Collapse Of Communism Research Articles

Transitional Justice Incubator: Bridging European Fault Lines

Transitional justice is typically perceived as a product of the third wave of democratisation, which came to the fore after the fall of the Iron Curtain, bringing along with it various mechanisms, from truth commissions and lustration procedures to national trials, leading to the creation of hybrid and international tribunals of global reach.1 Despite its obvious relevance, the aftermath of the Second World War is generally treated as a cursory prehistory in the transitional justice literature. With the exception of the Nuremberg trials, robust research on legal and extralegal ventures which characterised the first postwar decade remains largely disconnected from contemporary transitional justice concerns, and yet it offers a number of valuable lessons.2 Three recent publications which are the subject of this review are therefore a welcome intervention, highlighting the scope and depth, successes and fallacies of efforts to come to terms with the atrocious legacy of the Second World War in its immediate aftermath.

Before and After the Fall of Communism: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Soviet Foreign Policy in 1939–1940 in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Textbooks

ABSTRACT The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is a controversial event in the history of the Second World War. Some scholars regard the Pact as essential to the security of the Soviet Union; others consider it a reason to equate the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany as the main initiator of the Second World War. Comparison of the historical representations of the Soviet territorial expansion in 1939–1940 in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian textbooks can uncover the conceptual transformations in historical consciousness since the fall of Communism, and reveal: does the current evaluation of the Pact in Russia and Eastern European states vary?

This Way Back by Joanna Eleftheriou

Reviewed by: This Way Back by Joanna Eleftheriou Bryon Macwilliams (bio) Joanna Eleftheriou, This Way Back. In Place series. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020. Pp. 270. Paper $23.99. At first blush Joanna Eleftheriou's collection of essays, This Way Back, seems an unlikely fit for a book series rooted "in place": much is written from a neither here nor there place. Then again, for Eleftheriou—the child of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Greek-American mother, raised in both the United States and Cyprus—liminal space is her place. "I was born with nostalgia in my blood," she writes (59), reminding readers that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek words nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. Eleftheriou's nostalgia is a burden. After all, how much of a homecoming can there ever be when one has little sense of home? And how much pain must one carry beyond the wounds necessary for personal growth? The pain of duty to a father—his expectations, and his unfulfilled dreams. The pain of disapproval of a mother—and of mother and daughter's shared religion, Orthodox Christianity, with which the writer, a lesbian, is "incompatible" (11). The ache from "centuries-old collective memory" among Greek Cypriots and Greeks, generally—what Eleftheriou calls the "lament" of "our Greek nation's fall from its old glory" (107). Then there is the weight of obligation to dead ancestors—those who worked the land Eleftheriou inherited, and whose newly independent country was partitioned before she was born—and the longing for love that, for many years, Eleftheriou found merely in "the stars . . . the ocean, and words, my work" (139). Throughout the 17 essays in the book, Eleftheriou's first, it is clear that, for a long time, these and other forces conspired to tell the writer that her life—her self—could wait. [End Page 248] The book turns in large part on the family's decision, in the writer's early adolescence, to move from the borough of Queens, New York, to the father's village of Asgata near the Cypriot coastal city of Limassol. As a young adult Eleftheriou returned to the United States, where she is now an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. "It's taken decades to begin winding my Americanness back into my identity," she writes. "I had trouble making peace with the birthplace I'd left" (75). In one essay Eleftheriou—"desperate to make sense of a certain kind of beauty that I had just begun to see"—explores desire and permission through the life of the actor Melina Mercouri, for whom "pleasure was her life's guiding principle" (34). In another she wonders when duty to family ends, telling her father in an unsent letter: "I'm not sure I can find a man and marry quick enough to give you peace" (136). She watches from afar footage of Cyprus's first gay pride parade, concluding that "when teachers and priests and politicians said that the Greeks had suffered and deserved to have their human rights better protected" they meant "only certain Greeks—the Greeks who dated the opposite sex" (185). By the end of the book Eleftheriou hopes that telling her story can "offer liberation from this ghost that lives inside me: a sense of exile, a sense of not belonging, a sense of being trapped and unable to flee" (228). There is a sense, too, of Eleftheriou—a runner—trying literally to outrun her ghosts in the early mornings and moonlit evenings among the hills around Asgata. The publisher promotes the book as an essay collection that "reads like a memoir." But, while the essays tell different parts of the same stories, the book reads more like Eleftheriou's description, in a scholarly essay on nonfiction hybrids, of Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1983): The book is "divided into discreet parts" that revolve around ideas and "[only] loosely follow the chronology" of her life (Eleftheriou 2014, 42). Indeed, there isn't a clear sense of time in the book. The essays are arranged such that Eleftheriou's sexuality—"I am, indeed, the first gay Orthodox woman I know" (198...

Socialist fragments East and West: Towards a comparative anthropology of global (post-)socialism

This article initiates a comparative anthropological analysis of the legacies and endurances of socialism in two different European contexts. It draws on ethnographic and historical material relating to the UK and Romania, 40 years after the first efforts to privatize central elements of the welfare state in the UK and 30 years after the collapse of state socialism in central and eastern Europe. Rather than restricting our analysis to the ‘East’ and the 20th century, as is often the case in the literature on post-socialism, we argue for the need to attend to socialism’s historical border-crossings as well as its persistence today as a set of practices and imaginaries which are not wedded to one historically existing state form. Through controversies around the demolition of council (public) housing estates in London and exploration of work practices in cooperatives of production in Romania this article illustrates such historical border-crossings, and comparatively analyses the contemporary curation of what we call ‘socialist fragments’ at both these sites.

Being Nonreligious in Croatia: Managing Belonging and Non-Belonging

Catholicism in the Croatian context has been one of the most powerful sources of collective belonging for centuries. Since the fall of socialism, desecularization tendencies have manifested as homogenization, collectivization, and deprivatization of religion. (Non)religiosity became a contested issue, which not only implied belonging (ethnic, national, historical) but was also highly politicized. This paper aims to explore how living in a society with a dominant collective religion influences the experience of nonreligious people. The conducted research was based on 30 semi-structured interviews with people who self-identify as nonreligious, but at the same time are not members of nonreligious organizations. The obtained data show that some elements of collectivism can push individuals away from religion, but for some nonreligious people, religiosity remains an important identification framework. Keeping a connection with religion is achieved through conformist behaviors or “cherry-picking” elements of religiosity, which are then combined in individually-consistent worldviews. Nonreligious people sometimes feel “left out” and experience their nonreligiosity as lonely and isolating, which they often do not want to pass on to others. This creates a specific position for some nonreligious individuals that is simultaneously “in” and “out” of religion, and challenges the way nonreligiosity is often imagined.

Patterns of Post-socialist Urban Development in Russia and Germany

Since 1990, urbanization in post-socialist countries has frequently resulted in a loss of urban density in the existing building stock while land use patterns at the outskirts of growing city regions began to sprawl. Formerly state-planned and controlled housing forms as well as industrial and business enterprises were suddenly exposed to new market interests and finance-led investments in a globalizing world. In the initial adaptation to socio-economic transformation pressures after the fall of the iron curtain, the countries in question took different approaches in the governance of urbanization trends. The comparison of urban development between Russian and Eastern German city regions showcases two contrasting examples. Urban development in Russian city regions is largely driven by action-oriented political control of land market interests on the project level. Today's Eastern German city regions have adopted the spatial planning regime of former West Germany. Where the German planning regime aims to coordinate long-term planning and decision-making between different tiers of government with an emphasis to empower land use management on the local community level, land use decisions in Russia are formally free of such regulatory frameworks. According to urban metrics that monitor the sustainability of urban development, both approaches result in increasing urban sprawl and related potential adverse impacts on multiple public goods. Experts interviewed for this article frequently attribute this outcome to “catch-up development” that prioritizes economic development over other land use interests. The cumulative negative effects of urban sprawl on land use efficiency are increasingly being recognized, but they are still frequently subordinate to urban development interests.

Interview: Mary Kaldor and Helmut K. Anheier

In this interview, Mary Kaldor and Helmut K. Anheier examine the state of Eastern Europe thirty years after the fall of communism; they explore the differences between old wars and new wars, the relevance of Clausewitz in the field of international relations today, the problem of methodological nationalism, and what the social sciences mean today. They also talk about the impact of neoliberalism, the state of democracy, and the role of civil society.

Multimodal Palimpsests: Ideology, (Non-)memory, Affect and the Senses in Cultural Landscapes Construction in Eastern and Central Europe

This article introduces a collection of essays about the construction of a cultural landscape in Eastern and Central Europe. This part of the world has been subjected to violent changes over the past hundred years that have also left their marks on the landscape, especially in the wake of the Second World War and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It is suggested that the cultural dimension of these changes will be approached as a multimodal palimpsest, where old layers have partially been erased and overwritten by new layers of landscape text, with the old text still being more or less readable to the researcher. In addition, it is emphasized that this process of rewriting is still ongoing, in attempts to inscribe landscapes within ethnocentric frameworks.

The Evolution of Poland’s Foreign Policy Towards the Balkans

The main aim of this article is to outline the evolution of Poland’s foreign policy towards the Balkan region from 1989 to modern times. Poland’s foreign policy towards that region can be divided into several stages, the first being the period between the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Poland’s full accession to the Euro-Atlantic structures, i.e., 1989-2004. The second stage is the 2004-2010 period when Poland implemented its Balkan policy that was underpinned by the European Union’s approach, and practically co-participated in the European Union’s policy towards the Balkan states. The third stage’s commencement was marked by Poland’s preparations for the EU Council Presidency in 2011, and its obligation to coordinate the EU’s Balkan policy as well. This stage is characterised by Poland’s greater involvement in creating policy towards the Balkans, as evidenced by the organisation of a summit called the Berlin Process in Poznań in 2019, which was the initiative of a group of EU Member States involved in developing cooperation with the Western Balkan states. In modern times, however, Poland’s policy in the Balkans remains limited while it should be far more vigorous due to the concerns related to Russia’s influence and expansion in that region. 

Poland’s Security Policy after the Cold War

The three decades after the fall of communism in 1989 proved to be a good time for Poland’s national security. A sovereign Poland effectively reconstructed its foreign and security policy from the ground up, following 40 years of Soviet domination. She reorganized her treaty-based relations with neighboring states, consolidated its own borders and rejected old military and economic alliances. The Polish political transformation, although costly in social terms, has made it a democratic and economically successful state, anchored in NATO and the EU, regionally cooperative and selectively engaged in the global agenda - occasionally “punching above its weight”. This article deals with the key aspects of Poland’s post-1989 security policy. It begins with an analysis of the key historical factors contributing to continuity and change in this policy, stemming from national responses to the changing external environment and evolving state sovereignty. A detailed analysis of Poland’s security policy after 1989, covers the following issues: Poland’s path to NATO and subsequent national priorities as a member of the Alliance, the role of the USA in Polish security policy, the approach to collective security, and last but not least, the role of European Union. It ends with a reflection on the contemporary challenges confronting the national security policy. 

Nikolai Myaskovsky – 140th birth anniversary. Rediscovering the composer in the present times

Abstract On the occasion of the 140th anniversary of composer Nikolai Myaskovsky’s birth, in the spring of 2021, in the city of Ekaterinburg there took place the Myaskovsky Dialogues festival dedicated entirely to the Russian composer, being one of the few musical events with a musical programme based on his works. Known as the “father” of the Soviet symphony, Nikolai Myaskovsky was one of the pillars of resistance in Russian music culture in the first half of the 20th century, managing to maintain a stylistic balance between traditional genres, harmonic language with innovative tendencies, ideas promoted within the new political system and a neutral way of integrating communist ideals musically. Although his contemporaries perceived him with respect and consideration, N. Myaskovsky was discredited after the tensions and political events of 1948, entering a shadow zone during the Cold War, until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Therefore, it was only in the last three decades that he was rediscovered in the music world, due to the interest given to his works by well-known conductors such as E. Svetlanov, V. Gergiev, V. Petrenko, V. Jurowski. In this paper, our aim is to accomplish a historical perspective on N. Myaskovsky’s rediscovery and his approach in concert programs, records, reviews, chronicles, articles, musicological studies, papers and volumes from the 1970s to the present.

No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period

No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period

Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity

Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity

American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish ChicagoPoles in Illinois

American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish ChicagoPoles in Illinois

Wealth defence strategies of Bulgarian Oligarchs in the 1990s

ABSTRACT The rise of the ownership concentration has become a significant political and economic issue and one of the biggest policy questions in the newly forming democracies after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The so-called oligarchs have attracted great interest due to their influence in policy-making, whereby they pursued their own agenda. Much less systematic attention has been, however, devoted to how they do so. In this article, I use the concept of wealth defence to scrutinize the strategies of Bulgarian oligarchs for securing their fortune in the period between 1989 and 1997. This article reveals, contrary to the theoretical literature’s assumptions, that in a country where the rule of law was lacking, the oligarchs did not resort preferably to an actual assumption of power by holding a state office. Since their property rights were weak, they re-insured their property by employing a different set of strategies to ensure risk diversification.

Analytic Study of Russian Experience in Economic Development and Integration in the Global Economy: Lessons for Iran and Developing Countries

Economic development is one of the main concerns of todays countries, significantly those influenced by the collapse of the communist bloc and the failure of a centralized planning and growth pattern of socialism. As a result, Russias economy in the post-collapse period witnessed chaos in domestic production and the rise in commodity prices. However, Russia is now the 11th largest economy globally, and the countrys exports, which was $ 78 billion in 1995, amounted to more than $ 420 billion. This paper attempts to analyze this experience concerning the role of government in developing and integrating into the global economy. Therefore, the main question is the governments role in developing and integrating into the global economy from 1995 to 2011. This paper attempts to review the Russian experience due to its similarity in post-Soviet period with the Iranian economys current circumstances, analyzing and comparing solutions that a government must consider to be transferred from a government-run to a market economy. The survey shows that the Russian government successfully took a step toward economic liberalization and integration in the global economy.

Rizgjimi i Islamit nëpërmjet tendencave të Texhdid-it (Ripërtëritjes) dhe Islah-ut (Reformimit) në Shqipërinë post-komuniste / Revival of Islam Trough Tajdid (Renewal) and Islah (Reform) Tendencies in the Post-Communist Albania

This article examines the revival of Islam in Albania through Tajdid (renewal) and Islah (reform) tendencies carried out by the Albanian Muslim Community and Muslim intellectuals, after the fall of the Communist System, in 1990s. The study intends to show the role of Tajdid and Islah activities in the restoration of Islam in the post-communist Albania. The significance of this research lies in its highlights of the renewal process of Islam in Albania within the first ten years after the fall of communism. This paper starts with a brief introduction on Albanians and their religious identity and continues with the discussion of: (1) the main factors leading to Tajdid and Islah in post-communist Albania, (2) the restoration of the Islamic educational institutions and the places of worship, and (3) the reformation of Muslim’s intellect, identity and belongingness. Descriptive and analytical methods are utilized. The analysis of this study adds new insights to the exiting literature on Tajdid and Islah tendencies for the revival of Islam in Albania.

The Timeliness of the Message of the Encyclical Centesimus Annus: An Analysis from the Perspective of the 30th Anniversary of Its Publication

The article points to the topicality of the encyclical Centesimus Annus, the third social encyclical of John Paul II, from the perspective of the 30th anniversary of its publication. The author brought to the fore the prophetic character of the encyclical as an important message for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the transformation period after the fall of communism, emphasizing its timelessness and topicality. Centesimus Annus became the voice of the Church, which, through the very nature of its social teaching and its prophetic and critical specificity, has the right to make judgments in social matters.

Rethinking Central Europe as a Migration Space: From the Ottoman Empire through the Cold War and the Refugee Crisis

What is central Europe? As I write this article in 2021, three decades after the fall of communism, this question seems as salient as ever. I am not the only Central European History reader to think about this topic in recent years. In a 2018 CEH article, provocatively titled “Habsburg History, Eastern European History … Central European History?,” Chad Bryant argued that scholarship on these three nominally distinct fields had become blurred in the wake of the post-communist opening of archives and the transnational turn. It was time, Bryant insisted, not only for CEH readers to reconsider the category of “central Europe” itself, but also to engage with a new set of questions, ones that would move beyond the predominant emphasis on “how and why regimes collapsed.” Compellingly, he advocated for studies that would help us understand the post-1989 era, such as the long-term legacies of communism, the integration of individual countries into the European Union, and present-day migration to the region.

Political institutions and economic development over more than a century

Economists and political scientists have long investigated the effect of political institutions on economic development, mainly focusing on cross-sectional analyses for the years after World War II. This paper takes a historical perspective and studies whether this effect can be traced back to 1870 and how it changed over time. Using both cross-sectional and panel fixed effects regressions, I show that democracy positively affects income per capita in the post-1950 period. The effect increases as time passes and becomes especially larger after 1990, i.e. with the great democratization wave induced by the Fall of the Iron Curtain. Yet, I find no effect for the period before 1950, when the variation in income per capita is mostly explained by prior income levels, and in particular, by education. These findings are robust to accounting for income dynamics as well as to using different data sources to measure political institutions.