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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
An exploration of how "north" has been represented in art and literature.
A MASTERPIECE IN SUSPENSE FROM POLISH DISSIDENT JAKUB ZULCZYK From the bestselling author of the book behind the HBO Europe show Blinded by the Lights comes a brand-new claustrophobic mystery thriller that’s taking Europe by storm. Agnieszka and her flatmates are trapped in her apartment block in Central Krakow. All windows and doors are sealed, phone lines are down and the Internet is off. Cut off from the world, they find themselves in a strange game played by the mysterious ‘THEY’. Paranoia thickens and tension builds as the chilling and gruesome endgame moves closer. ‘Big brother meets Stephen King in this chilling novel that firmly delivers with a satisfying level of unease.’ ...
A hero to many, Polish writer Adam Michnik ranks among today's most fearless and persuasive public figures. His imprisonment by Poland's military regime in the 1980s did nothing to quench his outpouring of writings, many of which were published in English as Letters from Prison. Beginning where that volume ended, Letters from Freedom finds Michnik briefly in prison at the height of the "cold civil war" between authorities and citizens in Poland, then released. Through his continuing essays, articles, and interviews, the reader can follow all the momentous changes of the last decade in Poland and East-Central Europe. Some of the writings have appeared in English in various publications; most ...
The signing of the Gdansk Agreements in August 1980 signaled the birth of the Solidarity independent trae union movement. The sixteen months that followed until the December 1981 declaration of martial law remain one of the most fascinating chapter in the history of communist states. But the events of August 1980 did not materialize from thin air. The groundwork for Solidarity was prepared five years before when a group of dissident intellectuals gathered to boldly proclaim their solidarity with persecuted workers at Random and Ursus. This group called itself the Komitet Obrony Robotnikow (KOR) or the Worker's Defense Committee. What was KOR? What were the social and political circumstances ...
This history of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) traces its origins as a tiny, clandestine revolutionary organization in the 1920s, to its years in national power from 1944 to 1989, and to the post-1989 metamorphoses.
Classical images of state-socialism developed in contemporary social sciences were founded on simple presuppositions. State-socialist regimes were considered to be politically stable due to their pervasive institutional and ideological control over the everyday lives of their citizens, impervious to reform and change, and representative of extreme political and economic dependency. Despite their contrasting historical experiences, they have been treated as basically identical in their institutional design, social and economic structures, and policies. Grzegorz Ekiert challenges this notion in a comparative analysis of the major political crises in post-1945 East Central Europe: Hungary (1956...
In the summer of 1980, the eyes of the world turned to the Gdansk shipyard in Poland which suddenly became the nexus of a strike wave that paralyzed the entire country. The Gdansk strike was orchestrated by the members of an underground free trade union that came to be known as Solidarnosc [Solidarity]. Despite fears of a violent response from the communist authorities, the strikes spread to more than 750 sites around the country and involved over a million workers, mobilizing its working population. Faced with crippling strikes and with the eyes of the world on them, the communist regime signed landmark accords formally recognizing Solidarity as the first free trade union in a communist cou...
Understanding the dramatic political, social, and economic changes that have taken place in Poland in the mid-1980s is one key to predicting the future of the communist bloc. Jadwiga Staniszkis, an influential, internationally known expert on contemporary trends in Eastern Europe, provides an insider's analysis that deserves the attention of all scholars interested in the region. Staniszkis presents the breakthrough of 1989 as a consequence not only of systemic contradictions within socialism but also of a series of chance events. These events include unique historical circumstances such as the emergence of the "globalist" faction in Mosow, with its new, world-system perception of crisis, and the discovery of the round-table technique as a productive ritual of communication, imitated all over Eastern Europe. After describing the development, collapse, and reorganization of a "new center" in Poland in 1989-1990, she discusses the first attempt at privatizing the economy. Her analysis of the dilemmas accompanying breakthrough and transition is an invaluable guide to the challenges that face both capitalism and democracy in Eastern Europe.
Among the issues examined are the extent of the human destruction, the degree of collaboration, Jewish reactions, and efforts to save the Jews.