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The article aims at contributing to the social history of the Solidarity movement by tracing the collective biography of its elected representatives. It will focus on the life trajectories of the 900 delegates to the First National Congress of Delegates. The convention, held in Autumn 1981, is commonly perceived as a focal moment in the history of Solidarity and plays a crucial role in almost every academic narrative on the anti-communist opposition. Often seen as a first genuine Polish parliament since pre-war times, its main task was to forge the political and economic programme thus furthering the revolution. The projected research will draw on genuine methodology, combining prosopographical and oral history approach. The research will address mainly the following issues: what social strata the elites came from, what was their cultural and educational background, what motives/causes/expectations drove them to engage with Solidarity, to what generations did they belong, how did they embrace the character of political transformation of 1989, and to what extent and how did they get involved in the political, economic, and social life of post-communist Poland. In general, the paper seeks to shed a new light on our understanding of Solidarity's social roots—for instead examining to what extent the contesting, revolutionary elites were a product of the Stalinist social advancement. It also tries to depict the level of continuity between the elites of 1981 and post-1989—thus testing the common theories whether the Third Republic is (or is not) rooted in the legacy of Solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian governments produce internal assessments of the quality of governance that allow them to identify and address brewing problems before they threaten regime stability. This paper provides a theory of how the information necessary to produce such assessments is collected. The empirical focus of the paper is on pre-1989 Bulgaria, which is used to illustrate how information-gathering channels in communist autocracies differ from those used in electoral autocracies. The theoretical argument of the paper is that citizen complaints rather than elections function as the main channel for gathering information on popular perceptions about governance problems in communist autocracies. Information compiled through the analysis of complaints is valued because it allows the leadership to identify problems with policy implementation, to track corruption, and to monitor the level of popular trust in the regime. Therefore, citizen complaints serve as a barometer of public opinion regarding governance problems. The archival materials on which this paper is based were accidentally discovered in the 2000s, when a closetful of about 2,000 files of the Information-Sociological Center of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party was located during routine repairs of the Central State Archive in Sofia. These files, which were previously assumed lost, give scholars access to a treasure trove of material that provides a rare internal perspective on governance under late socialism. In conjunction with other formerly classified archival materials, they allow us to document what information on public opinion was collected and transmitted to the top leadership in pre-1989 Bulgaria. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After 1989, class appeared to be everywhere and nowhere. The messy consequences of the emergence of new classes and new types of economic inequalities were plain for all to see, but no one uttered the term "class." The concept appeared illegitimate because of associations with the old regime, even though it always had more success explaining developments in the capitalist world east Europe was entering than the state socialist world it was leaving. The media and academy adopted a discourse of "normality" instead: New rules resulted not from policy choices empowering certain groups at the expense of others but from necessity, and people just had to adapt. Because the economic collapse nevertheless elicited much anger and frustration, the absence of class talk contributed to a proliferation of nationalist talk, and thus had political consequences. The paper rehearses reasons for the decline of class analysis in the region, and notes the post-1989 fascination with the "middle class." It explores the evolution of class analysis during the communist period, culminating in the embrace of a stratification theory that resisted discussion of power, which made sense at the time but became a burden after 1989. Several critical class analyses of state socialism, from the 1930s to today, are then introduced, demonstrating both their relevance and their unfortunate absence from debates. New types of class analyses promoted by younger scholars and activists are emerging, however, and are discussed in the summaries of the other essays in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical legacies in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on the work of Ken Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic and political legacies, while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew Janos, highlights the significant and resilient pre-communist, communist, and post-communist diversity of the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The empirical evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that both types of legacies continue to matter after a quarter-century of post-communist transitions. Thus, whereas we can still discern a distinctive and fairly uniform communist imprint in areas such as primary education and the importance of the state sector in the economy, in other areas of socioeconomic development, either communism was unable to reverse longer-term intraregional differences (e.g., with respect to GDP/capita or the size of the agrarian sector) or its initially distinctive developmental imprint has been fundamentally reshaped by post-communist economic reforms (as in the case of the massive increase in income inequality in a subset of ex-communist countries). In political terms, there is an interesting contrast between institutional trajectories (such as regime type), which largely follow pre-communist developmental differences, and individual political attitudes and behavior, where communist exceptionalism generally trumps post-communist diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse the archival collection of the memoirs of officers of the Polish security forces (Security Office and Citizens' Militia) on their service in the Warsaw voivodeship in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Entangled in political violence, they were chief actors of the top-down "revolution in the county" and bottom-up "county revolution" that overlapped in Central Europe after the Second World War. This article presents their accounts as examples of fulfilment of a "narrative command" to present a vision of the past in line with the official ideological scripts of the Polish People's Republic. At the same time, though, the approach employed here does not deprive the authors of their authorial subjectivity, and highlights their agency in attempting to express their individual agendas, interpretations, and emotions. This article distinguishes two types of accounts with reference to their perspective, structure, and language: "from a bird's-eye view" and "a frog's-eye" narrative, as well as one peculiar case of "an aspiring writer." Then, in its main part, the article analyses how veterans reconstructed and interpreted various experiences related to their service in the 1940s and 1950s. The issues are the following: becoming an officer and transformation from "peasant" to "guardsman," participation in violence and coercion, alcohol drinking, and possible fields of political criticism expressed by the officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secret police, along with the political apparatus of a ruling party or administration, created the backbone of communist regimes and constituted the main tool of State violence. The state of the art within studies on the Polish security apparatus—albeit extremely rich—is entirely focused on archival documents. What is missing from the research on the secret police in Poland is an oral history approach. This article is a pioneer attempt at revealing the operative methods of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) through interviews with former officers. It aims at reconstructing the mechanism that led the officers to victimize dissidents and how they created moral justifications for their deeds. Asking about their career track, successes and failures, relationships with other officers, private life, and details of daily duty, I tried to glean what made the interviewees become perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent reinterpretations of the history of socialist Yugoslavia, which broke up at the time of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe (1989–1991), have revived old and opened new controversies concerning the character and policy of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) at the time of the establishment of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FNRJ) following the Second World War. One of them credits the “absolutization” of Josip Broz Tito’s charisma for the establishment and functioning of KPJ rule. The main aim of this article is to challenge such claims by providing an analytical account of the formative years of socialist Yugoslavia based upon primary archival sources. These sources illustrate that rather than Tito’s omnipotence, the decisive factor in the functioning of KPJ power was the clientelistic structure of hierarchical party and state organization. This paper argues that the establishment of clientelistic group-rational behavioral patterns in the KPJ structure and state organization drove the institutionalization of loyalty between the patron, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KPJ (KPJ CC Politburo), and the client, the communist nomenklatura, an organized social network of party cadres occupying all significant functions in the society. The social origin of the members of the nomenklatura, that is, the new worker-peasant class organized at the level of federal units, was the basis for the legitimacy and functioning of KPJ power from 1945 through 1952. The revolutionary authority of the KPJ, which had been won through the partisan anti-fascist people’s liberation struggle during the Second World War, legitimized itself in this period through clientelistic structural dynamics in the political system of a “people’s democracy.” In order to explore these arguments, this article applies a generic-structural historical analysis to the dynamics of the social and political KPJ structures in 1945–1952 Yugoslavia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Considerable scholarly attention has been given to Charter ’77 as a site of dissent in the former Czechoslovakia. Yet there was a socially embedded site of resistance that was active long before the dissidents. We call this site the Czech woodcraft culture. With its mass popularity and its potent references to Native American anti-colonialism, the woodcraft culture has still barely registered among researchers. In this paper, we offer the first scholarly account of the origins of Czech woodcraft culture, starting in the early twentieth century. We argue that subsequent transformations of the woodcraft culture in the Czech landscape should be understood as popular, complex, and often ambiguous practices of resistance, from the internationalist inversions of a national bourgeois order in the inter-war period, to nostalgic and paradoxically nationalist subterfuges of the Soviet-imposed regime after 1968. We trace how, as a response to the state socialist regime’s cultural and political pressures, the activities of Czech woodcraft culture were “layered with memories and experiences rooted in the pre-communist period” (Bren, 2002: 124). The Czech woodcraft culture as a whole provided its adherents with an autonomous space that enabled new forms of sociality, immersions in the natural world, and a host of long-standing voluntary associative activities that preceded the emergence of localized environmental movements and other sites of dissent around the Czech lands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author, against the background of Communist Studies developed in Poland since World War I, reconstructs theoretical orientations that explained the communist system in that country. In this paper, the division of theoretical approaches into political, economic, and cultural ones is proposed. Each of them seeks factors responsible for nature, evolution, and final decline of the communist system in a different sphere of social life. An approach of the political type was Leszek Nowak's theory of communism as a system of emancipated political power; of the economic type—Jadwiga Staniszkis's theory of the communist system as incomplete capitalism; and of the cultural type— Michał Buchowski's conceptualization of communism as a system of new religion. In the final part, the author considers complementary character of reconstructed approaches and analyzes reasons why some of reconstructed theories did not generate schools of thought in Polish social sciences after 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, using the example of Tonia Lechtman, a Polish Jew, a Communist, and a mother, I look at the process of identity shifting. Throughout her life, Tonia Lechtman lived in multiple countries—Poland (1918–1935), Palestine (1935–1937), France (1937–1942), Switzerland (1942–1946), Poland (1946–1971), and Israel (1971–1996)—and in most of those places, she lived on the margins of society while either committed to working for the cause she believed in, Communism, or trying to create a safe space for her small children. The article looks at how her understanding of her own Jewishness and Polishness shifted while Poland remained a place that served as a model home, a project to complete while transforming it into a space of safety and personal growth. At the same time, Communism remained an idea, but also her social reality that framed the space for her shifting identities. The complexity of the intersections of these various roles and identities—their fluidity, on the one hand, and determinacy, on the other—defined how she experienced her life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years ago, many credited civil society for communism's sudden and mostly peaceful demise in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In the decades since, scholars have debated the definition, structure, impact, and strength of civil societies in this region. This article introduces a special section that provides theoretical, methodological, and empirical considerations of civil society activism in CEE thirty years after the end of communist regimes in the region. Based on our new multi-country survey instrument and extensive field research, we contend that despite important differences in civil society and democracy's trajectories within the region, there are commonalities emerging, with new forms of civic activism which are more informal, more dynamic, and ad hoc, often focused on "everyday issues" that average people identify as important and worthy of engagement. Unlike much previous research that focused on formal organizations and institutional conditions, we argue that civil society development in CEE needs to be analyzed from the perspective of actors—activists and citizens—and the concrete concerns that motivate the varied forms of their civic activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some notable uses of psychological language in the Securitate archives. We examine Securitate files concerning Constantin Vaman, a suspected legionary subjected to surveillance work by the Securitate. This article seeks to show how Securitate activities, particularly the writing of informer notes and operatives' reports, are the upshot of strategic use of morally implicative psychological language. Constantin Vaman's Securitate files are used to explore two categories of psychological language: the language of mental states and the language of disposition and motive. We show that Securitate's writing of informer notes and operatives' reports were dependent on the strategic use of morally implicative psychological descriptions. We argue that close attention to the many facets of psychological language used in Securitate documents discussed in this article may enable researchers to understand more fully the complex nature and inner workings of surveillance work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What challenges have we met while writing the history of communist countries before and after 1989? This article introduces a special section devoted to the historiography of the recent past in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It shows that many of the methodological choices made after 1989 eschewed any critical examination and replicated or denied choices made before 1989 without reflecting on them. The section also reflects upon personal continuities. And it finally shows that history writing has been instrumentalized for political purposes after 1989 just as it had been before 1989. In other words, it acutely raises the question of continuities in historical practices despite the 1989 political rupture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory politics in contemporary Poland has often been described as a limitation to historians' freedom of research. Against this backdrop, this article explores how historians of the Polish People's Republic (PRL) have been contributing to memory politics in the context of the democratic transition. It argues that the dissidence of the 1980s has paved the way to the post-1989 historiographical renewal, by favoring the development of an anti-communist historiography that ultimately facilitated the advent of the historical policy (polityka historyczna) of the 2000s. After 1989, the Polish historiography of the PRL was extensively reshaped on the basis of the dissident historiography of the 1980s. The main protagonists of the 1990s were largely drawn from the ranks of dissent, and many of them saw their scholarship as an extension of their past anti-communist engagement. Additionally, political changes turned the legacy of the old regime into a central issue of post-communist politics. History was called upon as a policy tool at the service of the democratic transition, whether it involved criminalizing the communist regime or maintaining the collective memory of the dictatorship. This conception of history resulted in the creation of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) at the end of the 1990s, but also in the affirmation of a historical policy justified by the need to redress the wrongs of the memory politics conducted in communist Poland. Contemporary history in the post-1989 years was thus far from free of politicization, even if it took different forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the continuities in the interpretation of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia from 1956 to the present. It first concentrates on the way the year 1956 (one that remained quiet in the country, as opposed to Poland and Hungary) has been treated in Czechoslovak historiography. It aims to show that an almost exclusive focus on political history has produced until today a misleading image of this apparent communist stability as based on repression rather than on a genuine basis of support for the communist rule. The German historiography of communism shows the usefulness of a socio-political approach that could serve as model. The article then further retraces the permanence of this misleading interpretation to the influence of a highly politicized narrative of the terror period inspired by the work of historian Karel Kaplan and other intellectuals of the Prague Spring era. For this it makes use of Kaplan's autobiography, which has only ever appeared in French. One particular point of interest is the historiographical treatment reserved to the Stalinist leader Klement Gottwald. The article suggests that this reform communist narrative, which blames the terror on the Soviets without questioning the responsibility of Czech society, has kept the history of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia from evolving at the same pace as the historiography of the post-1968 period. It therefore needs to be acknowledged and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years 1945–1953, the Kraków weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, approved by both Church and state, occupied a unique position. Its apolitical stance, inspired to a large extent by the Catholic philosophy of personalism, meant that within certain limits it enjoyed remarkable freedom. This article considers Tygodnik’s place in the early postwar Polish landscape, including its avowedly apolitical approach (dubbed “minimalism”) as it compared with that of other Catholic groups, how it dealt with increasing communist pressure, and what it managed to achieve before its closure. Among Tygodnik’s primary concerns were the defence of Polish society and culture against the war’s lingering psychological aftereffects, for example by encouraging discussions of what now would be called society’s “post-traumatic shock,” and reconciliation with the Germans. The newspaper also sought to defend Polish culture against communisation, in part by providing a forum for unconventional writers (who were at least nominally Catholic), resisting socialist realism and publishing information on nonsocialist-realist art and music, and addressing the changes being implemented by the communists in terms of secularisation. With mounting pressure, however, Tygodnik found it increasingly difficult to make acceptable compromises, until finally in 1953 its editorial board deemed it impossible to continue its coexistence with the communist regime. As a result, it was closed by authorities until a change in the political climate enabled Tygodnik to renew publication in 1956. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article shows how dissidents in the latter half of the 1970s "played the law" in the Polish People's Republic. Laws established by an undemocratic government, and thus theoretically lacking democratic legitimacy, were used by the opposition to delegitimize the government. The author describes the goals of the opposition and the lines of argument it employed, and how the Communist party—the other player in this peculiar game—made reciprocal efforts to exploit the law in order to weaken the opposition. The article discusses the specific international and Polish legal documents referenced by both sides of this game—the opposition and the government. The law was an important resource for both sides. This analysis nuances and demythologizes popular claims about the "Helsinki effect" by illustrating the role and legal context of the Helsinki Accords against the backdrop of local laws and the strategies undertaken by both actors. Furthermore, it describes the important institutional setting that influenced the types of actions undertaken by the protest movement in communist Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how market perceptions respond to the economic performances of the seven East European countries. A discussion of how perceptions are determined and how they are quantified is tackled in the first portion of the article whereas the second portion analyzes the economic performance of Eastern Europe in a way that permits cross-country comparisons and targets the sources of change in regional economic performance. A conclusion that uses the results of the paper for future speculation is also included.

This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation '68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective). 1968 is universally considered as the year that Marxism and socialism achieved significant political legitimacy amongst the younger generation. This is only partly true for Czechoslovakia, where the younger generations—students in their early twenties, but also young intellectuals, artists, and political activists entering their professional careers—brought about the emancipation of non-Marxist political thinking in public discourse. In this article, I demonstrate the intellectual clash of the generations of 1968: the older generation that represented Dubček's famous "socialism with a human face" and that made the Prague Spring liberalization possible by introducing a set of reforms, and new political generations—of students and young intellectuals who rejected the idea of Reform Communism as insufficient for real democratic order. Examining each generation's understanding of key political concepts such as "opposition" or "political pluralism" reveals that the younger generations had vastly different expectations of "socialism with a human face." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and 'ethnic unmixing', guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger.This introductory essay provides an overview of the historiography of the borderland region of Bukovina after 1945 and 1989–1991. Presenting the approaches adopted in different national contexts after the end of the Second World War, it points to the methodological nationalism which characterized research on the region during the Cold War. We show that while the historiography of Bukovina on the ground, in Romania and the Soviet Union, refracted wider national ideologies, abroad, particularly in West Germany and Israel, it remained for a long time the prerogative of small groups of "Bukovinians," who saw it as their "lost home." We explore both the similarities and differences between these narratives and stakeholders as well as the changes that took place after 1989–1991, especially in Romania and Ukraine. We show that while divided, the actors behind the narratives and thereby the narratives themselves have been connected in complex ways over the decades and particularly since the collapse of communism. Indeed, while for a long time the study of Bukovina resisted transnationalism, it nevertheless constituted and constitutes an ultimately transnational research object. Today, Bukovina remains a space of contest but it is also a space of opportunity, not least for researchers interested in the contested histories of borderland regions. This essay therefore contextualizes the themes and issues addressed in the following cluster of articles and identifies avenues for future research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-GrajperControversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-GrajperThis study deals with the liquidation of a Roma colony from the Romanian town of Oradea during the 1970s. Colony life, as well as the process of removal, demolition of the houses, and relocation of the inhabitants into blocks of flats, is mainly grasped through Roma narratives collected from 2011 onwards. But here we do not narrow down remembering communism to a mere collection of untold stories from the past. Based on the framework developed by Maria Todorova for the study of remembering communism, the following questions are addressed: How is the pre-1989 condition of the Roma revealed through their narratives? What do these say about the condition of the Roma during state socialism? How do past events influence the present-day marginalization of the group? A comparison of the socialist and post-socialist conditions of the Roma could be considered an important issue in forming an account of this ethno-racial group in Eastern Europe. It is so, as—despite the current research, which is small in number, various interpretations exist, raising the demand for scholars to address this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on her experience teaching present-day students about life under totalitarianism. Forty years of Communism is a long time; attitudes and opinions matured and shifted -- even (if we examine Havel's essay) those of his greengrocer. And what should be the focus of the teaching: the terror, the heroism, or the everyday business of living? How can one convey the different levels and subtleties of a world that history presents in black and white? The past could disappear in a hazy memory, but young people, once provoked, ask direct and practical questions that do connect the past to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the little-known BBC Monitoring Service (BBCM) archives, this article shows how Romanian governments in the period 1938–1948 chose to represent themselves via the medium of radio to the rest of the world. After introducing the BBCM and discussing the problems of using such Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) material, the article shows how four key aspects of Romanian history were presented by the Romanian authorities at this time: the wartime expropriation of Jews prior to their planned deportation; Romania’s changing of sides in the war as of 23 August 1944; the return of Jewish deportees after the war; and the communist governments’ changing attitudes towards Palestine/Israel and Jewish emigration. The article suggests that these sources are highly revealing but that they need to be used with considerable caution when trying to understand the tumultuous events of wartime Romanian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová.Soon after the establishment of communist rule in Bulgaria, the state’s “Southern border” (with Turkey and Greece) became its most staunchly guarded borderline, stimulated by the ideological interpretation of the two countries as imperialist states that posed a direct threat to the entire socialist bloc. Since the early 1960s—copying the strategies applied to the Berlin Wall—various new measures were introduced by the communist state to make this borderline even more impermeable, involving the actions of military institutions, propaganda units, and the local population. The current article analyzes the guarding of the “Southern border” in communist Bulgaria and interprets it as an element of the overall strategy of these years to put borderline areas under strict supervision and control. The article presents the main steps in the organization of Border Troops in Bulgaria after 1944 and the various political, educational, and cultural policies developed by the communist state to create loyalty among the soldiers, the military staff, and the population in general. On the basis of archival materials, published memoirs, and literary texts, the article reconstructs the maintenance of constant alert about illegal trespassing, the organization of “voluntary troops” for border-guarding, the training of the young generations, and the romanticizing of the border guard service in those years. In the last part, emphasis is paid to the discrepancies between the propaganda messages and the reactions of the local population, which outline the multi-faceted encounters with ideological policies at the edges of this staunchly guarded world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the legacies of communism for democratization has focused almost exclusively on explaining variation in the democratic experiences within the postcommunist space. While this is useful in many ways, it says little about a communist legacy in comparison to other types of antecedent regimes. We take a different approach, looking at the question by comparing postcommunist legacies to those of other states through the prism of democratic survival. One key implication of this shift in perspective is that the literature on democratic survival highlights a range of social and economic factors that are likely to help postcommunist democracies survive, which stands in stark contrast to the postcommunist democratic performance literature that emphasizes potential disadvantages. We assess these competing and contradictory implications by analyzing the relative likelihood of democratic survival using a sample of all third-wave democracies from 1970 to 2010. We find that postcommunist democracies are neither systematically more nor less likely to fail than other democracies. Further, we find no evidence that the prospects of failure are significantly affected by past membership in the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc, the type of communist regime, or the number of years under communist rule. These findings provide little evidence that the problems of postcommunist democratization pose a more difficult set of conditions for democratic survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the determinants for participation in two Ukrainian revolutions, the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014. These revolutions were proof of the social movement that accompanies post-communist transition in an Eastern European country. This social movement, in a transitional society in the process of redefining traditional ethno-cultural identities, defined a value-rational understanding of democracy and market economy. A result of Ukrainian government action, these two revolts (which occurred less than ten years apart) have both similar and different features. The methods of binary logistic regression used in this research reveal that both protests are the result of macroregional division and the Ukrainian population’s foreign policy priorities. However, in determining participation in the Orange Revolution, these factors also combined with principles of linguistic identity, age, and status differentiation. In contrast, participation in the Revolution of Dignity was shaped by support for democratic and market values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Montenegro is a country in which one of the main features of representative democracy has never developed: government replaceability. After regaining independence and initiating an EU accession process, externally driven changes have stimulated lively institutional transformations which, however, have failed to produce meaningful democratic competition.This article tries to shed some light on the following phenomenon: how is it possible that in a formally democratic legal framework the ruling (ex-communist) party keeps winning each national election? Apart from providing a contextual analysis, it seeks to describe a rather interesting concept—the image of invincibility which is, together with deep national/ethnic divisions and non-participant political attitudes, believed to be one of the key ingredients of the enigma of the last uninterrupted ex-communist incumbency in the post-communist world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accession of the East-Central European (ECE) countries carried a promise of enhancing and enriching the EU’s Eastern policy. The new member states had the strongest interests among EU member states to ensure that countries in the East are prosperous, stable, and democratic. Yet, the EU’s Eastern policy has been largely criticised for its ineffectiveness. So why have they not been able to address the shortcomings in the EU’s Eastern policies? The article argues that the ECE countries supported the way the EU’s Eastern policies were conceived and implemented because they saw it as a potent vehicle to promote their own transition experience not only in the region but also within the EU. We argue that the ECE states have experienced three types of challenges when promoting their transition experience. First, uploading to the EU level remained largely at a rhetorical level. Second, there are conceptual and practical difficulties in defining what constitutes transition experience and harnessing it, as well as coordinating its transfer between the ECE states. Finally, while using transition experience as the basis for their development assistance strategies, the ECE countries actually insufficiently conceptualised the “development” aspect in these policies. Being so driven by their own experience, they have not drawn the lessons from enlargement to use in a non-accession context, especially by incorporating the broader lessons with regard to development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the process of cultural reconstruction in two of Eastern Europe’s major cities, Kraków and Leipzig, in the first half-decade after World War II. In both cities, it argues, reconstruction radically changed the cultural landscape even as it seemed to uphold the status quo. City officials rebuilt many of the artistic institutions they knew from the prewar era, but consistently privileged those that were publicly owned and “progressive.” Such selective reconstruction greatly expanded state control over the arts while masking the fact that any change was taking place. It also made Kraków and Leipzig more alike: by accentuating each city’s leftist traditions, local officials fostered a cultural convergence without eliminating national difference. Their work was instrumental in the rise of East European communism. Grassroots reconstruction not only paved the way for cultural revolution but also helped to forge the Soviet Bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking theoretical cues from the respective works of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Dan Diner, this article has two fundamentally linked goals: to historicize Polish cultural memory of Katyń, emplotting it within a narrative arc encompassing the seven decades separating 1943 from 2015; and to identify individual and collective agency within the history of Polish memory of Katyń. Certainly, the word “Katyń” exists variously as toponym, as metonym, as rallying cry. Yet the historical narratives anchored in that word are the outcomes of actions taken by concrete actors—individuals, states, social movements, international institutions. Although this article takes seriously the many theoretical frameworks undergirding the academic study of collective memory, its principal focus is the balance of historical contingency and structure that has constituted discrete, identifiable episodes of both commemorating and forgetting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we test the effect of communist-era legacies on the large and temporally resilient deficit in civic participation in post-communist countries. To do so, we analyze data from 157 surveys conducted between 1990 and 2009 in twenty-four post-communist countries and forty-two non-post-communist countries. The specific hypotheses we test are drawn from a comprehensive theoretical framework of the effects of communist legacies on political behavior in post-communist countries that we have previously developed. Our analysis suggests that three mechanisms were particularly salient in explaining this deficit: first, the demographic profile (including lower religiosity levels) of post-communist countries is less conducive to civic participation than elsewhere. Second, the magnitude of the deficit increases with the number of years an individual spent under communism but the effects were particularly strong for people socialized in the post-totalitarian years and for those who experienced communism in their early formative years (between ages six and seventeen). Finally, we also find that civic participation suffered in countries that experienced weaker economic performance in the post-communist period, though differences in post-communist democratic trajectories had a negligible impact on participation. Taken together, we leave behind a potentially optimistic picture about civic society in post-communist countries, as the evidence we present suggests eventual convergence toward norms in other non post-communist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While a consensus is emerging about the importance of state building and state capacity for democratization in both post-communist and developing countries, comparatively few explicit attempts have been made to provide empirical support for the relationship between the two concepts. Even more problematic is to find an explicit causal mechanism linking high state capacity with democracy. State capacity can be understood as the capability of the state to penetrate society, regulate social relations, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways. In other words, strong states have high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states struggle to compete with private actors over extraction and appropriation of resources. But what makes strong states more likely to be democratic and, in turn, weak states less likely to be democratic? This article explores whether or not state capacity correlates with the outcomes of founding elections, that is, the first open elections in post-communist countries. In other words, do voters in states with higher initial capacity also tend to "throw the communist rascals out" in the founding elections? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lustration was not legislated in Romania to date, but it was discussed by deputies and senators of all ideological persuasions, especially from 2005 to 2007. Declarations delivered in front of the house, interventions during debates of lustration-related draft bills and contributions to a parliament-sponsored public discussion reveal that for Romanian legislators lustration can bring about moral cleansing and a break with the past, provide retributive justice for victims of communism, facilitate elite replacement, prevent future violence, and help countries enjoy the benefits of European Union accession, although it punishes valuable individuals, runs against European values, is impractical and unconstitutional. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides a detailed and informative account of the transitional justice process in Albania and examines the logic behind the initiation of lustration process. Describing the accurate historical context of the country's communist past, the authors explain the factors that prevented the successful implementation of the post-communist transitional justice in Albania, such as its political culture, the impact of the communist regime, and most importantly, the lack of political will from Albanian political leadership to break away from its communist past. A pioneer in initiating transitional justice laws in the Balkans in the early nineties, Albania failed to successfully implement them, as the leadership saw the lustration process as a political means to crush the opposition and consolidate its power. The article explains that transitional justice process in Albania became highly politicized and was used by politicians for political gains, which ultimately led to loss of trust from general public failing to detach the Albanian political scene from its communist past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the communist regime during one of the most intense periods of religious persecution in the Romanian People's Republic from 1956 to 1959. The church hierarchy demonstrated its support for the socialist construction of the country, while, at the same time, the regime began a campaign against religion by arresting clergy and reducing the number of religious people in monasteries; rumours even circulated that in 1958 Patriarch Justinian was under house arrest. Seeking closer contact with Western Europe, the regime allowed the hierarchy to meet foreign clergymen, especially from the Church of England. These diplomatic religious encounters played a double role. The regime realised that it could benefit from international ecclesiastical relations, while the image of Justinian in the West changed from that of "red patriarch" to that of a leader who was genuinely interested in his church's survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the cultural roots of Estonia's surprisingly successful transitions in the 1990s. Taking the point of departure in historical institutionalism, two layers of political cultural legacies are identified as particularly crucial in preparing Estonia for the democratic government installed after independence. First, the article argues that even in a Baltic context, Estonia stood out as a hotbed for social initiatives and elite net- works during Communist times. Second, to understand why such liberalisation within the authoritarian Communist regime started earlier in Estonia than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, there is a need to acknowledge the importance that the historical experiences of the inter-war republic played. Estonia then developed a civic culture that partly survived even during the Pats regime from 1934 to 1939. These experiences surfaced once the yolk of Stalinism was lifted in the 1950s and shaped Estonia under Communism into a society of "collective mobilization" where democratically inclined counter-elites could form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the historiography of Jewish-Polish relations after the Holocaust has often shown a marked tendency to trace the conflict between these peoples to the central role of Jews in the new communist ruling system. Poles murdered hundreds of Jews, mainly in 1944 to 1946, for various reasons—some ideological, others economic. The collective guilt that the Polish political right and some of Polish society assigned to the Jews, however, proves to be inaccurate when one examines the community of Jewish survivors who gathered in the Lublin district, the first area to be liberated from Nazi occupation (summer of 1944). Most survivors were roundly disinterested, let alone involved, in politics, and the issue of communism in Poland was totally alien to them. Their main concerns had to do with family property that had been abandoned during the deportations, an attempt to locate lost family members, and, above all, an effort to reengage with the life that the Nazi bloodbath had broken off. They were stunned to confront the intensity of Polish society's resentment and hostility toward them and the governing authorities' bureaucratic indifference. The conflation of these two factors prompted many to abandon their prior places of residence, to move to new areas of settlement, or to leave Poland forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many in the West and the USSR (but not in Eastern Europe) were surprised that communism as an idea fell along with the regimes that it had buttressed. Perhaps because of this exhaustion, the kind of fervent ideas-centered debates that had characterized previous revolutionary periods are largely absent in Russia. Yet communist ideas and ways of life have become the subject of nostalgic memory and reinterpretation, entering the post-communist present partially as legacy but also as novel adaptation, both as new ideas and new practice. In Russia where the democratic design is clearly ailing, if not failing, it is more important than ever to consider the views and the agency of those beyond the elite either to embrace or defeat conflicting visions of Russia’s future. And once again, people are dreaming, not of democracy and capitalism, but of order and a strong hand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on the nostalgia for the popular culture of communism in the Czech Republic. State of mass culture under communism; Consumer-oriented popular culture; Legacies of communism.

In the 1990s, post-socialist states faced a critical dilemma: how to privatize and transform thousands of firms in the absence of domestic entrepreneurs with enough capital to assume control of the state's industrial patrimony. In the fifteen years of post-socialism, the elites created by the processes of transformation have been a decisive force in the economic and political development of Eastern Europe. Yet few studies focus on these early winners of reform. This article explores the interactions between the new economic elite, their firms, and the Polish state to construct a multilayered framework of state-society relations in post-communism. It concludes that the structure of state-firm relations and heightened political pluralism was crucial in limiting the predatory behavior of the new economic elite during the period of restructuring and privatization despite. This was critical in avoiding the rampant corruption present in other post-socialist countries and placed Poland on a markedly different path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]