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The present paper discusses art as an environment for communicating meanings, as shared by the members of a community or culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries; for this purpose, the paper focuses on the changes taking place in cultural production as well as the consumption practices of the digital age: more specifically, on the shift from a goods-centred economy to a service-centred economy, on the experience as a commodity, on interactive art and relational aesthetics, as well as on the emergence of a new way of production and consumption. The paper also discusses a possible modernity and the cultural differences that appear in the works of Eastern European artists (and Romanian artists in particular), works which reflect the transition from communism to post-communism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article. The breakdown of the so-called Eastern Bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the demise of communism fueled transition processes in Central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Central Asia. The great majority of transformation difficulties across different areas demonstrate that when pursuing the process of a structural change, it is important to take into account diverse sets of formal and informal institutions preserved in each country. Each country has a unique set of formal and informal institutions. These differences are easily observed between Poland and Azerbaijan. The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast the outcomes of Poland and Azerbaijan's transitions from communism to capitalism and to identify the primary factors driving these two different transformations. Methodology. The paper presents two complementary methods to compare the transitions from communism to capitalism in Poland and Azerbaijan. The first method involves secondary analysis, where existing data from reputable sources such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) database, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), and country reports are compiled to provide insights into economic, political, and social indicators. Additionally, a comparative case study approach is employed, using Geert Hofstede's six cultural dimensions framework to explore the cultural influences on transition outcomes. By integrating these methods, the study aims to offer a comprehensive analysis of the transformation processes in Poland and Azerbaijan. Results of the research. The results of the analysis presented in the paper support the hypothesis that the historically-shaped differences in mental models and strong ties to international protectors determined the paths of transformations in Poland and Azerbaijan. The primary similarities and contrasts in the mindset are justified by the colonial or imperial history of the nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Sociologists in Communism. The beginnings of a profession without status” is a collective volume coordinated by Sorin Mitulescu and contains the stories of some sociology graduates in 1975 and of some of their teachers at that time. The book is both an essay in sociology and a collection of oral history papers. We understand from reading the book that sociology was at that time the victim of the oscillations in Romanian politics between the desire for modernization (especially technological) and the fearful and dogmatic conservatism that had penetrated all social levels. Sociologists in communism want to be a starting point in a broader debate on the role of sociology and the sociologist, both in the past and in the present. He discusses several topics such as the relationship between sociology and power, the professional mobility of sociologists, the relationship between personal life and the career of a practicing sociologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theological Review / Bogoslovska Smotra is the property of University of Zagreb, Catholic Faculty of Theology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Vietnam war (1955-75) was a conflict that made its mark on global history. It was a truly multidimensional conflict, where the frontlines were not separate from the heartlands. To bring order to the chaotic situation created by the aftermath of French withdrawal from Indochina, the United States of America decided to involve itself in the pacification of South Vietnam. They wanted to create a stable US-aligned regime which would curtail communist efforts in the region. In order to achieve this, they launched multiple intelligence-gathering and pacification campaigns. But despite the considerable efforts and resources brought to bear, South Vietnam fell to communism in 1975. In this paper, I will give a brief overview of US pacification attempts, and the problems relating to fighting such a difficult battle, where there are no clear sides, and anyone can be a potential enemy. Given the nature of the subject, few such works have been made that attempt to compare the methods listed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s, Central and Eastern European nations (CEE) rejected communism and embarked on a journey towards free-market democracy. As part of this transformation, the Romanian economy transitioned from communism to capitalism. The purpose for our paper is to suggest insight from the Romanian experience that may be useful for nations in Asia, Africa, Middle East or South America that maybe be undergoing a similar transition. The main results of our paper is to substantiate the precepts of institutional theory, that a system is best transformed through external, international pressures. Our contribution illustrates this transformation through the case studies of Romtelecom, Dacia, and Petrom, Romanian state-owned enterprises (SOE) privatized by foreign multinational corporation (MNC). We distinguish between formal and informal institutions with the latter tending to be overlooked by traditional researchers. Through these longitudinal surveys we argue that multinational corporations are possibly the best generators of informal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to outline recent trends in historical research on disability during state socialism in Eastern Europe. In doing so, it explores how an emerging generation of historians have investigated various aspects of disability in Eastern Europe before 1989 and raises the question of whether there was a distinct experience of disability under state socialism. Drawing on studies published in English and German, the paper traces both Soviet discourses and practices after 1917 and Central and Eastern European trajectories after 1945. It argues that disability policies and expert discourses were informed by a productivist logic as a governing strategy to increase work capacity and to integrate the disabled into socialist society. The paper concludes by discussing the need for a transnational, comparative approach for conceptualising how disability was construed during communism in Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Filozofija i Drustvo is the property of University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy & Social Theory and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of the paper is to explore the discourse strategies of the Party of Labor of Albania to eliminate its enemies in the early years of establishing communism in the country. The contention is that PLA and its leaders made possible the elimination of thousands of people by normalizing the process. The enemies of the party were declared enemies of the people and as such, they had to disappear in one way or another, so that the integrity of the body politics could be preserved. The class enemy was considered a parasite that should be eliminated in the name of social prophylaxis. By using discourse analyses the paper will investigate the discursive strategies followed by the communist party and its leader when addressing the class enemy. Speeches of Enver Hoxha in Party Congresses, Plenums, and gatherings with people will be analyzed. Only by normalizing the process of elimination of everyone who was depicted as an enemy, did the communist party make possible the elimination of thousands of people. Normalization is understood as the standardization of the procedure so that everyone knew in advance what would happen if someone had to be declared an enemy of the people. The paper will analyze the vocabulary used to portray the class enemy and his/her destiny in specific cases. The study has analyzed the speeches given to justify the elimination of Patër Anton Harapi, Lef Nosi, Maliq Bej Bushat, dom Lazër Shantoja, dom Ndre Zadeja, and the sabotage group of the Maliqi swamp. The analysis covers the period immediately after the end of the IIWW when communists seized the power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elaborating on the process of the restitution of church property in the Czech Republic after the fall of the communist regime, this paper stresses the discursive dimension of this process. To obtain information on the main arguments for and against restitution, we selected two mainstream daily newspapers, the centre-right Lidové noviny and centre-left Právo, and the 'official' church media of the two largest churches seeking restitution in the Czech Republic: Katolický týdeník, the official paper of the Roman Catholic Church, and the monthly Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren magazine, Český bratr. All selected sources covered the 1990-2019 period. Our analysis of the media debate helps to determine why restitution in the Czech Republic - an interesting case given that it is perceived as the most atheistic country of the Visegrad Four - took its unique direction. It took more than twenty years for the churches to receive their relatively generous compensation and, at the same time, become separated from the state. Linking the theoretical concept of discursive depoliticisation with an argumentative analysis allows us to show that emphasis of the spiritual contribution of churches to society did not play a key supporting role in legitimising the restitution. The enactment of restitution was aided by two widely shared, morally oriented depoliticised sentiments: a neoliberal emphasis on private property and efficient management and an emphasis on the defence of constitutionality reinforced by anticommunist sentiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates a communist plan in the 1920s to establish a Middle Eastern center in the port city of Thessaloniki. To explain this counterintuitive choice, the paper situates Thessaloniki within two radical spaces. First, it shows the importance of post-Ottoman radical networks in making Thessaloniki a critical point of liaison in the 1920s. Second, it discusses the radical connections across the Mediterranean and the agency of revolutionary sailors in establishing these linkages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour Class of a given socio-political and economic dispensation is a key segment of the same and the greater Indian scenario is also not exceptional from this fact. Though, the history of Indian labour class can be traced from the time immemorial, but the labour class in true sense in India emerged only in colonial period. Importantly, it has been a complex task from the very beginning to till date to organize the Indian labour class owing different structural and social causes. However, it has widely been seen that numerous attempts have been made on the parts of various entities ranging from philanthropic personalities to the Trade Unions infused with diverge political lore for awakening labour class in India and to make them organized. Hence, this paper makes a humble attempt to throw some lights on the historical background and political orientation of organizing Indian labour in a brief manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dictatorships are established and strengthened by imposing themselves on society. One of the tools they use to do this is school, along with textbooks as a means of information and mass spiritual nourishment. This paper aims to analyse the period of communist dictatorship in Albania and its way to influence the individual with an ideology in the function of politics yet to the detriment of the individual as a personality. The research is focused on the primary school reading books of 1946-1986. The passages connected directly with the political content, the parts that had genuine political concepts in the title or in content, were selected to complete this research. A significant number of these short stories, the types, the tendencies of their extension, the object, the nature, and their possibilities of influence were examined as the main materials of the study. During the research, the way textbook readings can influence to paralyze the quest for inner freedom and finding individuality were outlined. Thus, the school as an educational institution can be used to depersonalize the individual in function of the interests of social and political groups. The results showed that any society, including contemporary, could carry ideological influences, so the following article might increase the awareness on the texts used in school and on their interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jewish religious life in the Soviet Union is typically the subject of dichotomous depictions that offer only a superficial rendering of this rich and complex environment. This paper aims to complicate this image by pointing out several religious thinkers who engaged with Communist and Marxist ideas and incorporated them into their religious thought, while upholding rabbinic culture. Among the figures and themes examined are Alter Hilewitz's (1906–1994) Hasido-Marxism, Rabbi Avraham Yosef Guttman's (1870–1940) crisis of faith, and Shmuel Alexandrov's (1865–1941) use of Russian Nietzscheanism. Alexandrov was also the narrator who revealed these fascinating ideas to us in a rare collection of his letters, which possesses both a philosophical and a theological nature. These letters, which have received very little attention in previous studies, provide a small window into the conflictual world of rabbis and yeshiva students in the first decade of the Soviet Union. Reviewing the ideas generated in a struggle to make sense of one of the great crises of modern Judaism, and pondering questions of historical perspective and how empathy may distort it, this article wishes to go beyond the image of a defensive preservation of religious life and to re-envision this unique and innovative period of Jewish thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the communist regime seized power in Albania in 1944, the vilification, humiliation, persecution and execution of clergy of all faiths, including Muslim, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, were conducted publicly. Religious estates were nationalized in 1946, and around the same time, religious institutions were closed or converted into warehouses, gymnasiums, workshops or cultural centers. In the communist constitution of 1976, Albania became the first constitutional atheist state in the world. In Article 37 of the Constitution was stated "the state does not recognize any religion". Albanians were forced to deny their religion, change their belief system and adopt the new socialist way of life that praised secular gods such as the Communist Party and its leaders. The image of the party leader replaced religious icons. Young people were encouraged to follow worldly pursuits, including offering their life for communist deities. With the fall of communism, Albanian clerics and foreign missionaries encouraged the revival of religiosity in the country. Because in Albania, religious institutions and clergy did not exist for more than 3 decades, foreign actors played a major role in the return of religion to social life and among young people. Post-communist Albania represents a quintessential case study of importing religion into a formerly atheistic country that lacked qualified clergy, religious institutions and strong religious beliefs. In the permissive post-communist Albania, people, especially young people, attributed different meanings to religion and religiosity. Mere investigations and surveys of faith communities along traditional lines would fail to provide useful insights into the significant transformations that have impacted the religious field in Albania after the fall of the communist regime and the current challenges faced by new and "traditional" denominations. The post-communist religious context is dominated by two opposing currents: The first trend is marked by the legal organization of religious practice in the public space, which grants freedoms and equality to the "traditional" religions recognized by the state, but autonomous and independent from it. The other trend is shaped by the rituals and practices of believers from abroad who are pushing for the creation of new autonomous religious communities. This paper is not investigating religious "communitarianism" along traditional lines but rather examines salient religious identification and societal relationships and discusses their implications. This analysis rests on survey data and free-flowing and open-ended interviews conducted mainly with students of the Political Science Department of the University of Tirana and of the European University of Tirana, as well as research of different social networks. The article is divided into three parts, which present the following: literature insights, the historical background of Albania's secularization and current religious trends and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility in Romania dropped rapidly after the collapse of the communist rule, placing the country among those with low fertility rates, and started to grow again after the year 2014. The paper approaches the dynamic of fertility in Romania, focusing on the period when fertility grew again. Using data from the semi-panel conducted by World Values Survey Romanian in 2012 and 2018, the paper looks at the changes in fertility in Romania based on micro-level data and studying trends in cohort fertility among women of fertile age and the drivers of these changes. The cohort analysis indicates that birth postponement is the main mechanism leading to the growth in fertility in Romania in the past decade. At the same time, the results provide support to the uncertainty explanation, the fear of job losing having negative impact on the number of children born by a woman. Altogether, the results suggest that Romania does not yet reach the second gender revolution, that has gender equality in private sphere at its core, fertility decision relying on traditional factors such as economic uncertainty and patriarchal model, with the male partner being the main breadwinner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates factional arrangements within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the governing political party of the People's Republic of China. Using detailed biographical information of political elites in the Central Committee and provincial governments, we present a set of new empirical regularities within the CCP, including systematic patterns of cross-factional balancing at different levels of the political hierarchy and substantial faction premia in promotions. We propose and estimate an organizational economic model to characterize factional politics within single-party nondemocratic regimes and its economic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core of socialist ideology is Marxist discourse power, which refers to Marxism's dominance in ideological education and dissemination as well as its dominant position throughout the entire social ideological system. Big data (BD) has altered how people think, captured recent advancements in the process of thinking development, enriched and advanced thinking science, and improved how people think in relation to the times. This paper examines the BD era's discourse power construction of Marxist ideology. The percentage of respondents who answered "several times a day" when asked if they listen to, watch, or read political news on a daily basis increased from 7.2 percent in 2018 to 17.5 percent in 2021. The percentage of "once a day" and "several times a week" responses also increased, but the response "once or twice a week" did not. Understanding the latest developments and ideas in human thinking in the age of BD can help us think more broadly and creatively, and it can also give us the theoretical groundwork and thinking power to advance the use and development of BD., Competing Interests: The author declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Siyu Wang.)

Marxist philosophy has always been attached to the practice. In the new age, Marxist philosophy needs to solve many problems, such as ecological destruction, environmental pollution, international conflicts, and technical innovation, and improve the integration of the Marxist philosophy system with China's national conditions. The premise of change is practice, and the premise of practice is dissemination. Promoting the dissemination of Marxist philosophy is the cornerstone of solving the blind spot in the process of Marxist philosophy popularization. Because of the development of Internet technology, in order to ensure the validity of the uploaded videos related to Marxist philosophy on the platform, combining the research on human visual perception and the advantages of the long-term recurrent convolutional network (LRCN) model in video content recognition, an attention mechanism-based LRCN model is proposed, which simulates the attention characteristics of the human brain in the deep learning model, considers the video content globally, and makes the attention of the model fall in the effective area of the whole video. The experiment uses HMDB51, UCF101, and YouTube-8M data sets, and the results show that the LRCN model based on the attention mechanism proposed in this paper can effectively improve the accuracy of video content recognition, and it can converge quickly during training to improve the efficiency of model training., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Jinming Guo and Haibo Hu.)

Copyright of Dacoromania Litteraria is the property of ACADEMIA ROMANA Filiala Cluj-Napoca Institutul de Lingvistica si Istorie Literara "Sextil Puscariu" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The accelerated development of tourism has led to the emergence of extreme and extratravagant forms of it. More and more tourists, going out of the classical patterns and choosing niche tourism, wanting new experiences. In different parts of the world, a hybrid form of adjectival tourism has developed and diversified on the ruins of communism, respectively niche tourism. This paper aims to highlight the development of red tourism in different part of the word, the different aspect, and overtones of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Danube-Black Sea Canal had been one of Ceaușescu's pet projects, used by the communist leader to enhance his image as a visionary prophet of the Golden Era of socialism, the idea of a canal that would connect the Danube and the Black Sea may have been as old as ancient Roman history. It is certainly along one of the lines of Trajan's Wall (Valul lui Traian), running along the Kara Su Valley, that the canal had been imagined, in the 19th century, by various adventurers and travellers. In the 20th century, with the development of technology, the idea turned into a project: in 1922 and 1923, two Romanian engineers (Jean Stoenescu Dunăre and Aurel Bărglăzan) came up with very definite plans of how to create a fourth arm of the Danube, which would help navigation by shortening the distance travelled by commercial ships with about 400 kilometres. The actual building of the Canal, initiated by Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej at Stalin's orders, was less intended as a technological advancement and more as a pretext to exterminate the interwar elite in the forced labour camps established along the Danube. Work at the Canal began in 1949 and ended in 1953, after Stalin's death. Though only 20 km had been completed out of the intended 70 km, the legacy of the forced labour camps includes a large number of poems written by the detainees, detailing the inhuman treatment they received and making up a shattering testimonial of life in the Communist labour camps. My paper intends to present and analyse a selection of such poems, showing how they take up the myth of the exiled Ovid and mix it with symbols of Christian suffering. In most of the poems, the colour that is associated with life in the labour camps is black: the blackness of the Black Sea (the inhospitable Pontus, in Ovid's poetry) is thus transferred onto the traditional 'blue' Danube. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Culture series created by Scottish author Iain (M.) Banks consists of nine novels, one novella and a couple of short stories situated in the same fictional universe. The eponymous Culture is a space-faring (and spacedwelling) civilization, a conglomeration of several humanoid species and sentient machines, most intellectually powerful beings called The Minds. Technological advances made the Culture a post-scarcity society focused on the maximization of personal freedom. The character of its socio-political structure, however, is somewhat unclear. Based on the differences between its internal and external politics, scholars have mostly placed the Culture within the categories of Utopia and Empire. This is, as the present paper argues, a false dilemma since the Culture is simultaneously both and neither of those. The main argument is that the truly adequate label for the political complexities of the Culture civilization was coined only after the untimely death of the author himself - around 2015, when the far (or, some would say, radical) left activists on the Internet coined the phrase Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. Using both writings of Marx and Engels on the features of communism and Ollman's systematization of these features, I will try to show that this is indeed the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program is largely about the differences between capitalism and communism, and the changes that will be needed to effect a revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism. Because the author believes that these aspects of the Critique are still not widely understood or internalized, the paper undertakes a close reading of them. The reading is informed by Marx's conception of the relation between a society's economic basis and its political and legal superstructure, and it calls attention to ways in which his critique draws on his concepts of directly and indirectly social labor and his value theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ruch Prawniczy, Ekonomiczny i Socjologiczny (0035-9629) is the property of Adam Mickiewicz University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The situation in Hong Kong today is not dissimilar to the moral predicaments that Central and Eastern Europe had endured during the Communist era. Then, as now, state oppression and intimidation aim not only at generating a pervasive sense of learned helplessness in society but also incentivising political opportunism. This paper begins with a thorough examination of the relevance of the open society against the background of the regime's all-out attacks on the pro-democracy opposition and the civil society in the name national security following unprecedented protests in 2019. Civil society organisations are in retreat under the pressure of autocratic rule, but the normative appeal of the open society as a custodian for the city's distinctive values and identity is expected to grow against the backdrop of the moral and institutional decay of the official, 'Orwellian', realm. It then seeks to explain why the barriers against norm entrepreneurship – individual and collective actions resisting moral decline and decay – are not insurmountable as they first appeared. Three decades after the end of Communism in Europe, the moral commitment to the open society serves as rallying point against the rise of illiberal democracies or electoral authoritarianism. In any case, autocrats are not invincible and there is nothing inevitable about the authoritarian backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetics in the Soviet Union (USSR) achieved state-of-the-art results and had reached a peak of development by the mid-1930s due to the efforts of the scientific schools of several major figures, including Sergei Navashin, Nikolai Koltsov, Grigorii Levitsky, Yuri Filipchenko, Nikolai Vavilov, and Solomon Levit. Unfortunately, the Soviet government distrusted intellectually independent science and this led to state support for a fraudulent pseudoscientific concept widely known as Lysenkoism, which hugely damaged biology as a whole. Decades of dominance of the Lysenkoism had ruinous effects and the revival of biology in the USSR in the late 1950s-early 1960s was very difficult. In fact, this was realized to be a problem for Soviet science as a whole, and many mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and other scientists made efforts to rehabilitate genetics and to transfer biology to the "jurisdiction" of science from that of politics. The key events in the history of these attempts to pushback against state interference in science, and to promote the development of genetics and molecular biology, are described in this paper. These efforts included supportive letters to the authorities (e.g., the famous "Letter of three hundred"), (re)publishing articles and giving lectures on "forbidden" science, and organizing laboratories and departments for research in genetics and molecular biology under the cover of nuclear physics or of other projects respected by the government and Communist party leaders. The result was that major figures in the hard sciences played a major part in the revival of genetics and biology in the USSR., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

The collapse of the USSR significantly affected the economic and political situation of all the republics which gained sovereignty as a result. Among them were countries such as Estonia and Kazakhstan. This article considers whether these countries have coped with the new political conditions. Using known economic indicators, a comparison was made of the economic and financial situation of both countries, pointing to the potential causes of diversification of their socio-economic development. Currently, Estonia is considered the most developed country of the 15 former members of the USSR, and Kazakhstan is in 5th place. The research carried out in this paper shows that the current economy of Kazakhstan is clearly moving away from that Estonia needs radical measures to achieve economic acceleration. The authors, analyzing the strategic activity of Estonia and Kazakhstan and the independence of financial management, concluded that these have had a significant impact on the current state of economic and financial development of the countries in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Relaciones Públicas is the property of Instituto de Investigacion en Relaciones Publicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper deals with graffiti in the streets of Albania, a former communist state which in the time of communism had every modern motif banned, except the art of propaganda that was under the service of the party. Graffiti on the walls of buildings in different cities of Albania since 2010 has social, political, economic, psychological, social, and personal motives. It shows the development of murals, the freedom of expression of artists, and positive propaganda through this art. In Albania, artists are now free to express all their artistic ideas, and graffiti is used as public art which reflects any current events occurring. Color is the main element that distinguishes mural artists, as well as motive and figuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The case study presented here relates to Ursus – one of the world's oldest makers of agriculture tractors. Founded in the late 19th century, and nationalised in the inter-War period, Ursus became one of the success stories of communist-era Poland. This denoted that, when the transition to a market economy took place, the enterprise came to typify state-owned 'dinosaurs'. However, once Poland had acceded to the European Union, Ursus was acquired by a family firm and began to increase its international presence rapidly once again. This paper therefore revisits the processes whereby the state firms of post-communist economies underwent organisational transformation; and sheds light on the non-linear nature of its subject's development process, unfolding in the context of radical institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The primary aim of this paper is to outline concisely the history of environmental journalism in Czechoslovakia and to compare it to the development of Radio Free Europe's environmental agenda. This comparison can help us better understand how important a role society -- and by extension social constructivism -- played in twentieth-century environmental history. An explanation for these discrepancies can, in my opinion, be found not only in the internal discussions at RFE and among dissidents but also in the international context. Upon greater scrutiny, the simple question of why and how RFE's environmental agenda emerged, and why certain environmental topics but not others were covered in RFE's broadcasts and reports, appears to be multi-layered, and, if we attempt to answer it, can reveal how and why environmental issues become socially and politically relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the anti-communist rhetoric of the popular Ukrainian video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl which was developed by GSC Game World and released in 2007. In this paper I argue that, in order to mount a humanist critique against Soviet communism, the game borrows the anti-colonial discursive structure of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness filtered through the video game F.E.A.R. If colonialism is predicated on the juxtaposition of territorial expansion and a progressive temporality towards a civilizational ideal, then Heart of Darkness and F.E.A.R. convey a critique of colonialism by highlighting how spatial progress brings about temporal regression manifested as a dissolution of the self. To show this, they employ the doppelgänger convention. Both protagonists representing white civilization are on quest to find a character who has been ‘contaminated’ by the ‘heart of darkness.’ This latter character is eventually revealed to be a negative cultural doppelgänger of the protagonist who has assimilated otherness to the point of no return. By the same token, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl the psychological regression of the protagonist is mapped onto spatial progress towards the heart of communism, in this case Reactor #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. reworks the doppelgänger convention by identifying the protagonist with the character ‘gone native,’ i.e. gone communist, not only symbolically, but also physically. This enables the game to put forth two scenarios, namely one where the main character overcomes communism, and one where he embraces it. By offering both endings, the game maintains two contradictory views on the communist past. One ending suggests that communism can eventually be overcome, while the other postulates the communist past is here to stay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insofar as Education for Sustainable Development still represents a redemptive intervention, one according to the demands of a monolithic improvement agenda, its chances are greatly enhanced by the restoration of Grand Narrative initiated by the epochal turning. The much-vaunted Anthropocene returns to the agents of change the opportunity to redirect the unified 'geostory' of 'biohistory' towards a steadier state. That is to say, the Anthropocene collapse of the 'human' and 'natural' spheres into each other's orbits restores to ESD its promise to heal the planetary condition. This paper proposes, though, that such a re-fertilisation of ESD can bear fruit only if its premises are radicalised, indeed revolutionised. Employing a red biocentric approach -- a praxis which advocates communism without anthropocentrism -- it is argued that education for sustainability under current conditions equates to teaching and learning towards collectivism, class-, species- and world-consciousness. Furthermore, it is suggested, such consciousness is meaningless without vehicles for its articulation and actualisation. This means organisation, activism, disobedience, and the emergence of the possibility of the mass Earth Strike. Education for Sustainability and Communism (ESC) is unsurprisingly an activity unconfined by classroom walls: the condition of its possibility is the real, material site of resistance and of spectacle. It is argued that in order to break the impasse between critique and transformation, ESC affords the only viable possibility for the evolution of education for development that is fit for the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dacoromania Litteraria is the property of ACADEMIA ROMANA Filiala Cluj-Napoca Institutul de Lingvistica si Istorie Literara "Sextil Puscariu" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study deals with the idea of nationalism in the thinking of Slovak communist intellectuals from the early 1920s until the end of the 1960s. The variety of roles that national communism took during these decades are detailed, including an "intellectual exercise" in the 1930s, an ideological deviation in the 1950s, a program of national emancipation in 1960s and finally, the narrative of legitimizing the normalization orthodoxy after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion into Czechoslovakia. The aim of this paper is to explore the variety of ways Slovak communist intellectuals connected the Marxist-Leninist worldview with their own nationalist discourse in different periods, describing how encountered ideological dilemmas were solved and then integrated into the program of Slovak national communism. The opening pages discuss the first generation of Slovak Marxist intellectuals in the interwar period, who defined the essential points of the Slovak national communist program. Next, following the example of historian Ľubomír Lipták, the second part documents the "intellectual de-Stalinization" of the 1960s, which included profound criticism of the Slovak position in the republic. The final piece of this study analyzes the culmination of discussions regarding Czech-Slovak relations in 1968 and 1969. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the Fifth Amendment to China’s Constitution changed the name of the Law Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) to the ‘Constitution and Law Committee’. This involved more than a name change; rather, faced with a legitimacy crisis, the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) has a strong interest in augmenting the existing basis of legitimacy and creating a new source of power resting on popular sovereignty. The idea of popular sovereignty in the Chinese context is defined as the combination of sovereignty of the people and leadership of the CPC. As the central institutional device to guarantee people’s sovereignty, the people’s congress system has its own difficulties. Although it is the highest authority endowed by the Constitution, the NPC is actually a ‘strong on paper, weak in practice’ body. The creation of the Constitution and Law Committee, entrusted with the power of review by a decision issued subsequent to the Fifth Amendment, can contribute to enhancing the role of the NPC. This could be viewed as part of the CPC’s efforts to implement functionally the principle of popular sovereignty, which, in turn, can help uphold and safeguard regime legitimacy in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to experts, the rise of consumerism in Slovakia is associated with the end of communist totalitarianism. However, consumerism is a common phenomenon in developed countries of Western Europe as well, where the relaxation of the social happened for different reasons. Consumerism was accompanied by an increase in alternative "spiritual" trends (e.g. new religious movements) and an increase in the number of client cults such as Herbalife. The new "alternatives" have proven to be able to adapt to the current needs of humanity, and address the depths of human being. The current paper presents an analysis of the forms under which Herbalife reached old and new customers online, in the context of mass media and marketing communication. In order to identify the forms of effective advertising employed by Herbalife in reaching new or existing customers, the paper carried out content analysis of the main and official websites of the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Magorovy labutí písně ('Magor's swan songs'), a collection of poems by political prisoner Ivan M. Jirous, and an important example of Czech prison poetry from the second half of the 20th century. It was during his imprisonment in Litoměřice, Ostrov, and Valdice (1981-1985) that Jirous wrote the poems, which were smuggled out as motáky (clandestine notes written on rolls of paper) by his friend and fellow prisoner Jiří Gruntorád. The article first characterises the situation of Jirous and the Czech underground during the 1970s and 1980s. It then proceeds to analyse how Magorovy labutí písně represents a form of literary creation whose aesthetic specificity arises from the situation of extreme hardship -- the 'state of emergency' -- in which it was written. This specificity can be found in the authentic and even documentary aspect in which the poems reflect the time and place of the prison, as well as the broader, timeless, and more spatially expansive awareness of life that the poems express. What is essential here is not the contingent aspects of the writing, the fleeting influence of inspiration, but more broadly the conscious use of specific means and methods of poetic composition. It is thus a form of literary expression that confronts the characteristic aspects of prison time and spatial confinement by consciously exceeding the limits of the walls, reaching out into the diverse and varying temporal planes and shifting reality of the surrounding world -- an experience that is only intensified by its juxtaposition to the daily life of the prisoner from which these dimensions have been brutally stripped. This context-based interpretive analysis demonstrates, in conclusion, that the prison poetry in question here aims to define the effects of confinement and the prison environment by means of a complex gesture, one that is unified by a range of interrelated poetic devices: aural (sound and metre), figural, metaphorical, compositional, stylistic, etc. Prison poetry thus facilitates the survival of its creators and fellow (not only political) prisoners -- referred to colloquially as 'muklové' (an acronym for muži určení k likvidaci, or 'men destined for liquidation') -- not only in the physical sense, but above all spiritually, as integral, unbroken personalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Economic Research is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lodzkiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A comparison of the former Eastern Bloc and China's ways of dealing with the social implications of rock music as an alien cultural import from the West reveals significant analogies. The paper traces the process of politicisation of rock music and compares the two different cultural spaces by mapping each space's state ideology, aesthetic traditions and identities, and discriminative political and economic tools used to marginalise rock. Here the term politicisation refers mainly to the polarisation between the communist regimes' restrictive policies, and the attempts of the rock scenes to sustain their discriminating characteristics and relationship to protest. While in European communist states rock played a relevant subversive role, conversely, in China any 'rocking' of the state has largely been averted. The Chinese rock scene as an off-mainstream urban subculture has received less popular support than its counterpart in Europe and has also proved less politically significant. This comparative case study discusses the relationship between popular music and politics by tracing analogies and differences between the former Czechoslovakia, where the ideologisation and politicisation of rock reached the highest point in the Eastern Bloc, and contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like all cultures, totalitarian regimes develop their own symbols and rituals. As such symbols, music and music making play an important role in expressing values, norms of the community, as well as in providing models for living in it (Geertz, 1973). They are especially valuable tools for educating children. This paper summarizes the result of a pilot study in the lyrics of choral pieces for children, that were distributed along with the state-published methodological journal, Énektanítás [Teaching Singing] and its continuation, Az ének-zene tanítása [Teaching Singing-Music] between 1958-1989. Using political religion (Gentile, 2006) as conceptual framework for content analysis, the study presents: 1) how different characteristics of the communist doctrine appeared in the lyrics of choral pieces and 2) how they changed over time, outlining the life-cycle of the regime itself from militant mass movements to giving place to expressions of individualism and alternative faiths until it would dissolve in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part explains the concept of solidarity and fraternity on a theoretical level, especially in the light of Catholic social teaching. The second part analyzes the principles of solidarity and fraternity in Croatian society during the National Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In addition to solving the national question under a specific aspect of brotherhood, this term was understood in the spirit of the communist ideology of brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav peoples, and the ideology of solidarity was present predominantly in the form of self-governing socialism. The paper, therefore, shows how socialist Yugoslavia had many characteristics of a totalitarian system defined by communist ideology.

The transition of Moldavia from a Soviet Socialist Republic to an independent and democratic nation was a process that spanned (roughly) from 1985 to 1991. In this paper the author presents the relations between the reforms undertook by Mikhail Gorbachev (”Glasnost” and ”Perestroika”) and the emergence of a political opposition from within the Moldavian civil society against the Communist Party that ruled this peripheral Soviet Republic. More than this, the paper presents the relations between the main political opposer of the communists (gathered in different civil organizations) and the leadership of the Soviet Moldavia. The events that facilitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union are also mentioned and analyzed at a local and broader level, from the relation of Moldavia with the main Soviet Nations (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine), to the political and diplomatic bounds that are made during the year 1991 with Romania.