Communist Era Research Articles

Bricks and Bombs versus Bullets and Batons: Protest and Regime Violence as Generational Experience in Communist Poland

This article discusses the relation between state violence and public disorder under authoritarian rule in Poland. Focusing on the major crises and protests of the communist era, it examines regime violence through a double perspective – on the one hand, the way the regime resorted to physical violence to uphold its survival and, on the other hand, as a generational experience of those who suffered from it. Despite the state's use of physical violence until 1989 becoming more rationalised, modernised and efficient, it also turned less effective over time. This evolution contributed to a decreasing risk factor for protesters vis-à-vis the state. Since the bulk of those who participated in protests and riots were young people, the focus lies on the youthful dimension of public disorder and in particular the activity and experience of then students and young workers.

The Legal Position and the Cultural Role of the Churches During the Communist Era in Hungary

The Legal Position and the Cultural Role of the Churches During the Communist Era in Hungary

Ten Years Before I Met You

Ten Years Before I Met You Blas Falconer (bio) 70 kilometers eastof the capital, I livedin one of many buildings ofthe communist era, the imageof efficiency and utility,though the mines closed years before,Russian no longer required in school.Each morning for work, I walkedtoward the center, though it seemedI'd never get there, pastthe butcher shop, the church,the station, where trains came and went,almost empty, the bar fullby mid-morning. A path up the hill,from which you could seethe whole city—I would goone day. In winter, the skybecame a wall, the snow never ending.At the bus stop, no one spokeEnglish. When it came, late and full,it stopped, but the doorsdid not open. Some nights, I stoodin the orange booth, calling outto anyone who would answer. I grew lean,over the months, shedding whatI brought but didn't need,until my loneliness becamebeautiful, whetting a wantinside me, and when the rowof cottonwoods that lined the streetsbloomed in March, their seedsfloated through the air, a nuisance, butlike a dream. A gift from—whom? Someone tried [End Page 102] to tell me once. I cannotremember. I didn't understand. [End Page 103] Blas Falconer Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body This Failure. His poems have been featured by Poetry, Kenyon Review, and The Georgia Review, and his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange. He is a poetry editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. www.blasfalconer.com Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Imagining the Magical Freedom in Poland of the Communist Era: How Ibero-American Literature Influenced the Neo-avant-garde Artists

Analogies can be drawn between the contents of writings by Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges and Poland’s neo-avant-garde art of the 1960s and 70s, produced in the context of the oppressive reality of a Communist state: the literary category of ‘magical realism’ finds its counterpart in the actuality of an authoritarian regime, which is equally grotesque. The works by Maria Stangret-Kantor, Janusz Kaczorowski, Barbara Kozłowska, Ewa Partum, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Wojciech Bruszewski, or Natalia Lach-Lachowicz and the theoretical views expressed by Andrzej Lachowicz and Andrzej Kostołowski, which resulted from working with language as an artistic means, can be interpreted as expressions of one’s striving for imagined freedom – objections to the manipulation of meanings in the public sphere.

The Urmánczy Castle and the Municipality of Topliţa

The study shows the connection between the Urmánczy Castle and the municipality of Toplița. Its urban development in the 19th century was clearly influenced by the two grand estates of the Urmánczy and Bánffy families. During communism both had to suffer, but mostly the historical ensemble of the Urmánczy Castle located in the centre of the settlement. The park of the estate offered an “ideal“ available building place for the development of the city. The new administrative centre was built here together with a four-story hospital and several blocks of flats. These changes, and what pupils in the communist era were taught in school about the Hungarian counts who “exploited” the inhabitants of the settlement, drastically changed the perception of the castle in the community. Nobody was aware of the architectural value of the “only 100 years old” building. In 2009, the building was returned to the descendants of the Urmánczy family, the legal heirs, but the state continued to rent it until 2013. Currently, the castle is managed by the Positive Transylvania Association founded by the owners. From July 2020 it can be visited with guided tours.

Describing Mortality Differentials from the Perspective of Various Effects on Life Expectancy and Life Disparity Using Decomposition Methods: The Case of Czechia

The growth in life expectancy has accelerated since the 1990s in Czechia, which preceded a long period of stagnation or even a decrease during the communist era from the 1960s. This article aims to evaluate differences in mortality in terms of the impact of various effects on life expectancy and life disparity before and after the Velvet Revolution in Czechia. Three indicators were considered – life expectancy at birth, temporary life expectancy between ages 0 and 65, and the life disparity measure e-dagger (e†). In the article, we followed the decomposition method according to Arriaga (1984). Based on this method, the effect of mortality was further decomposed into an exclusive effect reflecting improved or worsened mortality in the given age group and into an interaction effect reflecting changes in mortality as a whole. Based on the results, it was found that the indirect effect prevailed in the case of life expectancy, while the direct effect dominated in the life disparity measure. Furthermore, we focused on the differences in life expectancy at birth between the sexes and between the two countries forming parts of the former Czechoslovakia – Czechia and Slovakia. For this purpose, we followed the contour decomposition method, so that we distinguished the effect of changes in mortality corresponding to the initial period and the effect of changes corresponding to changes in mortality in terms of time.

Prawo właściwe dla zobowiązań niewynikających z czynności prawnych w okresie Polskiej Rzeczpospolitej Ludowej

In the communist era, the law applicable to non-contractual obligations was regulated by two acts — the Private International Law of 1926 and the Private International Law of 1965, which dealt with the issue of the law applicable to obligations not arising out of legal action. The object of this study is to present the respective regulations in terms of determining this law. In particular, the author focuses on the analysis of two main connecting factors used at that time to determine the law applicable to non-contractual obligations, namely, the law of the place where the act giving rise to the non-contractual obligation was performed and the law of domicile. In the conclusion of the article the author assesses the solutions presented above from the point of view of both Polish and foreign doctrine.

Thomas K. Murphy: Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain: Life, Work and Culture in the Communist Era

Thomas K. Murphy: Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain: Life, Work and Culture in the Communist Era

<i>William Blake’s Black Bible</i> as a Spectacle of Doom: A Recent Note to Blakean Reception in Romania

I intend in this paper to focus on a lesser-known, yet highly significant, aspect of Blake’s aesthetic reception in southeast Europe. The radio play William Blake’s Black Bible (Biblia neagră a lui William Blake) represents—​as one learns at the end—​a tribute to the victims of the Colectiv Club fire, which occurred in Bucharest on 30 October 2015. The site itself was a blast from the past: established as a private venture by a prominent bourgeois family, Prodanof, between the two world wars, it became a successful footwear factory during the communist era and was left derelict after the demise of the Ceaușescu regime in late 1989. It was subsequently rented by private businessmen and turned into a fashionable events club after 1990.

MUSEUMFICATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: EVERYDAY LIFE AS A SPACE OF MEMORY OF A BYGONE AGE

The article is dedicated to the artistic and philosophical reflection on the everyday life of the communist era in the novel «The Museum of Unconditional Surrender» («Muzej bezuvjetne predaje», 1996) by Dubravka Ugrešić.The main attention is paid to the museumfication of elements of everyday life of the former Eastern bloc countries (SFRY, USSR in particular), i.e. transformation of material traces of the communist past into museum exhibits.After the fall of communist regimes in the Eastern bloc countries, and the disappearance of some of these states from the world map, entire layers of garbage and material remnants, including utilitarian objects accompanying the bygone everyday life, have remained. As long as the communist era has gone, the traces of its everyday life have acquired new meanings, associated with memory and nostalgia. These meanings define a new hypostasis of everyday objects: their hypostasis as museum exhibits.A world-famous Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić witnessed the formation and the breakup of Yugoslavia. In the novel«The Museum of Unconditional Surrender», written during her voluntary exile in Berlin, she depicts the museumfication of communist everyday life, revealing its new, metaphysical sense.The artistic world of the novel is organized within the metaphor of museum, which is emblematic for the postmodern philosophical and aethetical paradigm. The main action takes place in Berlin. Being a shelter for countless refugees and emigrants form the former socialist states, this city is seen as a total museum. Its dwellers repeatedly refer to themselves as to «walking museum exhibits». Thus, not only things, but also people get museumficated as remnants of a bygone era.The Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of the German Armed Forces, which gave the title to the novel, stands as a symbol of repressive mechanisms of the collective memory, promoting the coherent ideological metanarrative of the official history. Dubravka Ugrešić is aimed to deconstruct the museum as an ideological body, depicting some alternative storages of memory in the novel.First, it is the so-called «home museum» – a private collection of disordered photos and everyday things from the past. Besides, there are Berlin landfills and flea markets where things and people from the disappeared countries are found together. These alternative «museums» accumulate the uncoherent, subjective, heterogenic memory of the past. Such memory opposes the coherent metanarrative of a classic public museum.Looking through the different aspects of collective memory materialized in everyday objects, the article analyzes the relation between garbage and cultural memory, trivial objects and art, as well as the writer’s conception of museum.

Whose Holocaust? Whose Poland?

Abstract This essay argues that for better or worse the Holocaust has defined the postwar Polish historical narrative in many ways: in its silences, in its revelations as well in its distortions. Silences about the Holocaust characterized most of the communist era, with significant exceptions at both its beginning and end. Following an initial preoccupation with the criminal behavior of the Soviet and communist regimes in the 1990s, the Holocaust reemerged to the point of overwhelming both public discussion and the attention of scholars. The symbolic moment was the 2000 publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s Sąsiedzi (Neighbors). This period was also marked by greater scholarly interest in Polish-Jewish relations, which nonetheless lacked the resonance sparked by discussions of the Jedwabne massacre. While that scholarship continued, backlash to the revelations of early years of the new millennium, already present at the time, began to shape the “historical policy” of the first Law and Justice (PiS)-led government (2005–2007) and has become more prominent in its second iteration since 2015. The construction of a counter-narrative to that of Polish complicity is based not so much on “denial” as traditionally defined, but on redirection toward the twin themes of Polish resistance and rescue. The planned museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is just the most recent but hardly the only example, which in turn has sparked new controversies.

Stosunek do przeszłości jako czynnik kształtujący pokoleniowe autoidentyfikacje młodzieży w krajach postkomunistycznych

When we observe the social and political life in post-communist countries, we can also notice that generations of people born after the fall of communism are beginning to play an increasingly important role in shaping the views and political preferences of the whole society. Young people socialized in significantly different conditions than their parents’ generation represent (in many areas) attitudes that indicate their “generational difference”. The aim of the article is to describe and explain to what extent the assessments of systemic transformation in chosen post-communist countries are determined by the age of citizens. The author analyzes secondary data from surveys on public opinion in the following countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine. In order to explain how young people perceive their position in relation to the older generation, which remembers the communist era, an appropriate case study was conducted. The study was conducted among students from six academic centers in Ukraine (Kyiv, Lviv, Nizhyn, Pereiaslav, Sumy, and Uzhhorod). It was found that the strength of the relationship between age and the perception of systemic change varies across countries. The deepest divisions between the older and younger generations were identified in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Bulgaria. It was also found that the young generation of contemporary Ukraine is trying to emphasize its own generational difference by creating its own political identity in opposition to the features attributed to older generations.

Hungarian health care in the 1930s and 1940s: health care at a crossroads in East Central Europe before World War II

ABSTRACT The relationship between the Horthy era (1920–44) and the communist era shows continuities from a social historical perspective. The paper contributes to the reinterpretation of these relations by examining Hungarian health care in the 1930s and 1940s with a focus on the relationship between international transfers and path dependency in forging health care reforms. The author argues that the achievements communists regarded as inventions of socialism in health care and the welfare state had already been developed in the 1930s and 1940s. It was only because of the strict wartime budget of the early 1940s that these welfare reforms had not been realized. With the help of internal affairs documents, essays on health care, official statistics records in the National Archives of Hungary and the Semmelweis Library and Archives of Medical History as well as press material, Cora demonstrates that, even if communists depicted the interwar period as ‘fascist and imperialist’, the health care system of the so-called ‘productive social policy’ showed continuities. Moreover, social policy makers of the 1930s and early 1940s, such as Béla Johan, Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer and Béla Kovrig also designed welfare and health care reforms for the post-war period by both developing already existing Hungarian programmes and selectively adapting foreign welfare models (American management principles, the Alsace scheme and the Beveridge Plan). The study investigates Hungarian health care in view of the theory of path dependency and the macrohistorical convergence thesis developed by Tomka (on East–West convergence). It is within this framework that the paper addresses the issue of health care transfers to better understand the development of twentieth-century European health care systems by identifying similarities and differences in their development as well as to speculate on the trajectory of various political solutions to social challenges, including health care.

“Out our home” tel quel: An opinion on the Albanian Pavillion in the Venice Biennale 2021

In this year’s Venice Biennale, the Albanian pavilion named “In our home” proposed a notion of neighbourliness that presumably existed “less than 20 years ago,” yet one that has now disappeared as a result of “diving deep in the waters of globalization” and moving “toward an isolated indiference and uncertainty.”1 By ‘peeking sneakily’ at such reality through clips of “In our home” (“Në shtëpinë tonë”) – a rather consummated cinematographic totem of our communist quotidian anthropology, the pavilion invites us “to cross [the walls of our globalist apartment] and rediscover the gift of this bond2 .” Such crossing is ‘scripted’ through a pinwheel axonometric composition, in which four neighboring apartments “share a “[‘secret’] space that can only come to life if the neighbors are willing to make the discovery.”3 Some inconsistencies notwithstanding, like the association of a communist era flm with the wrong periodization of “20 years ago” (which should be like more than 30 years…), or the fact that the number of the ‘neighboring apartments’ in the brief is miscounted as three (when it should be four as an immanent result of the very pinwheel composition of the square), the pavilion explicitly proposes a return and recovery of a ‘lost’ time and its related ‘neighborliness’.

Jedna hra, různé příběhy? Zamyšlení nad kulturním překladem hry Stavíme Stalinův pomník

The article is a comparative analysis of Stavíme Stalinův Pomník and the Polish translation of it. This games refers to the world’s largest monument to Stalin in Prague, whose short history seems to summarize the specific character of the epoch. Drawing attention to the period when these games were created, which dates back to the early 1990s, the author tries to answer the question of whether the creators wanted to show something with this game, or whether it was only a matter of the satirical presentation of Stalin’s communism and the worship of him. A comparison of the components of versions of the game, such as the board, the rules of the game, the characters and the event cards highlights the icons of the communist era that are common for both countries, suggesting what belongs to the common experience of all Eastern Bloc countries.

The state in Chinese economic history

AbstractWe survey the recent economics and history literature on the Chinese state to investigate its role in China's long‐term socioeconomic development. We highlight three insights. First, unlike in Europe, where interstate competition helped give rise to capitalist states with high capacity, the Chinese state emerged from a different historical context. Second, the 18th‐ and 19th‐century Chinese state does not fit into the mould of a strong and extractive Oriental despotic state as once commonly believed. By conventional measures, early modern China had a weak state. Third, state building and centre‐local relations are two useful dimensions to understand development and change in China's recent history and political economy. To adapt China to a changing world, Chinese state builders embarked on a long process of state building from the late‐19th century through the Republican and Communist eras. Facilitated partly by regional decentralisation, the process now sees the Chinese state playing a substantially larger role in the economy and everyday life than any previous time in history.

Social mobility in China, 1645–2012: A surname study

This paper estimates the rate of intergenerational social mobility of status in Late Imperial, Republican and Communist China by examining the changing social status of originally elite surnames over time. It finds much lower rates of mobility in all eras than previous studies have suggested, though there is some increase in mobility in the Republican and Communist eras. But even in the Communist era social mobility rates are much lower than are conventionally estimated for China, Scandinavia, the UK or USA. These findings are consistent with the hypotheses of Campbell and Lee (2011) of the importance of kin networks in the intergenerational transmission of status. But we argue it more likely reflects mainly a systematic tendency of conventional mobility studies to overestimate rates of social mobility of status, where status is partially measured by income, wealth and education at individual or household level.

The Politics of Memory and the Refashioning of Communism for Young People: The Illustrated Guide to Romanian Communism

This paper analyzes the contents of a pocket-sized booklet entitled Ghidul ilustrat al comunismului românesc (The Illustrated Guide to Romanian Communism), which was published to counter growing nostalgia for the communist era that is popular among Romania’s young people. Influenced by family members and the media, the postmemory of Romanian communism among the country’s youth tends to focus on the positive aspects of the communist period and ignore the crimes of the postwar regime. The guide provides a selective reading of the history of Romanian communism and identifies repression as its main feature. The critical visual analysis of the images in the guide identifies the various forms that repression took during communist rule. It targeted not only individuals but also entire social groups, who faced imprisonment on political grounds. At the same time, the repression took quotidian form as the regime extended its control over people’s private lives and even their habits of consumption. DOI: 10.14712/23363231.2021.10

On Silence and History

Abstract How to write a silenced history is the broad question that frames this essay. It explores the methodological challenges of working with a purged archive and fragmented oral histories while telling the little-known story of the Bulgarian gulag and its aftermath. Weaving together the personal and the historical, the essay unfolds the silences that constitute the experience of state repression during the Communist era and the trauma that lingers to this day in the lives of survivors and society. To write a history of the Communist camp past in the capitalist present requires scholars to overcome intellectual frameworks deeply mired in triumphalist Cold War rhetoric. The historical methodology laid out here suggests that doing so demands of us to embrace the imperfect evidence that we have at our disposal: disjointed testimonies and purged documents. Instead of trying to make them cohere into a linear historical narrative, the essay proposes that we leave the gaps open and let the silences speak. In grappling with the limit of the archival record and faded memories, the essay also reflects on the multiplicity of the lived experience of twentieth-century Eastern European Communism and its contradicting realities, emancipatory and repressive at once.

THE SIMULACRUM NARRATIVE OF HISTORY INTERPRETATION IN POST-TOTALITARIAN CULTURE

The purpose of the article is to highlight the features of contemporary national culture as a special artistic meaning of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is formed by a reflection of a predominantly historical pattern. The research methodology consists of a set of scientific methods of general and special nature. Methods of analysis and synthesis, as well as historical, cultural and systemic approaches, were used to reveal the essence of virtual reality of super narratives in the information space, which are the impetus for the formation of ethical, aesthetic and artistic consensus. The relevance of the research is determined by the need to study the postmodern paradigm, which gives the rise to the new discourses that replace the narratives of the communist era in the interpretation of the history of the posttotalitarian space. The scientific novelty of the study is that it shows post-Soviet culture as an inertial phase of post-totalitarianism, which has an image simulative tottalogy of reality. Conclusions. The article demonstrated that the artistic meaning of the Gesamtkunstwerk of the post-Soviet space is a desirable reality, but it has stopped at the level of the fairy-tale narrative, which is formed by a reflection of a predominantly historical pattern. The time and space of culture in the dimension of the simulacrum world appear as another kind of aesthetics virtus. It has been noted that the cultural reality of post-totalitarianism is at a stage when it is necessary to realise that the invented reality of the fairy-tale type is not art. So, the hybridity of creative efforts, post-coloniality, hypercriticism as a way of being, vital energy represent a set of motives that adds little to the understanding of the situation of postmodern creativity in Ukraine. Conversely, national slogans indicate the need for a national identity, because time is waiting for the manifestation of creative initiatives of artistic synthesis.