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Walesa's autobiography provides a firsthand, inside history of Solidarity from 1984 to the present, as seen and told by its founder, the recently elected president of Poland. Here is the lively tale of the impassioned young electrician's rise from the Gdansk shipyard to the presidency, and of the events that ushered Poland into a new age. 8 pages of photographs.
Twenty five interviews with workers and intellectual allies of Solidarity.
Dealing with a Juggernaut: Analyzing Poland's Policy towards Russia, 1989D2009, by Joanna A. Gorska, is the first substantial study of Poland's foreign policy interaction with its more powerful eastern neighbor, Russia. This study is essential to understanding the prospects for order and peace in Central and Eastern Europe towards Russia during the past twenty years. Gorska challenges widely established interpretations of Poland's post-1989 foreign policy by arguing that consecutive Polish governments pursued a largely cooperative policy towards Russia and did so because of material power considerations, namely Poland's strengthened power position after the Cold War and moderate security pre...
This book examines the interface between Polish popular music and screen media against the background of Polish history, cinema, and popular culture and situates that interface in a local as well as global context. It looks at Polish musicals, biographical films about musicians, documentary films and, finally, music videos. The author draws attention to the immense popularity of musical comedies in Polish interwar cinema, the enduring appeal of musical genres during the period of state socialism, despite their low status in film criticism, and the re-birth of musicals in the 2010s. Mazierska also discusses the most important stars, directors and authors of songs presented in Polish films, and points to the effect of technological changes on inception and transformation of music-centred genres of screen media, including the effect of YouTube on their growth and preservation. The book is informed by the question of how parochial and universal is Polish popular music and its screen representation.
Between 1945 and 1991, tension between the USA, its allies, and a group of nations led by the USSR, dominated world politics. This period was called the Cold War – a conflict that stopped short to a full-blown war. Benefiting from the recent research of newly open archives, the Encyclopedia of the Cold War discusses how this state of perpetual tensions arose, developed, and was resolved. This work examines the military, economic, diplomatic, and political evolution of the conflict as well as its impact on the different regions and cultures of the world. Using a unique geopolitical approach that will present Russian perspectives and others, the work covers all aspects of the Cold War, from communism to nuclear escalation and from UFOs to red diaper babies, highlighting its vast-ranging and lasting impact on international relations as well as on daily life. Although the work will focus on the 1945–1991 period, it will explore the roots of the conflict, starting with the formation of the Soviet state, and its legacy to the present day.
Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options in the broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. The book’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism. Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-fold perspective. The fi...
This book tells the story of the dissident imaginary of samizdat activists, the political culture they created, and the pivotal role that culture had in sustaining the resilience of the oppositional movement in Poland between 1976 and 1990. This unlicensed print culture has been seen as one of the most emblematic social worlds of dissent. Since the Cold War, the audacity of harnessing obsolete print technology known as samizdat to break the modern monopoly of information of the party-state has fascinated many, yet this book looks beyond the Cold War frame to reappraise its historical novelty and significance. What made that culture resilient and rewarding, this book argues, was the correspon...
This book is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood both as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy?as well as the older political traditions?and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
Communism in Eastern Europe is in crisis. Its dimensions are social and economic; its manifestation is political. This volume, a collection of essays by leading authorities, describes the symptoms of the crisis, diagnoses the causes of the malady, and offers alternative scenarios for therapy. A unique dimension of this collection is its avoidance of one-dimensional explanations. The contributors approach the subject from very different angles, and start from very distinct sociopolitical premises. The volume includes original accounts of unexplored aspects of East European communism as well as classic interpretations of the economic crisis and social stagnation that characterize the area. Con...