Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2170216
Aleksandr Korobeinikov
{"title":"Yakut autonomy: the postimperial political projects of the Sakha intellectuals, 1905–1922","authors":"Aleksandr Korobeinikov","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2170216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2170216","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131294197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-09DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2173372
Margot Tudor
politicians co-operated in new projects such as the first national parks and the 1922 law for the protection of natural beauties and historical buildings. His overall assessment, however, is a negative one: state involvement coincided with the slow decline of the movement and resulted in its eventual dismantling under the fascist regime. With a view to the literature about other countries, this seems surprising. In the United Kingdom, for example, noninvolvement of the state was a factor in the emergence of a vibrant network of private conservationist organisations, many of which tried to solicit active state support and legislation in the first half of the twentieth century. In the book’s last sections, Piccioni laments that traditions of nature conservation were not passed on to future generations in the ‘years of darkness’ (p. 283). He suggests that this may explain the late emergence of Italian environmentalism in the second half of the twentieth century (pp. 289–297). For all its justifiable focus on civil society actors in the field of nature conservation, this view seems needlessly negative about any involvement or support by the state in conservationist affairs. Moreover, the narrative does not fit in with more recent works about nature conservation and the environmental history of Italy under the fascist regime, which look beyond the demise of the conservationist movement. Even though the fascist regime’s actions were not usually a success story or even a disaster on the ground, it is valuable to look into what happened and how scientific ideas of nature conservation, local and national traditions, personal continuities, and fascism’s political ideology resulted in these actions. Piccioni did not amend his central state-critical narrative in this updated edition despite the alternative approaches offered by recent works, although these are duly referred to in the footnotes and bibliography. In a similar way, the book does not fully acknowledge recent research on nature conservation under various political regimes elsewhere in Europe in the inter-war period, or on the efforts of international conservationist networks to gain a platform in the League of Nations. Instead, it repeats the assumption that the international movement dwindled with the death of its first founders and the ‘end of cosmopolitanism’ in the 1920s (pp. 220–222). The book is and remains an excellent overview of the history of the first movement for nature protection in Italy. It is great that it can now reach the international audience it certainly deserves. Only for the political aspects after 1919, the audience should note that historiography has taken new directions since the book’s original publication.
{"title":"Colonial internationalism and the governmentality of empire, 1893–1982","authors":"Margot Tudor","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2173372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2173372","url":null,"abstract":"politicians co-operated in new projects such as the first national parks and the 1922 law for the protection of natural beauties and historical buildings. His overall assessment, however, is a negative one: state involvement coincided with the slow decline of the movement and resulted in its eventual dismantling under the fascist regime. With a view to the literature about other countries, this seems surprising. In the United Kingdom, for example, noninvolvement of the state was a factor in the emergence of a vibrant network of private conservationist organisations, many of which tried to solicit active state support and legislation in the first half of the twentieth century. In the book’s last sections, Piccioni laments that traditions of nature conservation were not passed on to future generations in the ‘years of darkness’ (p. 283). He suggests that this may explain the late emergence of Italian environmentalism in the second half of the twentieth century (pp. 289–297). For all its justifiable focus on civil society actors in the field of nature conservation, this view seems needlessly negative about any involvement or support by the state in conservationist affairs. Moreover, the narrative does not fit in with more recent works about nature conservation and the environmental history of Italy under the fascist regime, which look beyond the demise of the conservationist movement. Even though the fascist regime’s actions were not usually a success story or even a disaster on the ground, it is valuable to look into what happened and how scientific ideas of nature conservation, local and national traditions, personal continuities, and fascism’s political ideology resulted in these actions. Piccioni did not amend his central state-critical narrative in this updated edition despite the alternative approaches offered by recent works, although these are duly referred to in the footnotes and bibliography. In a similar way, the book does not fully acknowledge recent research on nature conservation under various political regimes elsewhere in Europe in the inter-war period, or on the efforts of international conservationist networks to gain a platform in the League of Nations. Instead, it repeats the assumption that the international movement dwindled with the death of its first founders and the ‘end of cosmopolitanism’ in the 1920s (pp. 220–222). The book is and remains an excellent overview of the history of the first movement for nature protection in Italy. It is great that it can now reach the international audience it certainly deserves. Only for the political aspects after 1919, the audience should note that historiography has taken new directions since the book’s original publication.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125044395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2184679
Réka Krizmanics, Vedran Duančić
ABSTRACT The Communist parties of Eastern Europe depended on gathering information, producing and accumulating knowledge, and curating and disseminating it to their citizens. Promising to establish a form of government that rested on rationality and science, these processes needed to be regulated and monitored to ensure they corresponded to the (supposed) party line at every step of the way. But how could individuals down the chain of command conceptualize the party line and what role did their subjectivity play in shaping their actions? How should we deconstruct knowledge-producing and -curating processes to better understand what the parties knew and what and how this knowledge was ‘handled’? Our dossier brings together case studies from various national contexts from Stalinist, post-Stalinist and late socialist contexts from Eastern Europe, where cadres and experts with different relationships with the ruling parties negotiated their various identities. In the introduction, we situate these case studies against the backdrop of a procedural view of knowledge, distinguishing between the stages of production, gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledge, drawing on the framework proposed by Peter Burke. We argue that adopting the procedural view of knowledge questions the binary of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in following the party line effectively. Second, we draw attention to heterodoxies as spaces of resistance without the inherent intention of dissent. Thus, we introduce a new angle through which the constraints of individual knowledge-producing actors under state socialism can be investigated.
{"title":"Eager to (let) know: knowledge production and dissemination in state socialist Eastern Europe","authors":"Réka Krizmanics, Vedran Duančić","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2184679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2184679","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Communist parties of Eastern Europe depended on gathering information, producing and accumulating knowledge, and curating and disseminating it to their citizens. Promising to establish a form of government that rested on rationality and science, these processes needed to be regulated and monitored to ensure they corresponded to the (supposed) party line at every step of the way. But how could individuals down the chain of command conceptualize the party line and what role did their subjectivity play in shaping their actions? How should we deconstruct knowledge-producing and -curating processes to better understand what the parties knew and what and how this knowledge was ‘handled’? Our dossier brings together case studies from various national contexts from Stalinist, post-Stalinist and late socialist contexts from Eastern Europe, where cadres and experts with different relationships with the ruling parties negotiated their various identities. In the introduction, we situate these case studies against the backdrop of a procedural view of knowledge, distinguishing between the stages of production, gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledge, drawing on the framework proposed by Peter Burke. We argue that adopting the procedural view of knowledge questions the binary of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in following the party line effectively. Second, we draw attention to heterodoxies as spaces of resistance without the inherent intention of dissent. Thus, we introduce a new angle through which the constraints of individual knowledge-producing actors under state socialism can be investigated.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123416895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2189090
A. Hîncu, Agata Zysiak
ABSTRACT During the long 1960s (mid-1950s to early 1970s), mass culture developed in Poland and Romania at the intersection of state policies in the field of socialist culture, ideas of democratic participation and the growing importance of expert social scientific knowledge for governance. By comparing studies that critically examined the outcomes of socialist cultural policies at the time, the article contributes an East–East perspective to the scholarship on the global 60s and socialist modernity. It reconstructs the main features of the model of socialist culture and analyses how researchers engaged with this model and its implementation. Some emphasized people’s participation in line with the party-state’s yet unfulfilled aspiration to create a democratic ‘socialist culture’. Others produced expert knowledge based on theoretical and empirical sociological research on mass culture. The article reveals how the relationship between party-state and ‘the masses’ – both as subjects of cultural policy and as consumers of culture – was mediated in research on socialist culture in Poland and Romania in the long 1960s.
{"title":"Socialist culture, participation and expert knowledge in Poland and Romania in the long 1960s","authors":"A. Hîncu, Agata Zysiak","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2189090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2189090","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT During the long 1960s (mid-1950s to early 1970s), mass culture developed in Poland and Romania at the intersection of state policies in the field of socialist culture, ideas of democratic participation and the growing importance of expert social scientific knowledge for governance. By comparing studies that critically examined the outcomes of socialist cultural policies at the time, the article contributes an East–East perspective to the scholarship on the global 60s and socialist modernity. It reconstructs the main features of the model of socialist culture and analyses how researchers engaged with this model and its implementation. Some emphasized people’s participation in line with the party-state’s yet unfulfilled aspiration to create a democratic ‘socialist culture’. Others produced expert knowledge based on theoretical and empirical sociological research on mass culture. The article reveals how the relationship between party-state and ‘the masses’ – both as subjects of cultural policy and as consumers of culture – was mediated in research on socialist culture in Poland and Romania in the long 1960s.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124009658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2176290
Natalia Otrishchenko
ABSTRACT The former chief architect of the Lviv region described urban planners as people who ‘own the territory’ in terms of knowing the land specifics, available resources, possibilities and restrictions of each spatial intervention. At the same time, such implicit knowledge had to be codified to become usable in the decision-making process. The Soviet city constantly collected information but lacked the tools to administer all this totality. The paper discusses the role of urban professionals in conceptualizing urban environment management developed during the last decades of state socialism in Lviv, western Ukraine. It outlines the connections between academics from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and party authorities, and between scientific approaches to automated management systems and a specific location. How could the information about the city be organized? What kind of data was necessary to build a model for urban planning? Who could (and how could they) access these materials? How were experts involved in the discussion about urban management? What were their strategies? Based on oral history interviews, memoirs and publications from the period, the author discusses how the ideas of scientific urban environment management became one of the last Soviet urban utopias, which combined technological optimism and striving towards automation with rediscovering the user and attempts to reform the decision-making process.
{"title":"Urban planners between secrecy, automation, and human-centered design: visions of environment management in late Soviet city","authors":"Natalia Otrishchenko","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2176290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2176290","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The former chief architect of the Lviv region described urban planners as people who ‘own the territory’ in terms of knowing the land specifics, available resources, possibilities and restrictions of each spatial intervention. At the same time, such implicit knowledge had to be codified to become usable in the decision-making process. The Soviet city constantly collected information but lacked the tools to administer all this totality. The paper discusses the role of urban professionals in conceptualizing urban environment management developed during the last decades of state socialism in Lviv, western Ukraine. It outlines the connections between academics from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and party authorities, and between scientific approaches to automated management systems and a specific location. How could the information about the city be organized? What kind of data was necessary to build a model for urban planning? Who could (and how could they) access these materials? How were experts involved in the discussion about urban management? What were their strategies? Based on oral history interviews, memoirs and publications from the period, the author discusses how the ideas of scientific urban environment management became one of the last Soviet urban utopias, which combined technological optimism and striving towards automation with rediscovering the user and attempts to reform the decision-making process.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126701711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2176292
Tomaž Ivešić
ABSTRACT The paper is focused on Slovene and Serbian state socialist experts and their role in the scientific field of researching the Yugoslav national question in the first half of the 1960s, with emphasis on their research and debates regarding the concept of national Yugoslavism. The institutes being examined are the Institute for Ethnic Studies (Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja, INV) in Ljubljana and the Institute of Social Sciences (Institut društvenih nauka, IDN) in Belgrade. In the early 1960s, Yugoslav soft nation-building reached its peak with the famous Ćosić–Pirjevec debate. The latter coincided with the end of the ‘transitional period’ at INV and its new leadership under Drago Druškovič. Some Serbian lawyers shifted the fight for the establishment of a socialist Yugoslav nation from political debates to the Yugoslav Association for International Law, where the dispute reached a climax in late 1964. With the abandonment of the Yugoslav national idea, IDN prepared an ambitious programme of researching Yugoslav interethnic relations, which would include several institutions from all Yugoslav republics. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia financed research on interethnic relations in Yugoslavia to create ‘correct’ policies with regard to the national question. Huge amounts of data were collected (public opinion polls, newspaper clippings) and analysed by the research institutions mentioned earlier, which often gave expert opinions to leading Communists. In the late 1960s, amateur research and opinion polling conducted by Yugoslav newspapers challenged the monopoly of the Party on the scientific research field of interethnic relations. Thus, in the early 1970s, the Party struggled to retake control.
本文主要关注斯洛文尼亚和塞尔维亚国家社会主义专家及其在20世纪60年代上半叶研究南斯拉夫民族问题的科学领域中的作用，重点关注他们对南斯拉夫民族主义概念的研究和辩论。正在审查的研究所是卢布尔雅那的民族研究所(Inštitut za narodnostina vprašanja, INV)和贝尔格莱德的社会科学研究所(društvenih nauka研究所，IDN)。20世纪60年代初，南斯拉夫的软国家建设以著名的Ćosić-Pirjevec之争达到了顶峰。后者与INV的“过渡期”和Drago领导下的新领导层的结束相吻合Druškovič。一些塞尔维亚律师把争取建立一个社会主义南斯拉夫国家的斗争从政治辩论转移到南斯拉夫国际法协会，在那里，争论在1964年后期达到高潮。随着南斯拉夫民族观念的放弃，内联拟订了一项雄心勃勃的研究南斯拉夫种族间关系的方案，其中将包括来自南斯拉夫所有共和国的几个机构。南斯拉夫共产主义者联盟资助研究南斯拉夫的民族间关系，以便制定关于民族问题的“正确”政策。之前提到的研究机构收集了大量的数据(民意调查、剪报)并进行了分析，这些研究机构经常向共产党领导人提供专家意见。在1960年代后期，南斯拉夫报纸进行的业余研究和民意调查挑战了党在民族关系科学研究领域的垄断地位。因此，在20世纪70年代初，共产党努力夺回控制权。
{"title":"Yugoslav experts, Yugoslavism and the national question in the 1960s","authors":"Tomaž Ivešić","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2176292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2176292","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper is focused on Slovene and Serbian state socialist experts and their role in the scientific field of researching the Yugoslav national question in the first half of the 1960s, with emphasis on their research and debates regarding the concept of national Yugoslavism. The institutes being examined are the Institute for Ethnic Studies (Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja, INV) in Ljubljana and the Institute of Social Sciences (Institut društvenih nauka, IDN) in Belgrade. In the early 1960s, Yugoslav soft nation-building reached its peak with the famous Ćosić–Pirjevec debate. The latter coincided with the end of the ‘transitional period’ at INV and its new leadership under Drago Druškovič. Some Serbian lawyers shifted the fight for the establishment of a socialist Yugoslav nation from political debates to the Yugoslav Association for International Law, where the dispute reached a climax in late 1964. With the abandonment of the Yugoslav national idea, IDN prepared an ambitious programme of researching Yugoslav interethnic relations, which would include several institutions from all Yugoslav republics. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia financed research on interethnic relations in Yugoslavia to create ‘correct’ policies with regard to the national question. Huge amounts of data were collected (public opinion polls, newspaper clippings) and analysed by the research institutions mentioned earlier, which often gave expert opinions to leading Communists. In the late 1960s, amateur research and opinion polling conducted by Yugoslav newspapers challenged the monopoly of the Party on the scientific research field of interethnic relations. Thus, in the early 1970s, the Party struggled to retake control.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"182 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116413355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2176291
Szabo' Laszlo'
ABSTRACT How did the state socialist regimes of the Soviet Bloc acquire knowledge about the ‘West’? Despite the ready-made ideological framework about the nature of Western capitalism and ‘imperialism’, state socialist authorities constantly sought out and relied on new information about the societies and governments beyond the Iron Curtain. Since this learning process exceeded the competences and the energies of the Party and state organs, they relied on the observations and assessments of privileged individuals who were allowed to explore the world outside the Soviet Bloc. Focusing on the cultural and scientific contacts between Hungary and the United States, the article analyses a specific form of information-gathering: travel reports that reflected on work and study trips to the ‘West’ . Hungary, like most of its regional neighbours, became more open in the 1960s, signing a series of economic and cultural agreements with capitalist countries. The regime encouraged tourism and the number of travellers from and to the West quickly increased. Scholarly exchanges with the United States started through the Ford scholarships (since 1964) and then the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) (since 1968), and connections multiplied as Hungarian academics, artists and professionals were integrated into transnational networks. While the authorities could not control and shape all aspects related to the cross-systemic mobility of information, goods and people, they aimed to monitor closely the process through institutional bodies like the Institute for Cultural Relations which had strong ties to the State Security. All officially monitored travellers were required to attend an ‘orientation’ session before leaving and were expected to produce a written report afterwards in which they evaluated their trip, their hosts and the experience. The article investigates the form and the function of such travel reports in the wider context of covert and public knowledge production and dissemination about the ‘West’ in state socialist countries.
{"title":"Trans-systemic mobility, travel reports and knowledge acquisition in Cold War Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s","authors":"Szabo' Laszlo'","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2176291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2176291","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How did the state socialist regimes of the Soviet Bloc acquire knowledge about the ‘West’? Despite the ready-made ideological framework about the nature of Western capitalism and ‘imperialism’, state socialist authorities constantly sought out and relied on new information about the societies and governments beyond the Iron Curtain. Since this learning process exceeded the competences and the energies of the Party and state organs, they relied on the observations and assessments of privileged individuals who were allowed to explore the world outside the Soviet Bloc. Focusing on the cultural and scientific contacts between Hungary and the United States, the article analyses a specific form of information-gathering: travel reports that reflected on work and study trips to the ‘West’ . Hungary, like most of its regional neighbours, became more open in the 1960s, signing a series of economic and cultural agreements with capitalist countries. The regime encouraged tourism and the number of travellers from and to the West quickly increased. Scholarly exchanges with the United States started through the Ford scholarships (since 1964) and then the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) (since 1968), and connections multiplied as Hungarian academics, artists and professionals were integrated into transnational networks. While the authorities could not control and shape all aspects related to the cross-systemic mobility of information, goods and people, they aimed to monitor closely the process through institutional bodies like the Institute for Cultural Relations which had strong ties to the State Security. All officially monitored travellers were required to attend an ‘orientation’ session before leaving and were expected to produce a written report afterwards in which they evaluated their trip, their hosts and the experience. The article investigates the form and the function of such travel reports in the wider context of covert and public knowledge production and dissemination about the ‘West’ in state socialist countries.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129507028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2186836
Petra Polyák
ABSTRACT Based on the example of university party organizations, the article discusses the function of information scarcity in the daily work of lower-level functionaries in the Stalinist period of Hungarian state socialism (1948–56). In order to implement party policies efficiently, the functionaries of the Hungarian Workers’ Party needed to acquire information about the goals, possible methods and evaluative frameworks of their tasks and their social environment. The article argues that the uncertainty caused by the scarcity of reliable information from and about society could have been reduced by consistent orientation from the higher party levels. In the first years of open sovietization, the party leadership successfully presented itself as the only true and all-knowing guide towards communism, which provided stability when the Stalinist style of discipline, work and practice was introduced into the organizational culture. However, the contradictory and watered-down central interpretations about the modifications of the Soviet model during the New Course and after the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union proved to be insufficient to make sense of the party policies’ twists and turns and made functionaries unable to deal with the new challenges. The perception of not being adequately informed resulted in a gradual loss of loyalty towards the actual party leadership by the eve of the revolution of 1956. Elaborating functionaries’ confusion in the context of universities also shows how the control of students slipped through the party’s fingers and provides further explanation of why universities became hotbeds of opposition and resistance against the communist regime.
{"title":"The need to know. Information gathering and evaluation in Communist Party organizations of Hungarian universities (1948-1956)","authors":"Petra Polyák","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2023.2186836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2023.2186836","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Based on the example of university party organizations, the article discusses the function of information scarcity in the daily work of lower-level functionaries in the Stalinist period of Hungarian state socialism (1948–56). In order to implement party policies efficiently, the functionaries of the Hungarian Workers’ Party needed to acquire information about the goals, possible methods and evaluative frameworks of their tasks and their social environment. The article argues that the uncertainty caused by the scarcity of reliable information from and about society could have been reduced by consistent orientation from the higher party levels. In the first years of open sovietization, the party leadership successfully presented itself as the only true and all-knowing guide towards communism, which provided stability when the Stalinist style of discipline, work and practice was introduced into the organizational culture. However, the contradictory and watered-down central interpretations about the modifications of the Soviet model during the New Course and after the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union proved to be insufficient to make sense of the party policies’ twists and turns and made functionaries unable to deal with the new challenges. The perception of not being adequately informed resulted in a gradual loss of loyalty towards the actual party leadership by the eve of the revolution of 1956. Elaborating functionaries’ confusion in the context of universities also shows how the control of students slipped through the party’s fingers and provides further explanation of why universities became hotbeds of opposition and resistance against the communist regime.","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116529155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800","authors":"Jemima Hubberstey","doi":"10.2307/jj.2990338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.2990338","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":151994,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121608885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2023.2166463
Daniel Speich Chassé
ABSTRACT This article is a comment on contributions to a special volume of the European Review of History, “The International Statistical Institute, 1885–1938”
本文是对《欧洲历史评论》特刊《国际统计研究所，1885-1938》的评论。
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