The deportation from the MSSR in the summer of 1949 is one of the most sinister events in the history of this space, which not only marked the fate of many families of Bessarabian peasants, but was, also, a turning point in the development of the social engineering project whose purpose was the formation of the ,,new man". The study focuses on the analysis of the war of the communist authorities against the inhabitants of the villages of Bessarabia, starting with the spring of 1944, the mechanisms of struggle against those who resist the Soviet agrarian policy. It also examines the ideological framework that served as the basis for instigating hatred for a part of the poor peasantry against that part of peasant households, which did not want to collectivize. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of the main political decisions that have ordered the identification of the categories of persons to be punished, and implicitly defined the course of repression and deportation to Siberia.

Since the end of the war in 1975, Vietnamese Catholicism has had to face numerous difficulties arising from the anti-religious policies implemented by the Communist Party. The Holy See therefore initiated a patient diplomatic dialogue with the aim of providing for the appointment of bishops to the many vacant sees. Abandoning the rigid stance it had adopted in other contexts, in Vietnam a new appointment procedure was gradually established, which eventually gained the approval of the Communist authorities, while at the same time laying the foundations for the establishment of official diplomatic relations.

During the parliamentary elections in Italy after World War II, rumours spread in the public sphere about the occurrence of “miracles.” These “miracles” were interpreted as warning messages from the divine about the danger posed by the Communist Party. This was considered part of a strategy to promote Christian Democrats by representatives of the Catholic Church and was viewed with concern by communist countries in Eastern Europe as the phenomenon began to spread. In the second half of 1948, the Romanian authorities initiated measures to abolish the Greek Catholic Church and persecute the Roman Catholic Church. In this context, rumours spread in Catholic circles about “miracles” intended to stimulate the resistance of believers in the face of persecution. The phenomenon of “miracles” also spread among Orthodox believers, who were dissatisfied with the elimination of religious education in schools and the beginning of the collectivization of agriculture. For this reason, this phenomenon was considered a danger by the communist authorities in Romania. In this study, we aim to examine how the authorities dealt with the issue of “miracles,” what measures were taken, which institutions were involved, and what the consequences were for long-term religious policy in communist Romania.

This article offers a critical examination of Salim Kadri Kerimi’s response to my reply concerning his critique of my earlier study on the deportation of Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija, published in Tokovi istorije, No. 3 (2022). The analysis highlights Kerimi’s selective and tendentious interpretation of archival documents, wherein facts are interpreted in a manner that supports his pre-existing thesis - namely, that the Yugoslav communist authorities systematically and forcibly deported Turks and other Muslims. This approach often involves overlooking the actual content and context of the sources cited.

This article presents the concept and dynamics of secularization policies and the atheization process in Montenegrin society following World War II. The process of secularization began with the Communist Party’s rise to power and had its most significant manifestations until the mid-1950s. In this research, in addition to the specific secularization policies of the communist authorities, an analysis of the relationship of the state, that is, the communist authorities, towards the religious communities in Montenegro is given. Montenegro was the Yugoslav republic in which the process of atheization and secularization took place most intensively in relation to the federal level. The research presented in the article also includes an analysis of the results of the secularization of the three largest religious communities in Montenegro.

The subject of the study in this article is the artistic representations of the intellectual in O. Slisarenko’s novel The Black Angel. The purpose of the article is to identify the main types of intellectuals in the novel and to characterise their features. The theoretical and methodological frameworks for the research were provided by Edward Said’s, Zygmunt Bauman’s and Czeslaw Milosz’s works devoted to the identity of the intellectual and his mission in society, Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s studies on the ambivalence of human identity, the concepts of “split souls” (Dmytro Dontsov) and “the lost Ukrainian person” (Mykola Shlemkevych) as well as papers on the peculiarities of Slisarenko’s fiction. The methods of literary hermeneutics, anthropology and semiotics are used in the paper. The novelty of the research lies in the interpretation of the characters from Slisarenko’s The Black Angel as the representatives of the different standpoints and value guides the educated people choose in the face of historical cataclysms. The study shows that the intellectuals of the post-revolutionary era in the novel The Black Angel are experiencing an identity crisis and are trying to find the meaning of their own existence. The author represents the oddball inventor that collaborates with the communist authorities and dreams to make an invention, which would be able to change the life of mankind. Finally, the character obsessed with his own idea appears to be a pseudointellectual that ignores the laws of nature, does not realize the limitations of human capabilities and pursues his own fame rather than scientific truth. The novel also brings to fore other types of intellectuals, in particular, the educated man that devotes himself to the irreconcilable armed struggle for Ukrainian statehood, and the sage that opts for the path of escape from social confrontations and ideologies to solitude and self-absorption. The representation of intellectuals in The Black Angel is associated with references to the symbols, mythologism of thinking and philosophical reflections about the imperfection of all ideologies, human nature and limited human knowledge, the element of life and its eternal mysteries. The attention to the problem of intellectual’s identity at the turn of historical and cultural epochs makes Slisarenko related to other 20th-century writers that pondered over the issues of their own mission and human destiny.

Based on studying archival sources and literature, the author explores the implementation of nationalization after the Second World War, which enabled the communist authorities to destroy what private property the Church had left after the agrarian reform. Thus, by 1960, about half of all nationalized religious buildings in Slovenia were located in the then Diocese of Maribor. This percentage of nationalized religious buildings was definitely a severe blow to the aforementioned diocese in pastoral, educational, and, last but not least, economic terms. The second part of the article focuses on an analysis of the process of denationalizing the property taken from the Archdiocese of Maribor in the past. In particular, the author discusses the process of the restitution of this property, as exemplified by the theological seminary at Vrbanska cesta 30 in Maribor, which was returned to the ownership of the archdiocese in full, which restored the legal and economic basis of this ecclesiastical institution. Healso highlights the historical context and the legal and societal implications of this important step.

Founded in the 1750s, The village of Radnevo, depending on its geographical location (in the Upper Thracian land, near the town of Stara Zagora) has provided the livelihood of its inhabitants mainly through agricultural activities. Before and, especially after the Liberation, the village was formed as a large cereal center, developing cereal-trade activities related to cereals throughout the region. This role is further enhanced by the construction of the Simeonovgrad – Radnevo – Nova Zagora railway line in 1872-1873. Trade and production of wheat and others continues to be the main way of subsistence for the inhabitants of the village until the Second World War. The new communist authority in Bulgaria decides to take on the path of heavy industry, and this requires energy. It turns out that the East Marshall Coal Basin is the largest in the country and it is decided to create Maritza-Iztok Mines – energy enterprise. The headquarters of the enterprise is organized in Radnevo village and the new city completely changes its socio-cultural development model. Библиография: Койчева 1970: Койчева, Величка. Известия на историческото дружество в България. С., кн. 23, 1970. Овчарова 1946: Овчарова, Донка. Етнографско изследване на село Раднево, околия Старозагорска. Дипломна работа, представена в катедрата на Славянска етнография при СУ. С., 1946.

A Tough Man: Biographical Sketch of the Peasants’ Movement Activist Edward Kaleta(1913-2000) The article is about Edward Kaleta, a lawyer and politician, who in 1933 became a member of the Peasants’ Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe – SL), a party of Polish farmers, active in the Second Polish Republic. During World War II, under the German occupation, he was the SL’s Silesian representative in the underground Political Consultative Committee at the Government Delegation for Poland (a secret structure of the Polish Government in Exile in London). Kaleta then served as head of the office of the Regional Delegation of the Government in Exile in Krakow. After the war, he became a member of the Supreme Executive Committee of the Polish Peasants’ Party, the only political group in opposition to the communist authorities installed in Poland by the Soviet Union, led by Stanisław Mikołajczyk. During this time, he was arrested several times by the communist security apparatus. In the 1970s, he supported the activities of the Student Solidarity Committee, an anti-regime organisation established after the death of Stanisław Pyjas. The article is based on, among other sources, archival materials collected at the Archives of the Institute of National Remembrance in Krakow, the Archives of the Jagiellonian University, the Museum of the History of the Polish Peasant Movement, and the Wincenty Witos Museum in Wierzchosławice.

The subject of reflection in this article is the Israeli period in the work of Polish-Yiddish writer Kalman Segal (1917–1980), who decided to emigrate to Israel after the antisemitic campaign inspired in 1968 by Poland’s Communist authorities. Referring to Przemysław Czapliński’s definition of “nostalgia” (“a narrative manifestation of the [longed for] past, an effort to meticulously reconstruct personal experiences, spaces, people and customs preserved only in memory”), the author analyzes literary texts in which the writer, already a citizen of Israel, continues his life-long mission of nostalgically remembering the “Murdered Shtetl” (as the author calls it), a symbol of Jewish civilization in the Polish lands, and commemorating its Jewish inhabitants murdered in the Holocaust. At the same time, using Jora Vaso’s definition of “anti-nostalgia” (“the emotions of a modern exile who has left his ‘backward’ homeland to live in the modern world, being aware of its shortcomings, as a result of which it becomes an object of recollection, which arouses his harsh criticism and roots him in the past, making obsessive thinking about his former homeland his main preoccupation”), the author tries to show Segal’s difficult process of adaptation to the Israeli reality that was alien to him and how he was disturbed by the suffering and longing accompanying the decision to leave his former homeland. Over time, one can see in Segal’s work a growing acceptance of the new situation and commitment to the new reality. This can be read as overcoming both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia towards Poland. Life experiences lead Segal to believe that being in exile is a universal experience and an existential condition of the Jewish people.

In 1917-1922, in the Far East region known as the Green Wedge, Ukrainians who had migrated there actively fought for their national rights and self-determination. In this context, the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic emerged, striving for its own autonomy and independence. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the autonomous governing bodies of the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic as organs of state power in its state-building. The study found that the autonomous governing bodies of the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic played an important role in state-building. They ensured the functioning of the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic as an autonomous entity, contributed to the development of Ukrainian culture and education, and protected the national rights of Ukrainians in the Far East. Inspired by the example of the Ukrainian Central Rada, which emerged in Kyiv after the February Revolution of 1917, the idea of creating a Ukrainian Far Eastern Council arose. In the context of the escalating political crisis in the Far Eastern region, the decline of Ukrainian social life, and the growing Bolshevik threat, virtually all Ukrainian organizations that existed in the Far East were liquidated in November 1922 after the establishment of Soviet power in the area, and their leaders and activists were arrested, and their property was confiscated, which is a consequence of the Chita Process (a set of repressive measures by the Soviet communist authorities aimed at suppressing the Ukrainian national movement in the Far East, carried out from January 5 to 13, 1924, against Ukrainian activists and leading figures of the Ukrainian Far Eastern movement detained in 1922). Ukrainian national organizations constituted a well-structured system of bodies of national self-government of the Ukrainian population of the Far East, which had a socio-administrative character, and their creation was the implementation of the principle of national-cultural autonomy, which was legally formalized only in the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic.

During the People’s Republic of Poland, Polish education, despite the pompous slogans and assurances of the communist authorities, failed to fully realize the intentions and educational and upbringing goals of the time. This was caused, among other things, by the following factors: crises of the people’s power, fragmentary totalitarianism and the division of everyday life into private and official spheres (home and school), the influence of the Catholic Church, fascination with Western civilization, anthropological and demographic phenomena, social attitudes, shortages and deficiencies, economic crises, weakness of staff and administration, the evolution of the government’s educational policy, general apathy.

THE ARMY AS INTERNMENT: FORMS OF THE REPRESSION DURING THE MARTIAL LAW IN THE YEARS 1982-1983 AGAINST ACTIVISTS OF THE ANTICOMMUNIST OPPOSITION PLACED IN MILITARY SPECIAL CAMPS (PART II)The work focuses its issues on one of the repression forms used in the martial law introduced on 13th December 1981 to pacify the society which tried to change the fossilised communist system through activity in the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity”. It was not a new solution in the Polish People’s Republic – just after the Second World War the communist authority drafted into “alternative military service” opponents of sovietisation of the country, directing them to forced labour in mines. Fearing a social rebellion before the second anniversary of the independent trade union registration, communist authorities interned in military special camps, functioning in Poland from 5 November 1982 to 3 February 1983, 1450 trade union activists and members of the political parties unaccepted by communists. 264 younger colleagues of these people were drafted into the basic military service lasting two years in three units intended for this purpose.

ABSTRACT The present paper focuses on the early 1960s and spotlights efforts to commemorate the Holocaust in south-eastern Poland. Members of the religious Congregation and the lay Social-Cultural Association of Polish Jews as well as transnational activists, created a network of memorials. Encompassing local sites of killings, those small-scale memorials challenged the Communist authorities’ programme of commemoration. They marked villages, towns and cities with reference to Jewish suffering. They highlighted victims’ identity and used Jewish symbols and bilingual inscriptions to narrate the genocide. In so doing, they have successfully prevented the memory of the Holocaust from disappearing.

Liturgical and pastoral perspectives of the sacraments of baptism and confirmation according to bishop Wilhelm Pluta based on the Gorzowskie Widomości Kościelne [Gorzów Church News] The purpose of this article is to present the pastoral project and its adaptation and liturgical-pastoral perspectives for the local Church of the Recovered Territories in Poland, described during the episcopate of Bishop Wilhelm Pluta (1958-1986). The phenomenon of Bishop Pluta, his liturgical-pastoral vision and wisdom as a shepherd in the so-called Recovered Territories, populated by Poles from the East, people whose families were victims of the Holocaust, victims of the Volhynian massacre, who had to leave their life’s work and go into the unknown in cattle wagons, and as a shepherd defending human identity and dignity during the persecution of the Church in Poland by the communist authorities, illustrates only in a telegraphic summary the geopolitical context to which Bishop Pluta was sent. The analysis of available materials (pastoral letters, various types of typescripts, instructions, decrees and orders published in the official church bulletin – Gorzowskie Wiadomości Kościelne) presents the actual undertaking of the liturgical and pastoral mission by Bishop Wilhelm Pluty. The materials, the total number of which amounts to four thousand pages, show not only the enormous intellectual work of the bishop of that time, but also the great demand and task of the pastors, who were responsible for the direct implementation of the bishop’s orders. Such a rich resource of information cannot be exhaustively described in one treatise. Therefore, in the article presented below, I have limited myself to discussing only the bishop’s liturgical and pastoral perspective on the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. The above article is therefore an attempt to present Bishop Pluta’s pastoral idea in the face of the historical and cultural changes in the Recovered Territories in the years 1958-1986, and at the same time a reflection on its [Pluta’s idea] adequacy, the fruits of which we can observe today, with hindsight, in the Zielona Góra-Gorzów diocese.

The purpose of the study is to analyze the reasons for the communist authorities’ brutal implementation of the collectivizationand dispossession policy and its terrible demographic and humanitarian consequences in Ukraine.Scientific novelty: a set of theoretical and practical factors is highlighted that determined the authorities’ anti-humanpolicy towards the Ukrainian peasantry in the late 1920s and early 1930s and led to profound socio-economic and humanitarianchanges. The forms and methods of implementing collectivization in the republic are considered. The attitude of the peasantsto collectivization is highlighted, a wide range of passive and active forms of their peaceful and armed struggle against theauthorities’ intentions to change their socio-economic status is considered. The reasons for the defeat of the peasantry are analyzed.They lie in the plane of theoretical provisions that guided the Bolshevik Party in its relations with the peasantry. Theseprovisions were formulated by the founders of Marxism, who defined the peasantry as a reactionary class that has no future andproposed involving its economic and human potential in building a new system. Lenin and his associates took these dogmas asa basis and consolidated them in the minds of the members of their party. Based on the theoretical provisions of Marxism aboutthe hostility of the peasantry to the interests of the working class and the experience of the Civil war and Ukrainian liberationstruggles, in which entire peasant armies participated, the Bolshevik government, upon establishing its regime in the republic,punished with increased cruelty any manifestations of peasant discontent, considering them a threat to its existence. On asignificant scale, it removed from the peasant environment its most charismatic element, capable of organizing resistance, andweapons. In this way, it deprived it of the proper organizational, human, and armed potential, and the willpower to organize asignificant struggle.Conclusion. When the policy of forced collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside began to be implemented, it, despitemass demonstrations and the use of a wide range of forms and methods of resistance, was no longer able to resist it. As a result, a serious socio-economic breakdown occurred. Its consequences: the loss of a self-sufficient peasant-owner, a bearer of experience in agricultural production and the spiritual culture of the nation, the closure of many aspects of the production, social, and cultural life of the village to bureaucratic structures controlled by the state and the communist party, the loss of a free peasant, the formation of a slave-laborer. The “Great Breakthrough” was programmed at the very beginning of the formation of the communist doctrine.

The paper presents a detailed account of the criminal trial against Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Wiktor Boczkowski, alias “Korwin,” who served as an officer in the counterintelligence division of the Polish Underground State during World War II. His primary task was to combat the communist underground activity, which was already gaining momentum in the occupied Poland. After the war, due to his anti-communist efforts, he became one of many heroes of the independence underground persecuted by the new communist authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland. His criminal trial began shortly after his arrest and lasted for over seven years. During this time, “Korwin” remained in custody and was subjected to brutal interrogations. He was tortured, including having his beard burned, in an effort to extract confessions. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. In 1956, his sentence was reduced to eight years as part of a general amnesty, and he was released. After regaining his freedom, Boczkowski sought to have the case reopened, citing the use of illegal interrogation methods. However, the Supreme Court refused to review the case. Wiktor Boczkowski died in obscurity in 1967, never having been rehabilitated.

The purpose of the study is to clarify the Polish experience of modernizing education as a significant component of large-scale post-war reconstruction of the state. The methodological basis of the work is an interdisciplinary approach with particular emphasis on the structural-functional systematic analysis of historiographical facts and the comparative-historical method based on the principles of objectivity and historicism. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the comprehensive analysis of the problem of reforming Polish education as a key factor in the country's post-war reconstruction. The article has concluded that the reforms in schooling at all levels became the basis of the post-war reconstruction project, which was implemented by the Polish communist authorities after the expulsion of the German occupiers. These reforms were based on the principles of uniformity, universality, free and open education. Their goal was to overcome the consequences of many years of occupation, modernize and consolidate public life, and dynamically develop all branches of industry and agriculture. Significant obstacles to the implementation of democratic educational initiatives were the deepening of authoritarian phenomena in the socio-political life of the country, which fell under the influence of Soviet totalitarianism. This was manifested in the centralization of all levels of education, the ideologizing of its content, subordination to the control of the party bureaucracy, class selection for admission to higher education, etc. However, despite the aforementioned shortcomings and political pressure, during the so-called Stalinist period, the educational reforms opened up the paths of social mobility on an unprecedented scale and reformatted educational institutions from primary to higher levels. Of course, the consequences of the changes were far from the expected results, but at the same time they represented a bold attempt to change the face of Polish education, modernize post-war society and rebuild the economy taking into account the challenges of scientific and technological progress.

The paper examines the behavior of Yugoslavia’s two largest national minorities during the Second World War. It inves­tigates reasons why the new communist authorities after the war did not punish the ethnic Germans and ethnic Albanians equally for their similar collaborationist attitudes.

Film societies in communist Poland began to function at the end of Wladyslaw Gomulka’s era and gained popularity in the 1960s. One of them was DKF „Politechnika”, an organization created by scholars and students from Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Today, it is the oldest still-functioning film society in Wrocław and one of the oldest in Poland. The author, a contemporary member of this institution, presents its history from establishment in 1965 to the temporary suspension during the Martial Law in Poland. During that period, the most active member was Andrzej Solecki, who founded the club and served in its management until 1981. Solecki also collected a significant amount of historical documentation that serves as a source for this article. Following Solecki’s activities, the author presents the history of DKF „Politechnika” during its glory days. The text reveals a lot of obstacles that organizers had to overcome to present their audience original, thought-provoking, and often inconvenient for the communist authorities works of Polish and international cinema.