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During the early Cold War, it was difficult for American intelligence to penetrate the Iron Curtain but a potential solution soon arose: émigré intelligence groups such as the Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közössége (MHBK) or 'Association of Hungarian Veterans'. This group, however, turned out to be an intelligence 'paper mill'. Attempts at trans-Atlantic cooperation with the MHBK and similar groups failed as they lost most of their good sources and were penetrated by communist security services. By the mid-1950s, US intelligence cut these groups off, took over their good sources, and established a source registry to prevent recurrence of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, theDaily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, theDaily Workerwas very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The opening of new archival sources often turns up surprising and interesting information. For example, one of political activist Lillian Hellman's biographers discovered in intellectual Joseph L. Rauh Papers statements by Hellman confirming her Communist Party membership in the late 1930's, an affiliation previously vigorously denied in some circles although suspected in others. Rauh, a leading civil liberties lawyer, had been Hellman's counsel when she prepared for a confrontation with the United States Congress House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. Hellman was prepared to testify regarding her own Communist activity but not to name others. Rauh's files contain drafts of a statement regarding her Communist affiliation that Hellman would give should HUAC agree to her condition. Joseph Rauh handled many important internal security cases in the late 1940's and 1950's, and historians will find much of interest in his legal files on his successful defense of playwright Arthur Miller, his removal of the Independent Socialist League from the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, and his files on the hotly debated lawyer William Remington prejury case. The Ludwig Donath file in the Rauh Papers is an example of chance discovery of an unknown episode in the history of Hollywood Communism and the show business blacklist.

Focuses on the symposium on historical geographies of modern southern Africa held at University of Sussex, Great Britain in April 2002. Analysis of developments in tradition of historical geographies; Effect of structuralist Marxist history on historical geography.

How effective was Soviet secularization and what is its long-term legacy? This paper investigates the lasting effects of Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign (1950s) on the current level of Orthodox religiosity in eastern Russia using an original district (raion)-level dataset that combines historical and contemporary evidence. By employing various matching techniques and an instrumental variable approach, I identify significant effects of the Virgin Lands cultivation on diminishing the role of religion even 60 years later. Moreover, I demonstrate that the resettlement of Communist Youth League (Komsomol) members and the destruction of traditional social relations may have worked as key mechanisms that contributed to the legacy effects. This study offers one of the first micro-level empirical investigations into the impact of Communism-driven secularization, and contributes to the emerging inquiry into the historical legacy of communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how other countries were portrayed in the history test paper of the Chinese National College Entrance Exam, or Gaokao, over the past four decades. A qualitative study was conducted on the questions from history exams administered from 1978 to 2021. The contents of these questions were analyzed and synthesized into historical narratives, and six thematic narratives were identified in the test material: Humiliation and Resistance, War Changes History, the World Community, the Celestial Empire, Social Formations and Politics, and Communism. The study found that the history questions not only presented historical knowledge but also included an official understanding of history. The findings suggest that the Chinese government strengthened the ideological work of socialism with Chinese characteristics, shaping the legitimacy of Chinese communist rule and strengthening nationalist education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the operation of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime, one of the most oppressive communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the choice of the Church to operate both officially and secretly. Based on the religious economy approach, it defines the conditions favoring diversified operation on both the legal market and the black market. Despite repression, the Church strived to maintain official operation in Czechoslovakia. Simultaneously, it developed an underground structure that allowed for uncompromised religious life. The case study confirms the theoretical predictions that severe repression favors underground operation without eliminating the need for the official presence of the Church. Beyond the religious economy approach, the paper points to the role of agency. The diversification strategy could only emerge and function due to the combination of externally imposed circumstances and individual initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper envisages how the concept of 'Inequality' has been perceived by the Trade Unionists in late colonial Bengal. Informed by the ideology of Communism, these activists penned down a myriad of insightful analytical tracts, primarily in vernaculars, ranging from propaganda pamphlets to articles in the party organs. Their critique of Imperialism, and how it precipitates economic and socio-political inequalities was grafted in the ethos of class struggle. Through delineating their stark ideological differences with Gandhian mass politics, and by focusing on their intellectual endeavours concerning various structural inequalities of class, religion, caste, and gender it aims at charting out the indigenous response to the global doctrine of Communism. Often overlooked as conventional intellectuals, their literature brings to fore an alternative discourse on anti-colonialism in South Asia, overwhelmed by the theme of Nationalism. This paper is a methodological probe in doing intellectual history from below, adding to the edifice of the existing scholarship on Decolonisation, Communism, and Inequality in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of social media to underline the tourism cultural heritage of Bucharest. The authors examine the history of the city, dating back from its settlement during the Ottoman Empire and passing through a series of radical changes: the period of Phanariot rulers, the golden age as the "Little Paris" of the Balkans, the Communist period, and the current democratic regime. The paper is based on the reviews' study from the Tripadvisor.com platform and investigates tourists' emotions during their travel experiences. Sentiment analysis of Bucharest as a tourist attraction was developed based on the emotion criteria (anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, trust). The findings revealed that visitors have favourable emotional responses towards the tourist attractions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the thought of the Indian revolutionary and philosopher M.N. Roy (1887–1954). The essay argues that Roy's pivot from Marxism to a liberal 'New Humanism' over the course of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by his thinking about fascism and represents a broader turn away from a materialist reading of history and loss of confidence in the Indian working class. The paper begins with an analysis of Roy's early communism, and considers his later critique, elaborated from the 1930s onwards, that 'Gandhism' represented an Indian form of fascism, and explores how these arguments led to his rejection of Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the papers of Alderman Fanny Deakin, a woman Communist in north Stafford shire who was active from the 1890s until her death in 1968, have been deposited with the archives department of the Newcastle-under-Lyme Central Library. Some material, notably letters and photographs, has since augmented these papers of Tom Mann and A.J. Cook, together with correspondence from Tom Roberts, who was Midlands District Communist Party organizer in the 1930s, on recruitment and disciplinary matters. This material has been contributed by Lily Marshall, also a life-long Communist, who worked with Fanny for many years and whose own papers on the pottery industry, trade union and trades council and local government affairs are also now deposited with Newcastle Library.

Gendered relations of power contribute to the signification inherent in political parties. The formal rules and informal processes through which hegemonic gender regimes are reproduced and contested in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) are subjected to Feminist Institutionalist analysis here. In addition, the institutional belonging and political self-making of women party members are also assessed in the state of West Bengal. The experiential concepts of institutional belonging and self-making can enhance Feminist institutionalist research by identifying the processes that shape gendered behaviour of actors in institutions. The idealised revolutionary communist subjectivity that represents the institutional standard of appropriateness of gendered behaviour in the CPI(M) is explored. The co-constitutive relationship between institutions and political subjectivities is elaborated. The paper argues that the institutional belonging and political self-making of women in the CPI(M) are characterised by a politics of boundary-creation from as well as horizontal solidarities with fellow women colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects an effort to consider the history of Albanian education within the context of the country's history. In it, the origin and evolution of Albanian education are described in connection with the country's social and political standing. It is divided into sections, each corresponding to a major historical period in the formation of the Albanian state and intertwined with major reforms in education: education during the Albanian National Renaissance (1830s–1912); education after the Declaration of Independence (1912–1928); education under King Zog (1930s); the 1946 education reform; the 1960s reform, which involved reorganising the system of education for long-term success; and education after the decline of communism in the 1990s and beyond. The paper chronicles how the dawn of the educational system, its organisation and its curriculum were designed to prepare "period-specific" citizens. It is concluded that the roots of the Albanian national education system took hold during the Albanian Renaissance as a necessity of national survival and that the system's development through time is intertwined with the country's constitutional standing, echoing the secret workings of national life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exacerbated socio-ecological crisis, including the devastating COVID-19 pandemic during the last few years, has given rise to a variety of interpretations and strategies to face this crisis. Some researchers have suggested that the state is the single most effective agent capable of mobilizing the amount of resources and the policies required to overcome a crisis of such a broad scope and devastating impact. This paper analyzes the causes of the multifaceted and deepening socio-ecological crisis to show that the root cause behind this crisis is the capitalist mode of production itself. Subsequently, I interrogate those approaches proposing the state as a strategic mechanism to combat and overcome the crisis. It is outlined that the class-based (non-neutral) character of the state will tend to reproduce the prevailing capitalist relations of production, namely the basic conditions for the generation and exacerbation of this crisis. As is finally suggested, it is only with a revolutionary transformation of society that the working social majority will be able to radically undo the fundamental causes of the crisis and create the conditions for a peaceful and sustainable development on a planetary level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the image of Taiwan (the Republic of China) in the Polish communist press in the mid-1950s. It focuses on the news coverage related to the two Polish cargo ships – the Praca and the Prezydent Gottwald – which were detained by the Taiwanese authorities in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Based on the press narratives and supported by declassified government documents, the paper analyses the impact of the Cold War conflicts and divisions on the detention of Polish ships and its coverage by the Polish communist media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent fragmentation of the political landscape and the increasing uncertainty of its boundaries have made historians more acutely aware that politics does not exist only ‘high up’ and on the macro level but reaches deep into the private lives of people, shapes their identities and perceptions, influences their thoughts and emotions, regulates and modifies their behaviour. This makes the public/private divide a starting point from which to explore the multiple layers of politics. This is the perspective adopted in this Special Issue, that is dedicated to forms of revolutionary militancy in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy. Indeed, few other historiographical events are better suited than revolution and its concrete manifestation in history to be investigated from the perspective of private experiences, feelings, and emotions. The aim of these papers is, therefore, to describe the different Italian revolutionary cultures from the nineteenth century until the 1970s, analysing on the one hand the intersection between history and individual stories and on the other the emotional substratum of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on May Day celebrations in communist Czechoslovakia in the Žďár nad Sázavou district of today's Czech Republic. The communist regime used these celebrations to symbolically communicate several ideological and political messages. By examining one of these messages, the importance of the relationship between the countryside and the city, we see how its presentation changed over time. The variability of this message was caused not only by the changes the communist regime and society underwent during the studied period but also by specific local conditions. This paper concentrates on actors from two villages and argues that celebrations of May Day, an ideological-political holiday, could have been appropriated by local inhabitants as a community event that helped express the unity of the rural community. Holding May Day celebrations that served largely as community events in some villages also interrupted the union of the village and the city in socialist society, one of the messages that was supposed to be communicated by May Day celebrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does political nostalgia influence voting? Although nostalgic voters have been often mentioned as central to the rise of populism in the West, scholars have rarely shown empirically how nostalgia influences electoral choice. In this paper, I use survey data from 2009 and 2016 to investigate the extent and electoral impact of Soviet nostalgia in the context of democratizing Moldova. First, the paper reveals and explains why political nostalgia is distributed unevenly across Moldova's territory with certain regions and ethnocultural groups embracing romanticized views of the Communist past more often than others. Second, the paper demonstrates that nostalgic orientations toward the past and cultural factors rather than perceptions of economic conditions structure party choice in post-Soviet Moldova. The paper also identifies the discursive similarities between varieties of Western populism, Euroscepticism, illiberal worldviews, and the nostalgic appeals of the Moldovan Left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have studied memory for decades, but there is currently a renewed interest in places of postmemory: sites to which memories of a past are connected, that engage those who have no living memory of the past in question. By combining a process-tracing approach to several post-communist surveys with in-depth interviews with members of the younger generation about their postmemories of the communist past, this paper explores places associated with postmemories of communism amongst young people in contemporary Romania, focusing on two types of place: (1) mega-constructions, prisons and deportation sites; and (2) sites connected to everyday life (home, shops, hospitals). The findings suggest that "postmemories in places" are reproduced and co-produced by younger people in a nuanced and complex way. Spatial postmemories of communism are not simply formed by parental or grandparental experiences of communism itself, but are also shaped by experiences of the initial post-communist period. Younger people's complex range of "postmemories in places" toward the communist past are politically multivalent: postmemory of specific sites related to the cultural welfare of the communist past did not necessarily indicate a political commitment to its restoration amongst interviewees; and postmemories of political violence associated with particular sites did not preclude unilateral pride in national achievements prior to 1989. Furthermore, "postmemory in place" is not a passive process, but one that is shaped by both a critical attitude to the responses of older generations toward particular places, and the challenges of the capitalist present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discerning what populists mean by the people is crucial for understanding populism. However, the appeals populists make to the people differ across political systems, with distinctions particularly evident between democratic contexts and one-party states such as China. Articulations of the people in Chinese populist communication remain underexplored, which is a gap this paper addresses by clarifying how the people is constructed in the discourses that underpin Chinese populism. A total of 61 populism cases were examined through discourse and meta-analyses, from which three manifestations of the people emerged. First, the Chinese nation serves as an ideological glue to mobilize people to protest against those seen as betraying their Chinese identity or violating the sovereignty and dignity of China. Second, the mass is associated with an affective aversion to scientists and experts, but also with mass support for a satirical subculture that challenges the hegemony of elite-dominated cultural production and cultural institutions. Finally, socially vulnerable groups assemble powerless people in situations of economic impoverishment, political marginalization, and social vulnerability. The analysis reveals how these three conceptualizations of the people drive online Chinese bottom-up populism, allowing netizens to serve as mediators and pitting the people against corrupt elites and the establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are people in Central and Eastern Europe more hesitant towards COVID-19 vaccination and more prone to believe in COVID-19 related conspiracy theories than other Europeans? The article claims that the spread of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs in the post-communist region might be fostered by communist nostalgia. Drawing on the survey data from Lithuania, I show that communist nostalgia is one of the best predictors of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, controlling for other related factors such as populist attitudes, trust in political institutions, confidence in media and scientists and pro-Western attitudes. The paper claims that communist nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe is conducive to conspiracy beliefs in a similar vein as nostalgic narratives employed by populist radical right in Western countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing evidence from existing archives, parliamentary proceedings, presidential speeches, newspaper reports and oral testimonies, this paper demonstrates the extent to which Malawi sustained diplomatic relations with Taiwan and China from 1961 to 2014, within the broader context of southern Africa. While trade dictated the diplomatic choice of the so-called 'two Chinas', individual leadership styles as well as domestic politics remained the decisive factors. However, the paper argues that the process was dynamic, complex and highly contested – and that the broader idiographic context of southern Africa mattered. For while local circumstances created the need for diplomatic relations, it was the international political economy that acted as the impetus behind the establishment and shifting sustenance of the relationships. In making this argument, the study draws attention to how global forces interacted historically with local political economies within southern Africa to shape discourses of diplomacy as well as how economic challenges forced states to make compromises – including undermining human rights – in the making of these diplomatic relations over the last two generations in post-independence Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits the concept of cognitive confinement as a useful tool for understanding the idea of decolonization of knowledge and the opposite notion of epistemic colonization. For the sake of the mentioned goal, the paper places the discourse on epistemic (de)colonization within the context of a paradigm emerging in the cognitive sciences, referred to as embodied cognition. Cognitive confinement is understood here as a pathological situation in which the environment in which one's epistemic pursuits are embedded gradually transforms in such a way as to impede these pursuits and downgrade one's capacity to address real, especially local, problems. The paper also brings up a case study. Namely, it follows those thinkers, most famously Naomi Klein, who regard the 'shock-therapeutic' transition from Soviet-backed communism to free market capitalism undergone by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as a new and peculiar wave of colonization. The paper briefly discusses the epistemic or cognitive, broadly construed, aspect of this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the persistence of egalitarian norms in post-Communist societies by focusing on the former members of the Communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia and their children. Using individual-level survey data, we distinguish between Russia and the CEE countries in this respect. While in the CEE there is some evidence that both former members of the Communist parties and their children have stronger preferences for redistribution than the rest of the population (the results for the children are more significant), in Russia, only children of Communists (but not Communists themselves) support redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putting into question its central presupposition of 'inner freedom', this paper deconstructs the 'resistance through culture' of the Păltiniş School of dissident thinkers in Romania under communism in the 1970s and 80s. The philosopher Constantin Noica, and his follower Gabriel Liiceanu, argue that resistance to authoritarian repression and dictatorial regimes is best achieved by preserving culture by schooling selected individuals in that culture rather than through direct political action or publicly speaking out. Adducing precisely which cultural values underpin the arguments of these thinkers – values such as purity, exceptionalism, individualism and genius – I show that the culture propounded by them is essentially patriarchal and, further, that this culture is complicit with the very tyranny it seeks to resist: philosophically, ideologically and in practice. This is evidenced by the exclusion of women from the culture espoused. Additionally, by focussing on a fairly recent debate between Liiceanu and Nobel prize-winning author Herta Müller, herself an exile from communist Romania, I delineate two opposing philosophies of language which might best be described as "birth of the word is in the head" versus "birth of the word is on the page", effectively re-staging a problem going back to early defences of liberty, for example in Spinoza and Mill, the relationship between freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Only by understanding selves as linguistic bodies whose language is socialised and shared through affective relations to others and to oneself do we arm ourselves with the resources to resist censorship, repression and tyranny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a Critical Discourse Analysis and a Cultural Discourse Studies analysis of a series of English as a foreign language textbooks produced and used in Lithuanian schools during the Soviet era and into the post-Soviet era. The analysis shows that these books use the English language not to pay homage to linguistic imperialism and concomitantly promote anglophone countries (the Inner Circle), but rather to demote these countries and advance a communist ideology. This paper concludes that the English language per se is not an agent capable of (re)producing inequalities; rather, it is an instrument for other agents – in this case the creators of English language textbooks – to use to mediate any ideology, not just those for whom English is a first language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sand Sailor Studio, a small Romanian indie game developer company launched a Kickstarter project to fund the development of their game Black: The Fall in 2014. After having more than 1,600 people backing their pitch, they could finish their 2.5D puzzle-platformer set in a bleak dystopic past/future and published it in 2017, receiving mostly positive reviews. The paper argues that Black: The Fall inscribes a more general Orwellian dystopia into a dystopified version of Romania's socialist past in order to present it as a commodity for Western audiences, leveraging on the perceived uniqueness of Romanian history and hence reinforcing the image of Eastern Europe as an 'other at hand?'. While the visuals support what we can call a mediatised experience of the late Ceausescu-era, the game mechanic and affective qualities of playing may be capable of offering a more nuanced impression of the 1980s in Romania as a lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics and ideology of collaboration in China during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression through Zhou Fohai's diary. It suggests that his collaboration be understood as a complex wartime phenomenon that demonstrates a different version of nationalism with an aim to alleviate pains and hardships of the people during the war and with a prospect for China's survival and development based on anti-communism and Sun Yat-sen's Pan-Asian idea that viewed Japan as its crucial partner. Zhou's collaboration also needs to be approached within the context of the Guomindang's political culture and history, as he believed that organizing a separate National Government had been an acceptable political undertaking in the party with two precedents. His diary also testifies that the debacle of the Nanjing collaborationist government was not just due to its nature as a "puppet regime," but a product of complex factors deep-seated in the party's incorrigible culture and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides some insights on this special issue of Mortality, entitled Dying and Death in Former Communist European Countries, setting the issue against the general background of death studies and, more specifically, of death studies in eastern European countries. Some relevant references to the Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe International Conference, organised in Romania, at the '1 Decembrie 1918ʹ University of Alba Iulia, Romania, between 2007 and 2019, are also made. The rationale and also the limitations of this special issue are brought into attention. The papers that form this issue are briefly presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the holdings gathered on social and cultural movements at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in the U.S. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was founded at Stanford University by Herbert Hoover in 1919 to collect materials documenting the causes and consequences of World War I. The Hoover Institution is available without charge to all individuals regardless of citizenship, residence, academic affiliation, or lack thereof. Socialist activities during World War I are illuminated by the microfilm collection (10 reels) assembled by Frank L. Grubbs, Jr., as research material for his book "The Struggle for Labor Loyalty." Grubbs' topic was the competition between the pro-war American Alliance for Labor and Democracy and the anti-war People's Council of America, both founded in 1917. The Archives' holdings on the Communist Party, U.S., are far more extensive, and, without question, the single richest source is the Jay Lovestone Papers (330 linear feet). Lovestone a founding member of the party in 1919, played a central role in its internal factional wars of the 1920s, became its general secretary in 1927, and was expelled together with a core of followers in 1929 at the insistence of Communist International headquarters in Moscow.

Soviet medical science went through a deep and systematic transformation. Initiated in the very early days of the Communist regime, a moment of disrupting and isolating impact uprooted it from its former organizational and epistemic foundations and re-adjusted the expert output and modus operandi to state needs. Professional identities, paradigmatic approaches and everyday practices resulting from these were transformed and forcibly aligned with the expectations of the new powerholders, aligned with the newly formulated party-bound loyalties and secured by the broad array of severe sanctions. This article systematically approaches the dark side of the Soviet interwar transformation in medicine with a special focus on a sample of psychiatric experts. The paper analyses the entanglement between domestic pressures exercised upon scholars by the emerging totalitarianism, forcing them to detach and considerably re-adjust their international ties, while nonetheless trying to remain a part of this cross-border epistemic community. While international contacts did not cease entirely, their expanse, intensity and the very mode of cooperation had to change dramatically so as to fit the new regime´s vision upon medicine. International networks were re-appropriated for the sake of promoting the success of the Communist state, with scholars functioning as involuntary ambassadors of the regime. Though perfectly compatible with the practices and outputs of their fellow experts elsewhere across the globe while exposed to the permanent pressure of political terror at home, Soviet public health and its experts became deeply transformed and detached in manifold ways from their peers and their medical science. Largely overlooked, the early fractures of the interwar period carry on into the Cold War-influenced second half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are environmental conflicts managed in China and Russia? Both states are territorially large non-democracies affected by environmental degradation due to industrialisation and economic growth, and both are characterised by collectivist culture resulting from pronounced historical legacies and Communism. Our analysis of China indicates the important role played by local governments often supporting local people; and role of the negotiation between the central and the local governments. In contrast, in Russia local governments ally with businesses involved in environmental conflicts; or tend to support central government view on the conflict. However, the environmentalists' movements in Russia are better connected to external (international) support. In contrast, China exhibits more isolation of environmental movements that are less influenced by Western environmentalism, if at all. The paper aspires to bring further insights in understanding of the public environmentalism and management of environmental conflicts in Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a wealth of original material from Russian and East European archives, in addition to Western primary sources, this paper focuses on the uneasy Soviet–Somali patron–client relationship in the 1970s. It traces the development of Moscow's stake in Mogadishu since Mohamed Siad Barre's coup d'état in 1969 and dissects largely futile Soviet attempts at embedding lasting presence in Somalia's military ranks and security apparatus. As this paper shows, Somalia's socialist experiment proved a challenging affair on multiple counts, not only for the Soviets but also for the African country's leaders. Mogadishu's turn to the left faced serious opposition from within Somalia's own society, suffered from insufficient commitment and division within the state apparatus, and was confronted by local and international pressures coming from Arab and Western quarters. This cleavage strongly impeded the successful completion of the arduous tasks of socialism-building, resulting in short-lived and largely unsuccessful experiments at little understood social engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Bal’s narratology, underlaid by participant observation, and complemented by interviews, this paper provides a cultural analysis of the permanent exhibition of the Schindler Factory Museum which opened in 2010 in Krakow, Poland. The paper points to current heritage making processes in connection to both the communist period and World War II (WWII) in Poland. The paper suggests that despite an apparent focus on WWII, the exhibition narrative may, albeit indirectly, address the history written under communism and its protracted collective memory. Such an analysis offers a case to investigate cultural heritage as participating and reflecting dynamics between history writing and memory in contemporary Poland between local, national and transcultural memory making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the life and political thought of the Afro-Cuban, communist, feminist activist and lawmaker Esperanza Sánchez Mastrapa and her historical context. The article builds on the existing literature by using new periodical and archival sources from institutional collections of communist organizations and personal correspondence with feminist leaders. The paper's main objectives are the following. First, to demonstrate that Sánchez Mastrapa simultaneously engaged with Afro-Cuban, feminist, and communist organizations. Second, to illuminate how these platforms offered a productive space for some women activists like Sánchez Mastrapa to conceptualize a simultaneous critique of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. And third, to analyze how she used these institutional platforms to articulate an early intersectional feminism as part of a growing transnational left-wing movement fighting in favor of Black, poor, women workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Indonesian teachers have entangled alternative versions in their teachings on the 1965 affair, a controversial vicious and political event in Indonesia, to counterbalance or even contest the communist coup narrative in the history lesson curriculum and school textbooks. Employing the sociological tools of Margaret Somers, this paper dissects the stories of eleven high school history teachers about what enables them to teach multiple interpretations of the 1965 affair. The inclusion of different accounts in their teachings is navigated by various narratives of the affair that they acquired or fabricated in certain socio-historical and political settings. However, teaching is far from an independent pedagogical action. Accordingly, the extent to which each teacher could easily teach multiple versions was related to surrounding actors inside or outside of the school and their narratives of the 1965 affair and communism, as well as perceived absence of any institutional practice to veto such teachings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role and significance of ideology for party politics in twenty-first century neoliberal Nigeria. The question it sets out to answer is: Has the market economy's dominance led to the convergence of conservative and progressive/liberal ideologies in twenty-first century Nigerian political party contests? The importance of ideology for party politics in Nigeria seems to have declined with the market economy's dominance over other systems. The deployment of neoliberalism as an ideology in the last three decades through common-sense rhetoric about the goodness of the free market, aided by international lending institutions, has led to a dilution of individual party ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to point out a specific segment of education of children in Slovakia in the period of Socialism (1948–1989) through the example of confessional education of children in the environment of the secret Church. After the Second World War, a significant turnover in education occurred in Czechoslovakia under the impact of Soviet politics. Schools were nationalised, which in fact meant the disappearance of church schools and plurality in education. After the Communist coup in 1948, education was immediately reformed by the Education Act of 21 April 1948, which unified the system of education and made it a state monopoly with a pro-Soviet orientation. The socialist school was indoctrinated by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism; the content of education at all levels, as well as leisure time activities of children. Work with children and youth in a religious spirit was harshly punished and considered an anti-state activity. Therefore, in the period of political liberation in the 1960s (Prague Spring), the so-called secret Church started its activity. The paper is focused on an analysis of the model of working with children in the secret Church in Slovakia between 1973 and 1989 through the method of oral history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The function and meaning of voting can vary across political systems. Despite its diffusion as a norm alongside the global spread of political liberalism in the post-colonial period, women's franchise continues to expose key fault lines in the foundations of democratic theory. Recalling the Third Comintern's debates and activities in the aftermath of World War I, this paper explores how gender organized the left's critiques of bourgeois parliamentarism and its imperial tendencies in the early twentieth century. It draws particular attention to how, in the context of global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, the woman suffrage issue juxtaposed the promises and premises of bourgeois and proletarian internationalism, the democratic potential and limits of electoral systems and their political alternative, the soviet. From these experiences, this paper highlights the radical challenge that gender poses to the development of alternative democratic imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The core argument of this paper is that English-language scholarly understandings of socialism in Laos have been hampered by implicit ethnocentrism and denial of coevalness. Lingering but pervasive legacies of the Cold War include an equation of 'true' socialism with models of socialism that were practised in Europe, and a triumphalist tone that equates socialism with the past, the fake and the crumbling, even when it is (as with Laos) so evidently a tangible part of the lived present and the imagined future. Better understanding of socialism in Laos requires the kind of work that was done by an earlier generation of scholars on power in Southeast Asia, where concepts were translated across difference by rooting them in local terminology, contextualisations and usage. Following this inspiration, I approach socialism in Laos through the example of how the problem of water supply was addressed in a resettled, ethnic Kantu village in Sekong Province, Lao PDR. Why was the village resettled? Why was water a problem? What strategies did people use to obtain safe water? Answering these questions reveals some of what socialism means in lives as lived in this self-identified socialist state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development of trade union sport organization, concept, structure, and policy during the last period of communism in Romania. Elite sport was extremely developed and successful. The concept was, however, centred on workplace gymnastics and 'Daciada', a national mass sport competition, which was adapted to communist ideology to increase nationalism, production and performance. The structure of workplace gymnastics introduced different terms such as gearing gymnastics, production break gymnastics, moment gymnastics and individual gymnastics. This had the responsibility to educate the masses for the practice of regular physical activities to develop elite sports (for the most talented) and mass sport (as leisure and healthy activity for the rest of the people). The conclusions highlight how workplace gymnastics was promoted only by propaganda. It was not really practiced by the workers. Some men preferred ludic or relaxing activities, while some women were interested in health and aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Czech and Polish politics do not frequently make headlines in anglophone media, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has once again become a fulcrum of events that are analytically challenging and normatively disturbing. This paper seeks to identify patterns of elite recruitment and political careers in CEE and the relationship they bear to the democratisation of political regimes, especially changes among political elites in the context of celebritisation of politics in post-communist CEE countries. Such changes usually occur during an incremental process encompassing such issues as elite circulation, elite recruitment, representation, and the relationship between professionalisation and fragmentation of the elites. Careful analysis in an actor centred approach of how new parliamentary Polish and Czech elites were formed and changed, shows three distinct waves of politics: missionary, professional and the current wave of celebrity populism. As such, the paper explains structural factors that lead to celebritisation of politics and account for the attractiveness of celebrity populism in the region and the increasing allure of politicians representing this kind of policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the consolidation of the institutional and normative framework in heritage protection and preservation was marked by continuity in Western European societies. This meant that heritage lists, and in particular, the values for which assets had been listed, were not subjected to major changes or revisions. However, in 1989, this opportunity was provided to former socialist European countries once their regimes had become obsolete. In this context, not only was history reassessed but opportunities emerged that allowed the opening of a new chapter in the politics of heritage preservation. The current paper discusses the continuities and discontinuities of heritage legitimisation following the dismissal of the communist regime in Romania. In particular, it focuses on the impact of the historical break of 1989, as well as the transition, on the heritage evaluation and listing processes. The role of the state in these processes will be questioned against the background of a fragile institutional and normative framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the specific historical development of heritage's conceptualisation within Soviet Russia from the October Revolution in 1917 to its 50th anniversary in 1967. More particularly, it intends to elicit a debate on the relation between heritage as a concept and the new understanding of space and time introduced with the October Revolution. It stresses not only the stakes of integrating, assimilating and appropriating the past, but also the ones that reside in the will to build a communist future thanks to a heritage dedicated to last for eternity. The paper thus intends to shed light on the Soviet concept of heritage and examines its peculiarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger study exploring cultural and discursive performances of Holocaust memory in South Africa under the apartheid racist regime (1948–1994). During the years of apartheid rule, South Africans of diverse backgrounds regularly invoked the memory of the Holocaust. In his 2004 memoirs, the Indian South African anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada briefly narrates the course of his European odyssey (1951–1952), where he witnessed first-hand the destruction left by the Second World War and by the Holocaust in particular. Using Kathrada's memoirs; an interview I conducted with him in August 2016, and archival records concerning the cultural events he attended while in Europe, I tease out Kathrada's insights on the Jewish Holocaust through a distinctively internationalist perception of colonialism. In addition, I address specific threads of communist thought that shaped his worldview. Despite his communist background, records of his visits to the Auschwitz concentration camp and to the Warsaw Ghetto reveal Kathrada's unique perception of the Holocaust – in marked distinction from Soviet approaches to the Holocaust and its memorialization. Moreover, an analysis of Kathrada's public speeches delivered over the 1950s repositions Kathrada's little known sojourn in Europe as central in shaping his insights regarding the consequences of racism. These insights, gleaned in Europe, are brought home to South Africa. Drawing on Michael Rothberg's paradigm of multidirectional memory, this paper explores how Kathrada interweaves different narratives, structuring his own imaginaries and identities by negotiating between different practices of commemoration and memorialization, in a search for justice and solidarity, and as a means of articulating his own position as a victim of apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a book review of the André Liebich's book on East-Central Europe countries, socialist before 1989 and members of the European Union today. In this book, the author describes the evolution of these countries after the fall of communism and the accession to the European Union. The purpose of this book is to offer an overview of the countries of East-Central Europe some thirty years of transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 1921, J.H. Thomas, the Labour Party MP and National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) leader, initiated libel proceedings against the Communist—journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He cited defamation in the form of cartoons and words depicting the events of ‘Black Friday’—when he allegedly betrayed the locked-out Miners' Federation by leading the withdrawal of NUR solidarity. To Thomas, the framing of his image by indigenous Bolsheviks threatened to fatally define his character and career within popular imagination, and undermine Labour's rise. In this paper, I argue that during the domestic and international crises surrounding the First World War, innovative left-wing editors and cartoonists tested the boundaries of newspaper cartooning, and gave dissident cartoons renewed menace before the Law. The case was the first for over a century in which graphic satires of a national political figure were successfully prosecuted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]