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Materials in the archive of the Institute of Slavic Studies-the premier Soviet academic institution charged with directing the transformation of East European and Polish historiography-do not greatly alter the basic story we have known , that between 1948 and 1952 the Communist regime in Warsaw undertook to reinterpret the nation's history with the help of paradigms supplied by Moscow. The new, official version of Poland's past set out to present history as a predestined march toward socialism , to depict first Russia and then the USSR as Poland's unfailing friend , proclaim class struggle as the motive force of change, and judge all scholarship-past and present-in terms of rigid class concepts. [...]
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The tragic experiences of prisoners of the second largest ghetto organized by the Germans on Polish lands (after the Warsaw ghetto) were seldom incorporated into the sphere of official commemorations of World War II in communist Poland. This text attempts to retrace the increasing marginalization of collective memory in the Łódź ghetto during 1945‒1989 and point to the peculiar niches where its cultivation was permitted. The author is interested predominantly in the issue of the communist politics of historical memory with regard to the history of the ‘closed quarter’ in Łódź, that is manifestations of the top-down formatting of collective perceptions of the occupation-period history of the Bałuty quarter, which was isolated from the outside world. In the background of these reflections appears the issue of tension between official and popular memory and a question as to when and in what contexts the content of the latter could manifest themselves in the public space of the People’s Republic of Poland. The article’s source base is publications, periodicals, and selected documentation of institutions co-creating the communist politics of historical memory.
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The images that come to mind when we think about the 1989 "revolutions" are, on the one hand, the victory sign and the smiling crowds and, on the other, the overthrow of idols: of such real ones as Ceaușescu in Romania and Honnecker in East Germany and of the monuments of the dead ones, gigantic granite Lenins and Dzerzhinskiis towed away and the squares around them renamed for old kings or insurrectionary leaders. New monuments are built, new (or pre-Communist) geographic names appear on the changing map of East Central Europe and the former Soviet Empire. Schools and streets are getting new names, as if in a powerful effort to sweep history clean, and the same expressions of rejection are directed against yesterday's heroes-the dissident intellectuals. [...]
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Professor Ljubo Boban's recent Note on "Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History" (EEPS 4 [Fall 1990}, pp. 580-92), raises important points concerning current controversies over the concentration camp of Jasenovac. Professor Boban's treatment of the issues, however, is less than well balanced. This Comment on his Note is written as an effort to further Professor Boban's aim, to "prevent all manipulations of [the] tragedy" of Jasenovac. [...]
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It is easy to agree with Mr. Hayden that the magnitude of a crime cannot be measured by numbers and accounting alone. Nevertheless, it is possible that Mr. Hayden does not know that, there have been explicit attempts since the war, to bring forward the numbers and the accounting of victims as the issue of foremost importance. This was surely not done without a certain aim, and not without a certain method. The logic of this accounting was rather simple: the larger the number of victims, the greater the responsibility of perpetrators. If the number of victims is very large, then the perpetrators cannot be individuals or groups, but the whole people. [...]
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The notorious concentration camp of Jasenovac, established and run by the Ustaša regime of Ante Pavelić in wartime Croatia, has been the subject of enormous controversy in recent Yugoslav historiography. Two authors who have exercised a notably negative influence in this controversy are Vladimir Dedijer and Milan Bulajic. The purpose of this article is to disentangle some of the contradictory claims about Jasenovac and related questions that form the underbrush of historical and parahistorical literature in present-day Yugoslavia. Further, it is to establish the actual facts about the scope of Ustaša massacres at Jasenovac. Historians and the wider public need to know the truth about Jasenovac for its own sake, for the sake of appreciating the true dimensions of this human tragedy, and to prevent all manipulations of this tragedy. [...]
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This study discusses the role of the Russian diaspora in the instrumentalization of the Russian Federation’s public diplomacy. The main research question of this article is constructed on how Russia instrumentalizes the diaspora in its public diplomacy. Being among the countries that have the highest diaspora population due to population density,Russia applies public and diaspora diplomacy in order to strengthen its cultural and historicalties with the Russian and Russian-speaking citizens who live around the world, mainly in the old Soviet countries through the Rossotrudnichestvo Agency which was founded on 6September, 2008.
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For at least three decades, the relationship between politics and the writing of history in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has been a subject of interest to historians, political scientists, and others. Recent publications show the continuing strength of this interest. These writings document changes in the degree of ferment within one or another country's historical profession and in how various themes are treated, seeking to relate these to political developments; some contributors then go on to ask whether historical debates reveal evidence that socialism's scholars have some autonomy. [...]
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Prior to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a GRU officer named Oleg Penkovsky attempted to contact the West multiple times. He did it to such an extent that initially he was regarded as a provocateur. After his recruitment, Penkovsky was handled by a joint team of CIA-MI6 team and provided information that compromised the Soviet intelligence operations in Western countries. He also helped identify the operational readiness of nuclear missiles deployed by the Soviets in Cuba. Officially, his role was in equal parts exaggerated and downplayed by the UK and the Soviet Union. The former sought to protect the sensitive information that was obtained, the latter attempted to limit the damage he caused. Conflicting accounts identified him as either a Soviets plant or as someone who saved the West and the world. This article presents the reasons that determined him to choose the West over his own country; it discusses some of the accusations he was subjected to, particularly those that claimed he was working for the Soviets the whole time he spied for the West. Finally, it attempts to explain the importance of the information provided prior to the Cuban crisis. All these arguments support the assessment that Penkovsky was a genuine spy who offered his services to the West.
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In Brazil, different ethnic and social minorities (Quilombolas, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, the elderly) have expressly got recognition in the Federal Constitution of 1988 and other normative instruments as subjects of human rights. This scientific article deals with one such minority: the Gypsies. This article adopts the following problem of research: what is the relationship between colonial policies that aimed at the management of the Gypsy and the construction of the political-legal status of these peoples in Brazil? This research has made use of the following methodological resources: the participant observation of the authors in view of the legislative process of Bill 248/2015; the documentary research on the records of colonial and post-colonial laws that had directed to the management of Gypsies in Brazil; as well as the literature review, which intertwines the studies on the Gypsy question with decolonial theory.
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The creativity of political prisoners in various fields such as: poetry, prose, painting, then correspondences, sketches, photographs, etc. in Yugoslav prisons, over time it has also acquired the value of archival records. This material documents the concern, ideal, and sacrifice of patriotic people who suffered political imprisonment because of the national ideals they held. The exposure and recording of this documentation is an important contribution to national history, as it takes on the weight of a valuable archival material for future generations and our historiography. This material is quite special, due to the circumstances and specificities in which it was created, thus it carries with it what is called the “seal of time”. A part of this archival property has already became part of the fonds of our State Archives, On the other hand, some of them have been made public through articles in various magazines and newspapers, mainly poetry and short prose, while the rest have been published as thematic books and memories from prison time, etc. These documents, together, meet the criteria of archival records and material, which should be arranged and treated as a special collection/fonds important for the national political memory. Recording, collection, preservation and reflection of this creativity for the public, among others, for future generations will be a very important archival material, as evidence of a time and period of our history towards the struggle for freedom.
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In this essay, I discuss a particular narrative structure manifest in contemporary genocide narratives, a structure based on a distinctive presence of a first-person – usually male – narrator, who describes his experiences and reflections born in the course of his peregrinations to sites of mass extermination. Rooting my research in geocriticism, I explore ties between space and memory, which allows me to distinguish several levels of analyzed texts, tending towards metaphysical generalizations of nihilistic or patriotic nature. I apply the said analytical categories to my study of selected passages of Dawid Szkoła’s and Przemysław Dakowicz’s respective essays.
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This article examines the impact of Second World War events on the Slovenian territory in today's public discourse in the country. Specifically, the debate revolves around those Slovenian units that opposed the communist-led national liberation movement and to this end, collaborated with the Nazi and Fascist occupiers. Because of the extrajudicial killings of its members in the summer of 1945 and the faults of the communist regime as a whole, historical revisionists attempt to justify their choice to cooperate with the occupiers, a narrative that established itself after Slovenia gained independence in 1991. Today, in the light of Slovenia's independence and integration into the European Union, historical revisionists attempt to change the meaning of certain decisions, acts, or events to justify them. Despite numerous attempts at national reconciliation, the on-going disagreement in collective historical memory and value systems associated with such memory is used by individual politicians to push their political agenda. In that manner, it remains fairly present in the political and social life of Slovenia.
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Since Croatia’s independence, Croatian society has been antagonized by the issue of Yugoslav history. The point of contention on which society is divided into two almost irreconcilable camps concerns the interpretation of events after World War II and the mass liquidations, known as the Bleiburg Tragedy, of members of the defeated army of the Independent State of Croatia that began with their surrender at the small town of Bleiburg in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia. The topic of these liquidations was something of a taboo in Yugoslavia, which was governed by the Communist Party, but Croatian anti-Yugoslav emigrants constructed them as cultural trauma by linking them to the loss of “homeland” from a position of exile. This paper focuses on an analysis of the narrativization of the Bleiburg tragedy that creates emotions, constructs ideological phantasm and builds meanings for these post-war events as points of collective memory of Croatian political emigration. The analysis is based on articles dealing with this topic in the magazine Hrvatska revija from when it was published in Argentina. It also questions the way in which such structured cultural trauma antagonizes the social field after it enters the Croatian public space by revising common memories.
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Using the concepts of affective community (Ahmed 2015; Hutchison 2016) and affective management of “war heritage” (Logan and Reeves 2009; Gegner and Ziino 2012; Lončar 2014; Stublić 2019), the article examines how social subjects in Western Slavonia – a micro-location with many places of memory and a dense accumulation of historical traumas within them – are constructed as resisting and/or conforming to the dominant hegemonic policy of remembering the Homeland War as the “cornerstone of reasoning” in Croatia (Blanuša 2017). The examples analysed range from the activities of a local “memory agent” and the founder of a digital archive of local history to the reception of a book of testimonies and a documentary on the humanity of Pakrac’s medics in the war (Lessons on Humanity, 2017 and 2019). Based on these examples, I identified different strategies of cultural, pedagogical and ideological re-presentation and re-animation of local war heritage in the social and digital environment. These strategies are different responses to the fear that the feeling of social connection to war events and veterans as symbols of national unity and pride has been ebbing away. However, there has also been a noticeable shift on the Croatian (semi-)periphery from a ceremonial commemorative culture to a digital culture of memory of war, fostered by affective communities which transcend local, ethnic and generational boundaries. The second shift is semantic – the tendency to replace victimological and triumphalist war narratives with those of “humanitarian heroism” and positive war stories about humanity, about helping and rescuing people from the “enemy side”. In conclusion, even though the Croatian “social framework of memory” (Halbwachs 2013) offers different models for transforming fear, pain, violence and the trauma of war into “cultural heritage”, only individuals remember and feel, and very few among them become memory agents and activists of “mnemonic resistance” (Molden 2016) with a significant role in the struggles over the meaning of the past.
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The review of: JELENA SUBOTIĆ: Yellow Star, Red Star. Holocaust Remembrance after Communism, Cornell University Press, 2019, 228 str.
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The Veterans’ Federation (later: Federation of Veterans’ Associations) of the People’s Liberation War of Yugoslavia was founded in 1947 as a socio-political organisation of People’s Liberation War veterans and active participants of the People’s Liberation Movement, with committees formed according to the territorial principle—from the Federal, through republican and provincial, to municipal and local committees. It was characterised by a well-developed system of operation focused on the systematisation of veterans’ care and all forms of material, social, and health care for members as well as preserving and evoking public memory of the war. Combativeness and vigilance became high priorities of its socio-political work, especially from the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when members of the Veterans’ Federation became politicised in the wake of important socio-political changes. Simultaneous reorganisation-related changes and the activation of new municipal committees contributed to the intensification of the work of local veterans’ organisations, which manifested as the establishment of some new commissions and, in the following years, an influx of new members and a closer cooperation with other social and socio-political factors in the municipalities. This paper first describes the founding of the Veterans’ Federation of Yugoslavia, its structure and most important fields of activity, and then the formation, structure, and activities of the Municipal Committee of the Federation of Veterans’ Associations in Labin, which, together with other municipal veterans’ committees in the Socialist Republic of Croatia, represented the focus of veterans’ activities regarding quality of life improvements of its members and preserving the memory of the People’s Liberation War in the local community. This paper examines the most important changes in the Federation of Veterans’ Associations’ mode of operation, describes the local strategies of ideological work and work on creating a culture of memory related to the wartime and revolutionary past, and the ways in which the veterans’ organisation resolved the material and social-health issues of its members, and therefore influenced their quality of life. The research was based on materials of the Republican Committee of the Federation of Veterans’ Associations of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and the documentation of the Municipal Committee of the Federation of Veterans’ Associations in Labin, which has been mostly preserved for the late socialist period.
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Given their role in the preservation and protection of an authentic and credible trace of the past (documents) and, consequently, national identity, archives are considered places of choice for interpreting and representing shared memory and the past. Emphasising authenticity and credibility frames archives as seemingly neutral institutions in terms of politics and ideology. However, the trace that provides an insight into the “truth and knowledge” of our (individual and collective) past “that makes us what we are” needs to be questioned. Since the archiving procedure is based on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in all segments of everyday interpretation of material, the archive is a political and ideological institution that takes its place in the order of political power. This paper discusses the role of the archive as a place of preservation of “shared past and history” as an important part of national identity through the prism of institutional apparatuses or forms of knowledge/power (example of architecture) and technologies or manners of articulating and practising knowledge/power (example of everyday practice). The paper points to the role of archives in the (re)interpretation and (re)vision of shared memories, collective history and national identity on the examples of the Croatian State Archives and Archives of Yugoslavia, in the context of changes in the symbolic and political order (SFRY/Croatia). By constructing national memory and narratives of nationality through narratives of history and memory, and by constructing “truth” (knowledge) through exclusion and inclusion, archives (just like museums and libraries) have a role to play in “imagining” the community–nation. Or, according to the theory of performative identity (Foritier 2000), everyday practice that takes place in archives is an institutional identity practice that contributes to the unification and homogenisation of the community through a policy of interpretation by performing and producing (performative) memory (collective identity formation).
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The denial of the 1995 genocide against Bosniaks in the UN security zone of Srebrenica, has continued uninterrupted for 25 years. This denial has taken various forms and manifestations during that time; from denying the extent and character of crimes and the number of victims, to not accepting relevant court verdicts and especially, ignoring the consequences of genocide. As time passes, we are beginning to get the impression that an additional phase to the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica has emerged, in which, through the glorification of convicted war criminals and their affirmation in society, genocide is affirmed as an acceptable procedure and activity.We believe that this 25-year period of persistent denial, and even celebration of the genocide in Srebrenica, largely corresponds to the strengthening of neo-fascist and right-wing ideas and movements in European countries, which has been accompanied by an increasingly louder denial and relativization of the Holocaust.In this paper, we intend to analyze the connection between these phenomena, because we believe that the ideas pedaled by deniers of the genocide in Srebrenica, are significantly suited to strengthening the neo-fascism and Holocaust denial and are using this atmosphere to intensify genocide denial against Bosniaks and yet paradoxically, affirm the genocide, by glorifying the convicted war criminals and their ideas.
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