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This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.
This essay anthology offers enlightening perspectives on how East-Central Europe was transformed into the “other” Europe during the Cold War era. When the Second World War ended, a new conflict arose between world powers jockeying for supremacy. The Soviet Union pursued a policy of exporting its system of government in a process known as sovietization. But there were also governments that sought to adopt a Soviet way of life on their own accord. Dictated by ideological imperatives, both styles of sovietization employed socialist strategies of state and nation building. This volume not only examines the imposition of new forms of government, but also the socialist response to modernity as...
An exploration of the history and significance of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland. The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was “gifted” to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace’s visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a sort of obsession, locals joke that their city suffers from a “Palace of Culture complex.” Despite attempts to privatize it, the Palace remains municipally owned, and continues to play host to a variety of public institutions and services. The Parade Square, which surrounds the building, has resisted attempts to convert it into a money-making comm...
In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics. Tokarska-Bakir weaves together the voices of the Kielce pogrom survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators with a myriad of other archival sources. Her meticulous research exposes wartime and postwar biographies of local factory workers, city and church officials, local police offi...
The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms and scope of the European-wide program of plunder and then assess the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war restitution efforts. Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was intertwined with changing national myths about the war and conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means were unable to compensate or fully comprehend the scale of Jewish loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse of communism that the concept of restoring some Jewish property rights even became a viable option. Integrating the abundance of new research on the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this comparative perspective examines the developments in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
". . . by reconstructing the history/experience of Brzezany in Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish memories [Redlich] has produced a beautiful parallel narrative of a world that was lost three times over. . . . a truly wonderful achievement." —Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors Shimon Redlich draws on the historical record, his own childhood memories, and interviews with Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians who lived in the small eastern Polish town of Brzezany to construct this account of the changing relationships among the town's three ethnic groups before, during, and after World War II. He details the history of Brzezany from the prewar decades (when it was part of independent Poland and members of the three communities remember living relatively amicably "together and apart"), through the tensions of Soviet rule, the trauma of the Nazi occupation, and the recapture of the town by the Red Army in 1945. Historical and contemporary photographs of Brzezany and its inhabitants add immediacy to this fascinating excursion into history brought to life, from differing perspectives, by those who lived through it.
This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.
First emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, architectural reconstruction has increasingly become an instrument to visually revive a long bygone past. This book deals with the phenomenon of meticulous reconstruction in architecture. It argues that the politics of reconstruction go far beyond aesthetic considerations. Taking architecture as a major source of history and regional identity, the impact of large-scale reconstruction is deeply intertwined with political and social factors. Furthermore, memories and associations correlated with lost buildings of a bygone era are heavily influenced by their re-appearance, something which often contradicts historical events. Reconstructi...
Paradoxically, the term 'rhetoric' functions nowadays both as a name of an antique, even obsolete framework of research and as a fashionable buzzword that entails virtually any form of persuasive communication. Reflecting a growing scholarly interest in political discourses, this volume offers systematic, theoretically grounded insights into the flow of persuasion that constitutes politics today. Authors combine the interest in rhetoric within politics with different disciplinary orientations ...