Collapse Of Communism Research Articles

Urban party zones and their changes in former communist countries on the example of Polish cities

Abstract Eight former communist countries joined the European Union in 2004, and since then they have become popular party tourism destinations. In connection with social and economic transformations following the fall of communism, public spaces with the densest concentration of clubs were formed in the centres of big cities. Such a space can be called a “party zone”. This paper presents such zones delimited in Polish cities and attempts to investigate changes in those zones in 2004–17 (and thus, after accession to the EU). An additional objective was to identify the most popular clubs based on information from social media and from interviews with DJs. The results lead to two main conclusions: (a) three main types of party zones can be identified in the analysed cities taking into account their form and relationship to urban space; (b) in 2004–17 the preferences of club-goers changed in favour of open air clubs.

ABANDONED AGRICULTURAL LAND IDENTIFICATION USING OBJECT-BASED APPROACH AND SENTINEL DATA IN THE DANUBIAN LOWLAND, SLOVAKIA

Abstract. Farmland abandonment is a widespread phenomenon in different parts of the Earth especially in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe where large areas of agricultural land were left uncultivated, state-support and markets for agriculture disappeared and land reforms resulted in massive land ownership transfers following the collapse of socialism. Remote sensing and geographic information system provide powerful tools for identification and analysis of abandoned agricultural land (AAL) at various spatial and temporal scales. Here we present an approach to AAL extraction from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images, provided in the frame of the European Copernicus program. This study aims to investigate and map the spatial distribution of AAL on the foothill of Little Carpathians and in the Danubian Lowland, Slovakia. The presented case study showed the possibility of the use of Sentinel images and the object-based image analysis in the process of AAL identification that may improve the transfer of scientific knowledge to the local agri-environmental monitoring and management.

OVERVIEW ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION OF EARTH OBSERVATION RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS PROGRAMMES FOR AGRICULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT DURING THE LAST THREE DECADES IN ROMANIA

Abstract. Following the fall of communism in 1989, the R&D sector started a modernization process. By establishing in 1995 a structure dedicated to the space activities – Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) – the Government recognized the importance of this innovative strategic domain. The National Space Strategy defined by means of the RTD policy, with effects on both academia and industry, had three objectives since the 90’s: Participation to international space missions and programmes, Development of specific national projects and Capacity building at national level. In time, the experience acquired in the implementation of CIS, LCCS and LPIS/IACS projects offered the possibility to establish new certitudes for the evolution of the domain. The main development directions had been oriented towards the implementation of dedicated applications to answer problematics concerning smart agriculture, traceability, better agro-environmental practices and the relation with other scientific domains (e.g. cultural heritage). The partnership between a strong Governmental R&D structure – ROSA – and the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest (USAMVB) demonstrates the capacity to find solutions for promoting space EO technologies and adapt the higher education curricula in synergy with the development of the ambitious European space programme evolution.

Homeownership, mobility, and unemployment: Evidence from housing privatization

Homeownership is believed to cause higher unemployment. This is because homeowners face higher mobility costs that limit their job search to local labor markets. Empirical tests of this prediction have yielded mixed results so far, possibly due to the endogeneity of homeownership. This paper proposes that the privatization of public housing in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain was a substantial policy shock that generated largely exogenous assignment of homeownership to individual households. This facilitates a new test of the effects of homeownership on mobility and unemployment: First, our empirical results do not reject that homeownership reduces mobility. Second, our results are inconsistent with homeownership increasing unemployment.

The interaction between Foreign Direct Investment and Domestic Investment: Is there crowding out effect?

After the fall of communism, Central and Eastern European countries have experienced a transition process in which a remarkable increase is observed in foreign direct investment flows into the region. During this process, when transition countries tried to adopt a free-market economy instead of a closed centrally structured economy, funds obtained through FDI constituted an essential way of financing for these countries that were trying to restructure their economy. Study questions the existence of the crowding-out effect by using data from Eastern European Countries, including Romania, the Russian Federation, Moldova, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Ukraine. With this aim, PANIC Bai and Ng (2004), the bias-corrected PANIC Westerlund and Larsson (2009) unit root tests, and panel data analysis are implemented. Results obtained were consistent with theoretical expectations and showed that FDI had a crowding-out effect in the short run but, in the long run, a crowding-in impact on domestic investment.

Half a century of forest cover change along the Latvian-Russian border captured by object-based image analysis of Corona and Landsat TM/OLI data

After 1991, major events, such as the collapse of socialism and the transition to market economies, caused land use change across the former USSR and affected forests in particular. However, major land use changes may have occurred already during Soviet rule, but those are largely unknown and difficult to map for large areas because 30-m Landsat data is not available prior to the 1980s. Our goal was to analyze the rates and determinants of forest cover change from 1967 to 2015 along the Latvian-Russian border, and to develop an object-based image analysis approach to compare forest cover based on declassified Corona spy satellite images from 1967 with that derived from Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 8 OLI images from 1989/1990 and 2014/2015. We applied Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry to orthorectify and mosaic the scanned Corona images, and extracted forest cover from Corona and Landsat mosaics using object-based image analysis in eCognition and expert classification. In a sensitivity analysis, we tested how the scale parameters for the segmentation affected the accuracy of the change maps. We analyzed forest cover and forest patterns for our full study area of 22,209 km2, and applied propensity score matching approach to identify three Latvian-Russian pairs of 15 × 15 km cells, which we compared. We attained overall classification accuracies of 92% (Latvia) and 93% (Russia) for the forest/non-forest change maps of 1967–1989, and 91% (Latvia) and 93% (Russia) for 1989–2015, and our results were robust in regards to the segmentation scale parameter. Sample-based forest cover gain from 1967 to 1989 differed notably between the two countries (18.5% in Latvia and 23.6% in Russia), but was generally much higher prior to 1989 than from 1989 to 2015 (8.7% in Latvia and 9.7% in Russia). Furthermore, we found rapid de-fragmentation of forest cover, where forest core area increased, and proportions of isolated patches and forest corridors decreased, and this was particularly pronounced in Russia. Our findings highlight the need to study Soviet-time land cover and land use change, because rural population declines and major policy decisions such as the collectivization of agricultural production, merging of farmlands and agricultural mechanization led already during Soviet rule to widespread abandonment and afforestation of remote farmlands. After 1991, government subsidies for farming declined rapidly in both countries, but in Latvia, new financial aid from the EU became available after 2001. In contrast, remoteness, lower population density, and less of a legacy of intensive cultivation resulted in higher rates of forest gain in Russia. Including Corona imagery in our object-based image analysis workflow allowed us to examine half a century of forest cover changes, and that resulted in surprising findings, most notably that forest area gains on abandoned farm fields were already widespread during the Soviet era and not just a post-socialist land use change trend as had been previously reported.

La riflessione sul «socialismo reale»

The role played by Rosario Villari as a public intellectual was closely connected to his political and historical reflections on Soviet Socialism. This paper analyses his interventions in two distinct moments. Firstly, Villari’s contribution to debates on dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, when he was a member of Parliament for the Italian Communist Party and an advocate of Eurocommunism. Secondly, his views on the decline and fall of Communism in Europe and Russia between 1989 and 1992. The evolution of Villari’s interpretation, which ended up in a very critical assessment of the entire experience of Communism since 1917, had serious implications, in terms of historical thinking, on the legacy of the twentieth century.

Foreign direct investment and the undertow of history: Nationhood and the influence of history on the Czech-German relationship

Since the fall of Communism in 1989, the Czechs have received considerable foreign direct investment from Germany. But the historical relationship between the Czechs and Germans has long been a difficult one. The legacy of the past still overshadows the relationship between the Czech Republic and Germany even after the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union. The article examines how Czech managers in a joint venture with a German organization drew upon narratives and metaphors of the history of their relationship and historical stereotypes of German behaviour rather than economic explanations to understand and explain their experience of a failed joint venture.

An Exceptional Case of Women’s Self-Advocacy in Interwar Hungary: Cécile Tormay

A Hungarian writer who became a prominent public figure in the Horthy era, Cécile Tormay’s (1875-1937) fame and success was principally due to her memoir, Bujdosó könyv [‘The Hiding Book’], a work published in 1920-21 that depicts the two Hungarian revolutions following World War I. This popular work enjoyed several editions during the interwar period and was translated into English and French for propaganda purposes. After World War II, Bujdosó könyv was among the first works banned by Hungarian authorities for its anti-Semitism. Hailed as the most notable female author of the interwar period, Tormay’s name rose anew after the fall of socialism in 1989. Fueled by the official biography written two years after her death in the Horthy era by the conservative professor of literature, János Hankiss, a revival in the cult surrounding Tormay’s work has taken place in recent years. Hankiss portrayed Tormay as a woman of Hungarian noble descent whose deeds were motivated by sheer patriotism. This paper contends that Cécile Tormay was embraced by the interwar elite for her active role in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the First Hungarian Republic.

Martin Štoll, Television and Totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia: From the First Democratic Republic to the Fall of Communism

Martin Štoll, <i>Television and Totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia: From the First Democratic Republic to the Fall of Communism</i>

The Mismanaged Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Bulgaria

This article delves into the intricate, and often inconsistent, worlds of Bulgarian government policies towards ethnic minorities, in particular towards the Roma, after 1989. The author begins with an overview of the ‘ethnic model’ embedded at present in the country’s political system. Then he discusses the integration policies of Bulgarian governments after the fall of communism. His conclusion is that the lack of political will of the ruling parties represents the biggest obstacle to the integration of minorities. Anti-discrimination legislation is plagued by inconsistencies and problems related to its implementation. Despite some moderate progress, state policies continue to lack vision, direction and effective monitoring mechanisms. The representatives of minorities are still, for the most part, ignored in the process of tailoring and implementation of programmes.

Vít Richter – pierwszy bibliotekarz Republiki Czeskiej

&#x0D; Vít Richter has been working at the National Library of the Czech Republic since 1971. He has reached all the successive steps in the hierarchy during his professional career - from library assistant to general manager. Since the fall of communism, Richter has continuously played a very important, even key, role in Czech librarianship; he has also been extremely active and appreciated in Slovakia. In the years 1992-1998, he managed the construction of the central warehouse of the National Library, and from 1998 until the present, he has been managing the Librarianship Institute - an extremely important institution of the National Library of the Czech Republic. At the same time, he actively participates in community life - he was one of the restorers of the professional movement and for two decades, he led the Association of Library and Information Professionals of the Czech Republic. Since 1998, he has also been the chairman of the Council of the Central Library of the Czech Republic. By combining these functions, he played an extremely important and positive role in the modernisation of Czech libraries and enjoyed great trust and prestige in the community and beyond. In 2020, in the face of growing problems in the activities of the National Library, he temporarily took up the position of the general manager to organise current affairs at the request of the Minister of Culture.&#x0D;

Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism

Abstract Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism surveys the ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church has negotiated its relationship with the secular state, with other religions, and with Western modernity from its beginnings until the present. It applies multiple theoretical perspectives and draws on different disciplinary approaches to explain the varied and at times contradictory facets of Russian Orthodoxy as a state church or as a critic of the state, as a lived religion or as a civil religion controlled by the state, as a source of dissidence during Communism or as a reservoir of anti-Western, anti-modernist ideas that celebrate the uniqueness and superiority of the Russian nation. Kristina Stoeckl argues that, three decades after the fall of Communism, the period of post-Soviet transition is over for Russian Orthodoxy and that the Moscow Patriarchate has settled on its role as national church and provider of a new civil religion of traditional values.

Impediments in cluster development: the case of Târnave valley

Abstract Many years after the fall of communism, the Romanian wine industry has been still struggling to overcome lot of challenges such as erratic weather, unfair competition, lack of investments or the need for a clear vision of the future path of growth. The industry has reached eventually a level of maturity although there is still much to be done in terms of, among others, network-oriented management skills and the acknowledgement of the importance of the role of location for upgrading competitive advantages. Cluster development initiatives have become lately an important direction of economic policy, building on earlier macroeconomic stabilization efforts, opening up markets and reducing business costs. Companies that operate within a cluster, as opposed to those that are not integrated in such agglomerations, benefit from externalities thanks to their location, have better access to specialized suppliers, technological improvements and skilled labor, as well as direct connections to specialized knowledge flows. Is cluster formation and development a driver for the revival of the Romanian wine industry? What are the impediments that delay further progress? To answer these questions, a qualitative research was conducted with support of statistical data collected mainly from the Global Competitiveness Report, the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the National Institute of Statistics, and the International Organization of Vine and Wine. The paper focuses on the case of the vine and wine region of the Târnave Valley to understand the impediments for cluster development.

Will China Suffer the Same Fate as the Soviet Union?

It was widely assumed in the West following the collapse of European socialism that China would undergo a similar process of counter-revolution. This article seeks to understand why, three decades later, this hasn't happened, and whether it is likely to happen in the foreseeable future. The article contrasts China's “reform and opening up” process, pursued since 1978, with the “perestroika” and “glasnost” policies taken up in the Soviet Union under the Gorbachev leadership. A close analysis of the available data makes it clear that China's reform has been far more successful than the Soviet reform; that, in contrast to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, all the key quality of life indicators in China have undergone significant improvement in the last 40 years, and China is emerging as a global leader in science, technological innovation and environmental preservation. The article argues that the disparate outcomes in China and the Soviet Union are the result primarily of the far more effective economic strategy pursued by the Chinese government, along with the continued strengthening of the Communist Party of China's leadership.

US political and military involvement in the security of Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 – the example of Poland

The article discusses how the United States of America has contributed to the security of Central and Eastern Europe, both politically and militarily, since the end of the Cold War, using Poland’s example. It shows that the United States committed itself to the security of both Poland and the region, following the collapse of communism in Poland in 1989, albeit to a varying degree in different countries. America played a pivotal role in NATO enlargement in the 1990s, and in extending security assurances to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as well as to other countries in the subsequent years. It has continued to assist Poland with its defence reform, thus enhancing its military capabilities. It was also instrumental in strengthening NATO’s eastern flank after 2014, a salient point on Poland’s security agenda since it acceded to the Alliance. It is argued that American political and military involvement in Poland’s security has been both substantial and beneficial, and there is a real need for continued political and military cooperation with the USA and its presence in the region. In the article, the determinants of Poland’s post-Cold War security policy are outlined. Next, the roles that both countries have played in each other’s policies are explained. After that, the US contribution to Poland’s security, both in the political and military spheres, is presented. Finally, an attempt is made to evaluate American involvement, and the author’s perspective on the future of the Poland-US cooperation is offered.

Former Communist party membership and present-day entrepreneurship

After the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, former party members were particularly likely to start businesses and become entrepreneurs. What remains unclear, however, is whether this entrepreneurial activity was driven by the resources, information, and opportunities provided by former party membership or because individuals with specific individual attributes were more likely to become Communist cadres (self-selection). This study is the first to separate the causal effect of former Communist party membership from self-selection. Using individual-level Life in Transition-III survey data and a control function approach, we find that former Communist party membership has facilitated business set-up but not business longevity in Central and Eastern European countries. We also show that people who joined the former ruling party had fewer of the traits associated with entrepreneurship such as unobservable personality traits, ability, motivation, and entrepreneurial aptitude, and as such were negatively self-selected. We show that former Communist party membership still matters for business practices, business ethics, and the nature of doing business in transition economies.

Is Cultural Policy in Poland in the Process of Recentralization?

One of the key mottos of system transformation in Poland after the fall of communism in 1989 was far-reaching decentralization. These transformation processes encompassed also the sector of culture. Now, this strong trend towards decentralization has been mitigated or even reversed. This paper will review many of the concerns which have been articulated in relation to the centralization/decentralization conundrum. The main aim of this paper is to test the assumption that cultural policy in Poland faces recentralization, by means of political, fiscal and administrative indicators to track the dynamics of its recent shifts. To look at this tendency I conducted a comparative analysis of the cultural policy instruments in two periods: the coalition of The Civic Platform and Polish People’s Party 2007- 2015, and Law and Justice Party 2015-2017. The study contributes to knowledge of political, fiscal and administrative settings of cultural policy recentralization in Poland.

Capitalism after communism: The triumph of neoliberalism, nationalist reaction and waiting for the leftist wave

AbstractWas neoliberal capitalism the only possible development path in Eastern Europe after the collapse of real socialism? How did the restoration of capitalism in the former Eastern bloc affect the economic and political situation in the world? Is the support of workers and lower classes for right-wing populists that has been observed in Eastern Europe for the past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall a permanent phenomenon? By asking these questions, the authors point out that the offensive of the far right began in Europe before the 2015 migration crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, and that it coincided with the weakening of leftist workers’ parties. This process began in the 1990s after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. What can stop this process and change the situation? The solution is to show that another model is still possible: greater egalitarianism, democracy and the rule of law. This sociopolitical alternative, however, must simultaneously oppose two powerful forces: neoliberal capitalism and nationalist populism.

The Afghan “Fog of War”

Abstract The terrorist attacks of 9/11 took the USA and NATO by surprise, as they are still under the euphoric effect of celebrating the fall of the Eastern European ideological walls and the collapse of the communist bloc. The immediate response of the military operations led to the neutralization of the Taliban forces or more precisely to their removed from political power and denial the influence of Al Qaeda. The purely military approach dominated the initial kinetic clashes and conquered the physical terrain but failed to dominate the society marked by perennial conflicts, widespread corruption, poverty and multiple ethnic and tribal fragmentations. The Afghan insurgency that formed seems to have managed to slow down and finally block the reconstruction and development effort made by the strong NATO-centred coalitions. The article examines the causes of the Afghan “fog of war” that led to this great failure and makes recommendations that must be taken into account in future military conflicts.