communists in Poland. The objective of the considerations in this paper is to try to demonstrate the construction of the phantasm surrounding her on the basis of a thorough analysis of different texts in Polish culture, ranging from literature to film.
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Julian action (program) as a legal and political phenomenon in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the turn of the XX century, which occurred in the areas inhabited by Hungarians living abroad. It mostly referred to the establishment of Hungarian schools, cultural societies, religious schools and state railways. There are two opposing opinions on its main goals: on the one hand Julian action was perceived as a measure of preserving the identity, culture and language of Hungarians abroad, and on the other it was recognized as the political Hungarisation of Slavs, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Hungarian government incorporated Julian action into the concept of the Hungarian state idea, aspiring to unite the Hungarian state from the Carpathian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea, with a single Hungarian national language. In that context Hungarians from Bosnia and Herzegovina were observed by other nations as imposed foreign bodies and conquerors, while for Hungary they were a “fortress” defending them from South Slavic nations who were uniting in their fight against the Monarchy, as well as a means of spreading the Hungarian influence and opposing Austrian aspirations. Julian action was short-lived due to the oncoming World War and failed to accomplish the long term goal in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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The article presents the problem of cultural memory of Poles from two different regions of Ukraine, the south-east of the country and Carpathian Bukovina. It examines the following five main topic areas: the Second World War, life after the war (including the problem of the Russians), the issue of the Roman Catholic religion, the language question, and the problem of declaration of Polishness today. The accounts of the everyday life of Poles in the Ukrainian-Russian and Ukrainian-Romanian borderlands show important differences concerning their experience of war. In Bukovina, which used to be part of Romania, Poles display a much more consolidated sense of national identity. Despite the restrictions imposed by Soviet authorities, they gathered around the Roman Catholic Church as well as the institution of family, and taught the Polish language in private homes. This explains a continuity of their traditions, language, culture, and memory. On the other hand, throughout the Soviet period the Poles in Eastern Ukraine were cut off from contacts with Poland, the Roman Catholic Church and Polish organisations. Geographically dispersed and living in fear in their social environment, Polish families experienced a loss of their loved ones and faced severe punishment for declaring identity other than ‘Soviet’. Another factor at play was a relatively high rate of mixed marriages. The memory of contact with the Soviets is similar in both borderlands. The conduct of the new authorities was the same everywhere, and the examples quoted in the article represent a broader issue which would merit a separate study
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Several prominent historians and researchers of historical memory from Poland, Lithuania and Belarus have focused on some questions concerning traditions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as the role of the close neighbors in the history of Poles, Lithuanians, and Belarusians. This insight give us an idea about the main directions of historical research in these countries for which the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish¬ Lithuanian Commonwealth is a common heritage. This also allows us to understand the level of public and political interest in this problem, and reveal important trends in the historical memory of these three countries.
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There were two phases in the post-1989 Polish historical politics as projected abroad. The initially “normal” Poland gradually transformed itself around year 2004 into a Poland of suffering and redemption. An important role in that transformation was played by the reaction to the external vision of Poland’s role and fate during the Second World War, causing the “Holocaustization” of the Polish historical self-image. The article discusses the main elements of that self-image and the way it is used.
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This paper will analyse the representation of houses in selected novels and non-fiction by Penelope Lively. Houses feature in her writings as material objects as well as immaterial forms created by the human psyche; they may also be conceptualised as organic beings whose lives mirror the lives of their inhabitants. However, it will be argued that for the characters in Lively’s novels houses function primarily as sites of memory. Houses are treated as repositories of the past, both because they hold secure its material remnants and because they have the potential to evoke memories and thus enable people to forge and maintain meaningful connections with the past. The article will also take account of Lively’s three autobiographical books, Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, A House Unlocked, and Ammonites and Leaping Fish, in which the writer embarks on the project of retrieving memories by exploring, respectively, three houses she used to reside in as “material memoirs” of her own past as well as collective history.
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Alzheimer’s is a disease that poses a challenge to the established ways of thinking about the relation between memory, identity and narrative. In this article, I offer a reading of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice (2007), Stefan Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting (2008), and Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves (2014) to examine the ways in which the increasingly popular literature of Alzheimer’s represents, and possibly reconfigures, the prevalent notions of identity and memory, as well as the relation between literature and science. A number of critics have noted a shift in contemporary literature demonstrated by the growing focus on neurological conditions. Accordingly, the analysis of Alzheimer’s novels refers to selected critical descriptions of this shift, including the discussions of syndrome literature and the neuronovel.
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The article analyses the features of the model of the national memory, represented by historiographycal discourse of 1920-th. Images of historical events and key personalities of intellectual Ukrainian space are considered as attempts of compromising and adaptation of the model of the national memory to the socio-political processes of the Ukrainization.
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The purpose of the article is to trace the development of the victims vs. perpetrators discourse as an integral part of the historical master narrative of Latvia since the end of the 19th century till nowadays. The narrative of abuse plays an essential role in historical master narratives of many modern national communities, as their integrity is strongly dependent on defining themselves via binary oppositions. According to Anthony Smith, in this self-identification process of a nation culture, mass communication and education play a particular role [Smith, 1991]. Maurice Halbwachs has specified that school textbooks, media and cultural production actually do not care much about the 'real history' - what is being implemented, refers to 'collective memory', adapted to the requirements of the actual presence [Halbwachs 1980]. The research paper analyses how this collective memory pattern has been shaped throughout time in the historical master narrative of Latvia as reflected in literature, media and school textbooks. The research focuses on the 'official' master narrative, as the research objective was to reveal how the past has been adjusted to present under changes of political regimes and social developments. However, in the context of the second half of the 20th century contrasting voices have been included in order to suggest the presence of the multiplicity of narratives and to pose a series of questions to the current cultural and socio-political interpretation of the past of Latvia.
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The article presents the process of building of war industry in Poland in the interwar period through the prism of Jan Prot's biography – a Polish independence activist who was a member of the Piłsudski political camp. He was also one of the most significant economic activists of the Sanacja camp even though did not belong to the milieu of its first-rank leaders. As an adolescent Prot entered the Polish independence camp led by Józef Piłsudski. As an officer of the Polish Legions and then the Polish Armed Forces he took part in the struggle for independence and frontiers of the Polish state. After the end of the war he left the army and continued university studies in the field of chemistry, which were finalized with a PhD dissertation in non-organic chemistry in 1924. From 1927 he worked as the Central Executive Manager of the State Gunpowder Factory (PWP) in Zagożdżon-Pionki where he expanded both the factory and a settlement built around it. With time the PWP plant became the largest gunpowder and explosives factory in Poland as well as one of the biggest factories of that kind in Europe. It successfully attended the creation of the Central Military District (COP) which was the greatest economic project of the interwar Poland. In September 1939, the outbreak of WWII made Prot and most of his subordinates evacuate PWP to the east in the hope to resume military production in a safe place. The Soviet aggression against Poland made those plans futile which led to Prot's involvement in clandestine fight against the German occupiers. Soon after, on the order of the underground organization called the Union of Armed Struggle he left for France and then Great Britain where he died as a political emigrant in 1957. He paid great merit in the process of building of the Polish war industry during the Polish IInd Republic despite the fact the outbreak of WWII interrupted it.
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