Victims Of Repression Research Articles

Colonial Incarceration and Selective Memories: What Is Remembered? Who Is Forgotten? The Case of Peasant Women Deported to São Nicolau (Angola, 1969)

ABSTRACTThe colonial judicial system was quite different from ‘the rule of law’ as applied in the European countries. In the history of colonial rule in Africa, collective punishment was among the more brutal and widespread forms of repression, but it has got little historical attention. This is probably due to the banality of those practices but also to the fact that their victims were not distinguished intellectuals, church or union leaders, workers on strike or radical students. They were, most of the time, peasants from places distant from political capitals, rarely mentioned in newspapers, unknown to those committed to defending more ‘important’ political prisoners. And after the independence of their countries those victims of collective punishment and imprisonment have rarely received much attention as part of the anticolonial resistance usually praised in commemorative ceremonies and patriotic discourses. This paper uses an (almost) forgotten episode of Portuguese colonial violence in Angola, involving hundreds of peasant women and their children, to question the way societies selectively remember victims of repression.

On the authorship of “Beria’s letters from imprisonment”

««Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Право» — международный научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, публикующий материалы в следующих рубриках: Публичное и частное право: прикладные исследования Криминология Криминалистика Судебная экспертиза Исследования права с позиций социальных и гуманитарных (неюридических) наук Правовая жизнь: научно-практические заключения, комментарии и обзоры Сравнительное право Зарубежное право

Looking for a Refuge of ‘Normalcy’ during the Argentine Dictatorship: The Case of Atlanta Football Club

This article examines the history of Club Atlético Atlanta of Buenos Aires during the years of the military dictatorship (1976–1983) within the framework of efforts to reconsider the impact of repression on everyday life. Club Atlético Atlanta is a microcosm of Argentine society, and it contained everything: from victims of repression, to the son of genocidal general Roberto Eduardo Viola. Conformism, indifference, adaptation, support for the military authorities, or opposition to them, as well as resistance strategies, were a mosaic of expressions showing that various attitudes coexisted while facing the impact of state terror on daily life. The advent of dictatorship did not mean the same rupture for everyone, and did not alter in the same way certain dimensions of everyday life and routines for different individuals and groups. The story of a neighbourhood club such as Atlanta and the perceptions and memories of its fans may help us move forward on this path, to ascertain the links between the ‘micro’ level of social life and the great narratives of politics and the State.

A test by the arbitrariness in 1937-1938

Mass political repressions of the 1920s-1950s had serious negative consequences for the life of society and the state. Accurate statistics of political repression in the USSR does not exist, although their scale is extremely large. The authors paper is dedicated to the victims of repression as well as it gives a description of the initiators, participants and executors of the operation on repression. One of the orders of the NKVD № 00447 of July 30, 1937 contained this word combination. The author considers events related to the repression of 1937-1939 in the Orenburg Region, where the first arrests began in the second half of 1936. The author shows how the established command and administrative system, monstrous judicial arbitrariness, creation of extrajudicial bodies for repressions implementation, the triumph of lawlessness, the state of lawlessness and much more led to mass tragedies. The focus of the researcher is the destruction of the best party and people, industry captains, thousands of honest workers. The author in addition to documents extracted from the Orenburg archives, attracts memories of victims of arbitrariness, as well as materials from personal correspondence with their relatives. The Russian state condemned the long terror and mass persecution of its people as incompatible with the idea of law and justice.

The Discovery of Mental Hospital Patients:A Historical Epidemiology of Institutionalization in the American North, 1880–1920

Historians of the American mental hospital still do not firmly grasp who mental hospital patients were. Although the field's signature debate on the nature of the mental hospital as “repressive” or “humanitarian” involves the characterization of the patients —based on their demographic traits—as victims of repression or beneficiaries of humanitarianism, there has actually not been a thorough demographic analysis of the patients. This article ascertains and examines the defining characteristics of the patient population within the context of that enduring debate. It first identifies demographic groups that were more prone to institutionalization than would have been expected from their susceptibility to insanity. They symbolized the patient population in the late nineteenth century when insanity did not necessarily result in institutionalization. This article then discovers essentially the same demographic groups ended up in mental hospitals in both the hinterland and metropolitan areas of the North from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It also finds a protective effect that marriage had against institutionalization operated in a socially conservative way. Finally, it weaves together the demographic traits of the patients deemed indicative of the mental hospital's repressiveness and the ones considered reflective of its humanitarianism into a panoptic portrayal that presents the patients as both victims and beneficiaries of the mental hospital. This article's analysis of the patients as a complex, multifaceted population helps transcend the binary framework of the debate on the nature of the mental hospital and deepen our understanding of who they were.

Большой террор 1937–1938 гг.: выбор жертв репрессий (на материалах следственных дел УНКВД по Алтайскому краю)

Большой террор 1937–1938 гг.: выбор жертв репрессий (на материалах следственных дел УНКВД по Алтайскому краю)

Masowe represje wobec Polaków w obwodzie winnickim na Ukrainie w latach 1937–1938. Głosy akt śledczych

The article deals with reasons, course and results of repressions directed against the Polish population in Vinnytsia region in Soviet Ukraine during the years of the Great Terror. On the basis of investigatory files materials the procedure of the socalled “Polish Operation” conducted by the NKVD Special Board from August 1937 to November 1938 is presented. The investigations were held speedily and extrajudicially (ex curia). Most persons of Polish descent were convicted of anti- Soviet agitation and propaganda on the ground of Chapter 54–10 of the Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code. Accusations incriminated to the arrested concerned national activities including defence of Polish schools, patriotic upbringing of children and youth, keeping and distribution of Polish literature, as well as religious activity, ties with catholic priests and relatives in Poland, practicing sabotage for the benefit of Poland, criticism against kolkhozes (collective farms) etc. The sentence of convicts most often was to be shot, or from 5 to 10 years of correctional forced labour camp. Most victims of repressions were rehabilitated during Khrushchev “thaw”, after Stalin’s death or after 1989.

Postawa Kościoła wobec wydarzeń społeczno-politycznych w Polsce na początku lat osiemdziesiątych XX wieku

W polskiej historiografii stan wojenny stanowi ciągle zagadnienie budzące wiele kontrowersji. Wydaje się też, iż nawet powiększający się dystans czasowy oraz psychologiczny nie ułatwia wypracowania jednoznacznej i obiektywnej oceny dramatycznych wydarzeń z lat 1981–1983. Na ową dyferencjację prezentowanych opinii duży wpływ mają bieżące trendy poprawności politycznej oraz niedostępność stale jeszcze utajnionych dokumentów z archiwów polskich i rosyjskich. Próba dokonania rzetelnej i wieloaspektowej oceny stanu wojennego nie może obyć się bez analizy napiętej sytuacji społeczno-politycznej oraz trudnego położenia gospodarczo-ekonomicznego Polski na przełomie lat siedemdziesiątych i osiemdziesiątych. Konieczne jest również uwzględnienie ważnego czynnika, jaki stanowiła założona w 1980 roku „Solidarność” – pierwszy powojenny masowy ruchu opozycyjny, zakorzeniony silnie na podłożu przesłanek chrześcijańskich. Z tego zaś punktu wychodząc, nie da się pominąć roli, jaką odegrał w okresie stanu wojennego polski Kościół katolicki, bowiem to właśnie w ramach struktur kościelnych – wobec zawieszenia działalności niemal wszystkich organizacji społecznych – udzielane było materialne, prawne i duchowe wsparcie dla ofiar represji oraz ich rodzin. Zaś postawa hierarchów oraz licznych przedstawicieli duchowieństwa (np. prymasa Glempa, abpa Dąbrowskiego, ks. Popiełuszki czy ks. Jancarza) dobitnie świadczyła o zdecydowanym potępieniu mających wówczas miejsce licznych przypadków łamania prawa, a w szczególności – aresztowań oraz internowania działaczy „Solidarności”. Rozważania powyższe – jakkolwiek ciągle niedoskonałe i zapewne przedwczesne – pozwalają wysnuć przypuszczenie, iż wydarzenia lat 1981–1983 wywołane były raczej brakiem autorytetu władz oraz podstawowych wolności społecznych aniżeli niedostatecznym zaopatrzeniem w artykuły żywnościowe, kryzysem ekonomicznym czy groźbą zbrojnej interwencji ze Wschodu. Kościół katolicki stanął w tej sytuacji w obronie praw człowieka i godności ludzkiej, czerpiąc siłę między innymi z nauczania i postawy Jana Pawła II.

Exhumation and reburials of some anticommunist partisans in county of Cluj, Romania, 2009-2010

After the Second World War, Romania entered under the USSR political and military sphere of influence, which led to the installation of the communist government. In years that followed many Romanian citizens who didn’t agree with the new regime or its ideology were subjected to terror and repression. Any person suspected of being an enemy of the people would end up in political jails or put to death through collective executions. But there were also people who stood up against the regime. Groups of partisans emerged, groups that endured in forests and mountains for many years, standing up to the Securitatea, the repressive instrument of the state. After the fall of the communist regime, the former “enemies of the people”, victims of repression, benefited from reconsideration and rehabilitation that transformed them into anticommunist heroes. A series of commemorative actions that initiated a new post-communist tradition constitute part of a process called the politics of memory. The processes of unearthing and identification of the victims’ served to map out the magnitude of the crimes, and inventory evidence against the perpetrators. The factual data gathered will be used as incriminating evidence which will help with convicting the executioners. At the same time, the commemorative actions of a large number of victims may, through the representative voices of the survivors’ descendants, symbolically reopen the wounds, cultivate trauma, demonize the Other, identify the Scapegoat. My research aims to show how these theories and mechanisms remain valid and apply to the case of people who were victims of communist repression through isolated and almost anonymous executions. The murder was committed in silence and the murdered is condemned to being forgotten. The exhumation and reburial also remain events with local reverberations.

Visciano contre Cauvet de Blanchonval (1940-1971)

Plan de l'article*** Un duo d'aventuriers ? L'aristocrate russe et son curieux homme d'affaires Du duo au quatuor : entree en scene de la compositrice et de l'inventeur Delations et antisemitisme L'apres-guerre : dechirement et transfiguration des victimes du nazisme Epilogue*** Resume - Visciano vs. Cauvet de Blanchonval (1940-1971): Denunciations, mythomania and antisemitism Historian Laurent Joly calls into question preconceptions about denunciations, notably the modest social origins of the denouncers, as well as the alleged proclivity of women towards denunciation. He also notes that no social milieu was immune to denunciation. The Affair which opposed Victorine Visciano and Catherine Cauvet de Blanchonval confirms the complexity of attitudes, the infinite nuances of gray areas and the fact that some individuals denounced people to the authorities even as they themselves were victims of repression, and, in some cases, even members of the resistance. Even as we look to the most frequent psychological motivations for denunciation--jealousy, the lure of financial gain and revenge, this sordid story is exceptional in more than one way, not only because of the personalities involved, but also because of its long duration. It testifies above all to the important repercussions of denunciations during the Second World War and the propensity of all the governmental administrations of the day involved in surveillance to follow through on the most fantastical rumors.***URL : http://www.cairn.info/revue-archives-juives-2013-1-page-54.htm (consulte le 28/05/2014)

Os prisioneiros do Benevente

O artigo discute a repercussão pública da deportação, no ano de 1919, de 23 imigrantes, incluindo o militante Everardo Dias, no paquete Benevente. Esse episódio revela características importantes da repressão contra o movimento operário no Brasil ao intensificar um debate sobre a violação dos direitos de trabalhadores estrangeiros, prática que se tornou comum durante a Primeira República. Além disso, o episódio evidencia a importância da imprensa na batalha travada pelo movimento operário em defesa das vítimas da repressão.

"Você me prende vivo, eu escapo morto": a comemoração da morte de estudantes na resistência contra o regime militar

O artigo apresenta uma análise dos 'usos políticos do passado' feitos pelos militantes do movimento estudantil na década de 1970 no intuito de reforçar a identidade associativa e legitimar a resistência contra a ditadura militar. A instrumentalização do passado se fez a partir da ênfase no martírio de estudantes vítimas da repressão: a morte de Alexandre Vannucchi Leme (aluno da Geologia da USP e militante da ALN) pelos agentes do Exército em 1973, e o 'desaparecimento' de Honestino Guimarães (último presidente da UNE na clandestinidade). Nesse culto às vítimas da ditadura, também se relembra a morte do estudante secundarista Edson Luís, baleado por policiais durante uma manifestação de rua, em 1968.

Between Urgency and Strategy

The political activities of Argentine exiles in Paris during the period of terrorism in Argentina (1976—1983) centered upon opposition to the military regime and solidarity with the victims of repression in Argentina through the systematic denunciation of the regime's violation of human rights. The form that these political activities took was the product not only of the urgency of the situation but also of the logics of the receiving society and the rejecting society and the political situation of the exiles. Consideration of these three factors is essential to any understanding of the logic of exiled political actors.

“PROPHETIC” NGO-GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIPS: WHAT WOULD DANIEL DO?

The Bible provides three models for effective faith-based action in public life: Jeremiah, Obadiah, and Daniel. These biblical characters exemplify varying approaches to NGO-government relations. Like Jeremiah, some actors and organizations speak totheir own government as a representative of the victims of repression. Others, like Amnesty International, are free from the control of the offending government and canpublicly condemn malfeasance as Obadiah did. Those following Daniels example earn the trust and respect of the government by obeying God first and foremost. As a result, actors like Daniel are able to affect change from the inside even at the highest levels.

Samuil Lubarsky: Portrait of an outstanding agronomist1

Samuil Lubarsky: Portrait of an outstanding agronomist1

Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution in Ethiopia (review)

Reviewed by: Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution in Ethiopia Guluma Gemeda Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution in Ethiopia. Paulos Milkias. Youngstown, New York: Cambria Press, 2006. Pp. xx, 364. Maps. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. Paper. Much has been written about the Ethiopian Revolution, which ended the centuries-long monarchy in 1974 and plunged Ethiopia into a period of violence, famine, and political repression. Many Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian scholars have examined the causes of the revolution, its tumultuous early years, and the devastating long-term consequences. Paulos Milkias's Haile Selassie, Western Education, and Political Revolution in Ethiopia is another scholarly book on this very important moment in modern Ethiopian history. The book is divided into 14 chapters and a postscript. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the historical and theoretical background, respectively. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 analyze the role of modern education in Ethiopia, the penetration of Western cultural influences, and the rise of Western-educated intellectuals, who initially cooperated with the Haile Selassie regime but later turned against it. Chapters 6 through 10 discuss the involvement of French-Canadian Jesuits and United States educators in the development of higher education in Ethiopia, the alienation of Western-educated intellectuals, and the rise of the radical student movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 examine the challenges posed by the students and teachers to the Haile Selassie regime, the widening political protests that engulfed the feudal, autocratic government, and the rise of the Derg (the military junta) and the fall of the monarchy in 1974. Chapter 14 summarizes the main argument of the book. The postscript briefly discusses the political repression during the [End Page 191] Derg era (1974–91) and the coming to power of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1991. In this book, the author attempts to explain the contradictions between modern education, which promoted Western cultural and political values, and the modernizing autocracy of the Haile Selassie government, which consolidated its power after the end of the Italian occupation (1941). Beginning in the mid-1940s, Haile Selassie recruited French-Canadian educators to expand modern education and produce loyal intellectuals who could run the government bureaucracy and manage the economic enterprises. But in the 1950s and 1960s, the emperor increasingly favored American involvement in shaping Ethiopia's higher education. The policy initially led to "a triple partnership: Haile Selassie, the Western educated elite, and the United States," united by mutual interests and interdependence (243). But by the early 1960s, as the modernization policy of the Haile Selassie government failed to produce the desired economic development, and the bond between the emperor and the United States became stronger, the Western-educated elite felt alienated and eventually turned against the regime and its Western backers. Milkias argues that the political crisis of the 1960s and early 1970s was a reaction to the feudal, authoritarian regime, which introduced Western education and values "without changing the intrinsic character pertaining to itself" (245). This book is very well written. The chapters are a bit fragmented but are short and readable. The book draws its overall strength partly from the author's personal knowledge of Ethiopian politics as a student leader in the 1960s and his involvement in some of the major events discussed in the book. Milkias reminds the reader that he knew some of the important political actors in the Haile Selassie government. Although he was a participant in the student movement of the 1960s, he writes dispassionately and with scholarly objectivity. He belongs to a generation of students who believed in dismantling the entrenched feudal order to facilitate the political and economic modernization of Ethiopia. These students were young, radical idealists. They hoped to bring about progress, democracy, and faster economic development. But after the overthrow of the monarchy, they became captives of the Marxist political ideology that they used to attack the feudal autocracy and Western cultural domination. They splintered into rival political groups and [End Page 192] became victims of repression under the Derg regime. The author points out the weaknesses of these intellectuals and the fatal mistakes they made in their attempt to radically transform...

Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives (review)

302 Rhetoric & Public Affairs episode between the fifth and sixth chapters of the third and last part of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale. The life of a central character of the novel, Senecal, unfolds the social contradiction that Flaubert and other conservatives of the time were acutely aware of the drift of European societies toward authoritarian democracy. When imprisoned for conspiracy before the revolutions of 1848, Senecal's colleague Dussardier deplored Senecal's lot as a victim of repression. But by the date of the fateful episode recounted in this section of the book, December 2,1851, the former revolutionary has become a policeman. The "blank" is the open-mouthed shock registered on the face of Frederick Moreau when, at first seeing a protester falling dead after being struck by a policeman 's sword, suddenly recognizes the policeman. "And Frederic, open-mouthed recognized Senecal." This sentence is followed by a rapid-fire series of narrative cuts to subsequent scenes in Moreau's life. Proust, who did not admire Flaubert as a writer, found these scenes so remarkable that he made them the focus of an important critical essay. Flaubert's use of—"He traveled, he came to know the melancholy of the steamboat, the cold awakening in the tent___He returned. He went into society . . . . Toward the end of 1867...."—in place of similar but much more slowly paced locutions in Balzac, grounds Proust's claim that Flaubert is the first to transform such transitional "dregs" in history writing to the status of music. Ginzburg turns Proust's claim around to use it as evidence of the mutual interaction of style and substance of historical knowledge. Part of his argument, violently summarized, is that Flaubert accurately reflects the nascent world of the cinema and the impact of rapid transportation by rail. But the main, and more nuanced, part of his argument is that the availability of new means for the construction of narrative influences the way history is discovered, for it affects the very research methods of the historian. Instancing Marc Bloch's analogy of history as the last scene on a reel of film which the historian attempts to unroll backward, despite the gaps and blanks he will surely find, Ginzburg stresses how "the very availability of a narrative device can generate ... a specific approach to research" (102). For Ginzburg, Aristotle's view of rhetoric provides a cognitively rich understanding of narrative and hence of history. Historical narrative, far from enclosing history in a prison house of language or confining it to the endlessly recursive mobius strip of self-reference, beckons (sometimes in spite of itself) toward an objective world beyond the text waiting to be known. John Angus CampbeU University of Memphis Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/Located Lives. Edited by Virginia D. Nazarea. University of Arizona Press, 1999; pp. 299. $40.00. In many ways, rhetoric has always been a provincial discipline, claiming imprimatur for its universal claims from a small town in a small country a long time ago. Book Reviews 303 This provinciality is perhaps most evident in its favorite object of study, "great speeches by great men." This approach has long since exceeded its virtues, which the discipline of rhetoric, to its credit, has begun to acknowledge. Rhetorical critics now study the rhetoric of images, of science, of memorials, of city streets, of commercials , of bodies, of landscapes, and so on. This is an exciting but chaUenging development , for as it opens vistas for scholars, it also requires scholars to be open to interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge. Ethnoecology: Situated Knowledge/ Located Lives can contribute to the necessary task of opening. The editor of this volume, Virginia D. Nazarea, in her introduction and in her essay "Lenses and Latitudes in Landscapes and Lifescapes," makes clear ethnoecology 's definition and its relevance for rhetorical studies. Nazarea defines ethnoecology as "the investigation of systems of perception, cognition, and the use of the natural environment" (8-9). For ethnoecology, "understanding is shaped by standing , as is disposition by position" (8) and even perception is ideological. Nazarea's insistence that "culture structures perception and operates both as a way of seeing and a way of not seeing things" (93) has a fam...

Les mécanismes de la « Grande Terreur » des années 1937-1938 au Turkménistan

Oleg Khlevniuk, The mechanism of the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938 in Turkmenistan. Based on new materials derived from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and from those of the Prokuratura, this article describes how the "Great Terror" was exercised in one of the republics of the USSR, i.e. Turkmenistan, and how the orders from Moscow to carry out mass arrests and executions were applied locally. The action of the Turkmenistan NKVD as well as its relationship with the various institutions of the party are analyzed. The article shows how the groups destined to be the victims of repression were selected, how false accusations, through the use of the torture, were fabricated, and how the Turkmenistan troika functioned. The article concludes that, on the whole, the Great Terror was the result of centralized state actions. Despite innumerable cases of abuse of power, local leaders acted within the bounds of the orders received from the Soviet leadership in Moscow.

From Peaceful Protest to Guerrilla War: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army

Concentrating on the development of one politically violent organization, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), leads to conclusions that differ from more aggregate approaches. A quantitative examination of the development of IRA violence in a community mobilized for peaceful protest shows that state repression, not economic deprivation, was the major determinant of this violence. Intensive interviews with IRA supporters help to interpret these quantitative results by showing that, before endorsing political violence, victims of repression must (1) view the authority repressing them as illegitimate, (2) view peaceful protest in the face of repression as ineffective, and (3) consider the reactions to repression of people with whom they have close ties. These responses to repression appear to be continued by social placement; that is, in contrast to members of the middle class, members of the working class and student activists are more likely to experience repression, to be available for constly vio...

Political Repression in 19th Century Europe

Part 1: Techniques of Political Repression in 19th Century Europe 1. Suffrage Discrimination in 19th Century Europe 2. Restriction on Freedom of Expression and Organization 3. The Victims of Repression: Political Prisoners and Exiles Part 2: A History of Political Repression in 19th Century Europe 4. The Age of Repression and Revolution, 1815-1850 5. The Age of Repression and Reconstruction, 1850-1870 6. The Age of Repression and Reform, 1870-1914 Part 3: Summary and Conclusions 7. Political Repression in 19th Century Europe