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Perceptions Of Society In Communist Europe
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Book Synopsis Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe by : Muriel Blaive
Download or read book Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe written by Muriel Blaive and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on archival sources from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Romania and Bulgaria, Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe considers whether and to what extent communist regimes cared about popular opinion, how they obtained their information, and how it helped them implement and maintain their rule. Contrary to popular belief, communist regimes sought to legitimise their domination with minimal resort to violence in order to maintain their everyday power. This entailed a permanent negotiation process between the rulers and the ruled, with public approval of governmental policies becoming key to their success. By analysing topics such as a Stalinist musical in Czechoslovakia, workers' letters to the leadership in Romania, children's television in Poland and the figure of the secret agent in contemporary culture, as well as many more besides, Muriel Blaive and the contributors demonstrate the potential of social history to deconstruct parochial national perceptions of communism. This cutting-edge v. is a vital resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates studying East-Central European history, Stalinism and comparative communism.
Book Synopsis Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe by : Muriel Blaive
Download or read book Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe written by Muriel Blaive and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on archival sources from Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Romania and Bulgaria, Perceptions of Society in Communist Europe considers whether and to what extent communist regimes cared about popular opinion, how they obtained their information, and how it helped them implement and maintain their rule. Contrary to popular belief, communist regimes sought to legitimise their domination with minimal resort to violence in order to maintain their everyday power. This entailed a permanent negotiation process between the rulers and the ruled, with public approval of governmental policies becoming key to their success. By analysing topics such as a Stalinist musical in Czechoslovakia, workers' letters to the leadership in Romania, children's television in Poland and the figure of the secret agent in contemporary culture, as well as many more besides, Muriel Blaive and the contributors demonstrate the potential of social history to deconstruct parochial national perceptions of communism. This cutting-edge volume is a vital resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates studying East-Central European history, Stalinism and comparative communism.
Book Synopsis Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe by : Sorin Radu
Download or read book Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe written by Sorin Radu and published by Lit Verlag. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countryside and Communism in Eastern Europe offers a comparative perspective regarding the communist transformation of the countryside within "Soviet Bloc" countries. Its main focus is on organization and political practices within the rural areas, land reforms and collectivization of agriculture, social change and rural mentality, and political instruments of the communist regimes for transforming the village. This includes coercion and resistance; communist propaganda and agitation in the rural world; and cultural propaganda and representations of the countryside in the official discourse in the "Eastern Bloc." (Series: Mainzer Contributions to the History of Eastern Europe / Mainzer Beitrage zur Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 8) [Subject: History, Politics, Rural Studies, Eastern European Studies]Ã?Â?Ã?Â?
Book Synopsis Communism's Shadow by : Grigore Pop-Eleches
Download or read book Communism's Shadow written by Grigore Pop-Eleches and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.
Book Synopsis Cold War Cultures by : Annette Vowinckel
Download or read book Cold War Cultures written by Annette Vowinckel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in the daily life of the societies involved. The term "Cold War Culture" is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether -- or to what extent -- the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters. This volume offers an important contribution to the international debate on this issue of the Cold War impact on everyday life by providing a better understanding of its history and legacy in Eastern and Western Europe.
Download or read book Uncivil Society? written by Petr Kopecky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-16 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume makes a significant contribution to the debate about the development of post-communist civil society by focusing on its alleged 'dark side', i.e., on the groups that are excluded from 'civil society' on both conceptual and normative grounds. The chapters, written by specialists in the field, explore in rich empirical detail the complexities involved when such groups - like the skinheads in Hungary, the farmers' 'Self Defence' movement in Poland or the war-veterans in Croatia - challenge the state, engage in community activism, or get involved in protest actions. It also offers a contrasting perspective by focusing on similar activities by the alleged 'pro-democratic' actors of civil society, such as Impulse 99 in the Czech Republic. The book maintains that political protest, or contentious politics, should be included under a broad and positive development of associational activity in the region. Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe is a fascinating study, and will be of interest to scholars of Eastern European politics and history.
Book Synopsis The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes by : Bálint Magyar
Download or read book The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes written by Bálint Magyar and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-20 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.
Book Synopsis Public Perceptions of Threats to Security in Post-communist Europe by : Christian W. Haerpfer
Download or read book Public Perceptions of Threats to Security in Post-communist Europe written by Christian W. Haerpfer and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Uncivil Society written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies–East Germany, Romania, and Poland–to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany’s pseudotechnocracy to Romania’s megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland’s cult of Mary to the Kremlin’s surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.
Book Synopsis Remembering Communism by : Maria N. Todorova
Download or read book Remembering Communism written by Maria N. Todorova and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.
Book Synopsis The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe by : Marc Morjé Howard
Download or read book The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe written by Marc Morjé Howard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeks to explain the weakness of civil society in the countries of post-Communist Europe.
Book Synopsis Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe by : Péter Apor
Download or read book Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe written by Péter Apor and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection of essays in Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe addresses institutions that develop the concept of collaboration, and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. The essays provide a comparative account of collaboration/participation across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux throughout East-Central Europe. They also demonstrate how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. By interrogating the ways in which post-socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, “collaborators,” the contributing authors provide a nuanced historical conception of “collaboration,” expanding the concept toward broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation to facilitate a better understanding of Eastern European communist regimes.
Book Synopsis Museums of Communism by : Stephen M. Norris
Download or read book Museums of Communism written by Stephen M. Norris and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.
Book Synopsis Communism: A Very Short Introduction by : Leslie Holmes
Download or read book Communism: A Very Short Introduction written by Leslie Holmes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of communism was one of the most defining moments of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction examines the history behind the political, economic, and social structures of communism as an ideology.
Book Synopsis Marginal Spaces and Cultures of Dissent in Socialist Romania's Black Sea by : Ruxandra-Iuliana Canache
Download or read book Marginal Spaces and Cultures of Dissent in Socialist Romania's Black Sea written by Ruxandra-Iuliana Canache and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes two Romanian villages – 2 Mai and Vama Veche – as spaces of relative freedom during the last decades of socialist rule. This microhistorical study refutes simplistic views of the communist past which focus on political figures and events, and instead explores ordinary people and everyday life. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it considers a broad range of sources, including official Communist Party documents, secret police files, personal memoirs, oral history interviews, ethnographic films, songs, and artistic performances. This book intertwines three narrative threads: that of the visitors (mainly members of the Romanian intelligentsia, young people, and hippies); that of the local inhabitants; and that of 'authority' (local and central state agents actively engaged in surveillance and supervision). In doing so, it interrogates the spectrum of consent/dissent and resistance/collaboration hitherto neglected in scholarship.
Book Synopsis Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability by : Victor C Shih
Download or read book Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability written by Victor C Shih and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over two billion people still live under authoritarian rule. Moreover, authoritarian regimes around the world command enormous financial and economic resources, rivaling those controlled by advanced democracies. Yet authoritarian regimes as a whole are facing their greatest challenges in the recent two decades due to rebellions and economic stress. Extended periods of hardship have the potential of introducing instability to regimes because members of the existing ruling coalition suffer welfare losses that force them to consider alternatives, while previously quiescent masses may consider collective uprisings a worthwhile gamble in the face of declining standards of living. Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability homes in on the economic challenges facing authoritarian regimes through a set of comparative case studies that include Iran, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Russia, the Eastern bloc countries, China, and Taiwan—authored by the top experts in these countries. Through these comparative case studies, this volume provides readers with the analytical tools for assessing whether the current round of economic shocks will lead to political instability or even regime change among the world’s autocracies. This volume identifies the duration of economic shocks, the regime’s control over the financial system, and the strength of the ruling party as key variables to explain whether authoritarian regimes would maintain the status quo, adjust their support coalitions, or fall from power after economic shocks.
Book Synopsis Meandering in Transition by : Ostap Kushnir
Download or read book Meandering in Transition written by Ostap Kushnir and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book addresses the dynamics of the post-Communist transition and identity building in Central Eastern Europe. It scrutinizes the formation of geopolitical affiliations and discourses of belonging. It also traces the dynamics of national decision-making, institution-building and changing perceptions of the region by global actors.
