Pub Date : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50010001
C. Alston, D. Laqua
This essay introduces “Between Subversion and Opposition: Multiple Challenges to Communist Rule,” a special issue of East Central Europe. It focuses on four broader questions raised by the contributions: the different periodizations associated with communist rule; the meanings attached to different forms of subversion and dissent; the broader transnational contexts in which activists operated – including the role of contacts with activists in the West; and, finally, the different ways oppositional activity has been remembered and represented.
{"title":"Introduction: Subversion, Dissent and Opposition in Communist Europe and Beyond","authors":"C. Alston, D. Laqua","doi":"10.30965/18763308-50010001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-50010001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay introduces “Between Subversion and Opposition: Multiple Challenges to Communist Rule,” a special issue of East Central Europe. It focuses on four broader questions raised by the contributions: the different periodizations associated with communist rule; the meanings attached to different forms of subversion and dissent; the broader transnational contexts in which activists operated – including the role of contacts with activists in the West; and, finally, the different ways oppositional activity has been remembered and represented.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44847694","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 : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50010003
James Koranyi
The history of Romanian dissidence during the Cold War often seems rather barren. Yet, as this article demonstrates, the legacy of Romanian opposition to Cold War communism is vexed with conflicts over ownership in a fragmented circle of late Cold War era oppositional voices and actors. A daring attempt to cross the Danube by a young Romanian German student in 1970 and an earthquake in the year 1977 provide the historical backdrop to these post-communist internecine battles over opposition and conformity. The prominence of the German-speaking community in these conflicts is not accidental but is itself a commentary on the structural problems related to dissidence in Romania. This article’s focus on specific individuals – Anton Sterbling, Paul Goma, Carl Gibson, Herta Müller – reveals differing interpretations of dissidence and opposition, a diverse social fabric of Romanian dissidence, and a long tail of psychological battles over the memory and the ownership of opposition to Romanian communism after 1989.
{"title":"Opposing Memories: Contest and Conspiracy over 1970s Romania","authors":"James Koranyi","doi":"10.30965/18763308-50010003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-50010003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The history of Romanian dissidence during the Cold War often seems rather barren. Yet, as this article demonstrates, the legacy of Romanian opposition to Cold War communism is vexed with conflicts over ownership in a fragmented circle of late Cold War era oppositional voices and actors. A daring attempt to cross the Danube by a young Romanian German student in 1970 and an earthquake in the year 1977 provide the historical backdrop to these post-communist internecine battles over opposition and conformity. The prominence of the German-speaking community in these conflicts is not accidental but is itself a commentary on the structural problems related to dissidence in Romania. This article’s focus on specific individuals – Anton Sterbling, Paul Goma, Carl Gibson, Herta Müller – reveals differing interpretations of dissidence and opposition, a diverse social fabric of Romanian dissidence, and a long tail of psychological battles over the memory and the ownership of opposition to Romanian communism after 1989.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48677703","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 : 2023-04-24DOI: 10.30965/18763308-50010004
Aleksandra Gajowy
Unearthing sociocultural histories of hiv/aids in Poland, this article focuses on heretofore silenced and dismissed narratives of the crisis and the ways in which hiv/aids in Poland posed a challenge to socialist rule, but also to Polish society and the state in the early days of neoliberal democracy. I focus on the first decade of the aids epidemic in Poland (1985–1996) to investigate how narratives of the crisis made palpable people’s anxieties about the changing political, economic, and social conditions, gentrification, as well as the linear logic of progress encapsulated in the desire to catch up with the West. I analyze sociocultural responses to the crisis, specifically artistic interventions, underground gay, lesbian and aids activism, public demonstrations against the state’s inept management of the epidemic, the lack of media coverage, and urban legends circulating in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In doing so, I examine how the intersection of public discourse of the aids crisis and the changing political landscape played out on the level of a body with aids through the biopolitical logic of “biological citizenship.”
{"title":"A Tiny War in a Human: aids, Art, and Protest in Poland","authors":"Aleksandra Gajowy","doi":"10.30965/18763308-50010004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-50010004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Unearthing sociocultural histories of hiv/aids in Poland, this article focuses on heretofore silenced and dismissed narratives of the crisis and the ways in which hiv/aids in Poland posed a challenge to socialist rule, but also to Polish society and the state in the early days of neoliberal democracy. I focus on the first decade of the aids epidemic in Poland (1985–1996) to investigate how narratives of the crisis made palpable people’s anxieties about the changing political, economic, and social conditions, gentrification, as well as the linear logic of progress encapsulated in the desire to catch up with the West. I analyze sociocultural responses to the crisis, specifically artistic interventions, underground gay, lesbian and aids activism, public demonstrations against the state’s inept management of the epidemic, the lack of media coverage, and urban legends circulating in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In doing so, I examine how the intersection of public discourse of the aids crisis and the changing political landscape played out on the level of a body with aids through the biopolitical logic of “biological citizenship.”","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48837383","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020002
Aigi Rahi-Tamm
The article covers the 15th General Song Festival “20 Years of Soviet Estonia,” held in Tallinn in July 1960, with about 30,000 participants. During the festival, the choirs started to sing popular songs and banned songs on their own initiative, leading to the festival being called “a small singing revolution”. It was a time of changes when both the authorities and the people were testing the limits of what was allowed and forbidden. As the message of songs plays an important role in influencing the people, the authorities hoped to exploit the song festival tradition in their own interest. The goal of Khrushchev’s new cultural policy was to promote the Soviet model for success to the West and to activate foreign relations. The intermediation of cultural contacts required breaking the anti-Soviet attitudes prevailing among the Baltic exiles, and for this purpose diverse tactics were applied. The article analyses the different manifestations of the people’s will both in Estonia and among the exile community as well as the measures and manipulations of the authorities. Thus, diverse practices of social control unfolded in the context of 1960 from initiatives to support each other to against state surveillance and exclusion.
{"title":"The Estonian “Little Singing Revolution” of 1960: From Spontaneous Practices to Ideological Manipulations","authors":"Aigi Rahi-Tamm","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The article covers the 15th General Song Festival “20 Years of Soviet Estonia,” held in Tallinn in July 1960, with about 30,000 participants. During the festival, the choirs started to sing popular songs and banned songs on their own initiative, leading to the festival being called “a small singing revolution”. It was a time of changes when both the authorities and the people were testing the limits of what was allowed and forbidden. As the message of songs plays an important role in influencing the people, the authorities hoped to exploit the song festival tradition in their own interest. The goal of Khrushchev’s new cultural policy was to promote the Soviet model for success to the West and to activate foreign relations. The intermediation of cultural contacts required breaking the anti-Soviet attitudes prevailing among the Baltic exiles, and for this purpose diverse tactics were applied. The article analyses the different manifestations of the people’s will both in Estonia and among the exile community as well as the measures and manipulations of the authorities. Thus, diverse practices of social control unfolded in the context of 1960 from initiatives to support each other to against state surveillance and exclusion.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43251801","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020004
Jose M. Faraldo
The article explores if Francoism was different to other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, focusing on the example of surveillance and its central meaning for modern dictatorships. As a case study, the article analyzes this through a comparative examination of the political police in Spain and in Eastern and Central Europe. The paper shows the general lines of the conceptualization of modern secret police, inserting them in a wider European context.
{"title":"How to Compare Dictatorships? Cultures of Surveillance in Franco’s Spain and Communist Eastern Europe in Context","authors":"Jose M. Faraldo","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The article explores if Francoism was different to other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, focusing on the example of surveillance and its central meaning for modern dictatorships. As a case study, the article analyzes this through a comparative examination of the political police in Spain and in Eastern and Central Europe. The paper shows the general lines of the conceptualization of modern secret police, inserting them in a wider European context.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45298531","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020012
C. Vasile
{"title":"Tismaneanu, Vladimir, and Marius Stan. Romania Confronts its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice","authors":"C. Vasile","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42143023","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020009
Rosamund Johnston
{"title":"Applebaum, Rachel. Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia","authors":"Rosamund Johnston","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47557792","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020008
V. Petrov
{"title":"Dragostinova, Theodora K. The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene","authors":"V. Petrov","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42070592","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020006
Muriel Blaive
Surveillance was long considered one of the main characteristics of communist rule. The ubiquitous presence of the secret police and its informants, citizens who would spy on their own family, friends, and colleagues, was one trait that was considered almost consubstantial to the exercise of communist repression. The regimes paralyzed the people by mobilizing fear: fear of repression, but also fear of the West, and fear of capitalism. But the participation of large chunks of society to this control culture, as well as its high level of conformism, progressively led to the postulate that the communist domination is no more than one particular avatar of modern society. Such an approach revives the notion of individual choice and that of social actors. As dissident thinkers underlined it, it would have been enough for people to question the official dogma, by refusing to live in a lie, for the regimes to collapse. However, surveillance practices have been studied also in Western countries in the past decades. And the recent coronavirus crisis shows yet again that the use of fear in politics is not a prerogative of communist regimes only. We can observe how potent fear is, also in our democracies, as a motivator of individual behavior and extractor of conformism. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has increased the visibility of state and corporate surveillance, yet this new reality has garnered the massive support of the wider public. In fact, it has largely been a demand on the part of a fearful citizenry, who has voluntarily complied to this new surveillance and self-surveillance model. The communist experience should warn us that surveillance leads to censorship and, even more importantly, to a change of behavior. But the current Covid situation should also lead us to reinterpret the degree of sincerity of social actors under communism: we now see that fear can lead to curtailing freedoms with the willing participation of a large part of society.
{"title":"Surveillance Society: From Communist Czechoslovakia to Contemporary Western Democracies","authors":"Muriel Blaive","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Surveillance was long considered one of the main characteristics of communist rule. The ubiquitous presence of the secret police and its informants, citizens who would spy on their own family, friends, and colleagues, was one trait that was considered almost consubstantial to the exercise of communist repression. The regimes paralyzed the people by mobilizing fear: fear of repression, but also fear of the West, and fear of capitalism. But the participation of large chunks of society to this control culture, as well as its high level of conformism, progressively led to the postulate that the communist domination is no more than one particular avatar of modern society. Such an approach revives the notion of individual choice and that of social actors. As dissident thinkers underlined it, it would have been enough for people to question the official dogma, by refusing to live in a lie, for the regimes to collapse. However, surveillance practices have been studied also in Western countries in the past decades. And the recent coronavirus crisis shows yet again that the use of fear in politics is not a prerogative of communist regimes only. We can observe how potent fear is, also in our democracies, as a motivator of individual behavior and extractor of conformism. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has increased the visibility of state and corporate surveillance, yet this new reality has garnered the massive support of the wider public. In fact, it has largely been a demand on the part of a fearful citizenry, who has voluntarily complied to this new surveillance and self-surveillance model. The communist experience should warn us that surveillance leads to censorship and, even more importantly, to a change of behavior. But the current Covid situation should also lead us to reinterpret the degree of sincerity of social actors under communism: we now see that fear can lead to curtailing freedoms with the willing participation of a large part of society.","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47394844","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 : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.30965/18763308-49020001
Muriel Blaive, Jose M. Faraldo
The chiasmus in our title (“surveillance of culture, culture of surveillance”) was not meant as a frivolous, would-be elegant catchphrase: it is rife with meaning.1 The rhetorical figure of chiasmus involves the notion of reciprocity (Forsyth 2013), implying that the second arm of the formula is an unavoidable consequence of the first. It is precisely this reciprocity that is at the heart of our special issue of East Central Europe. Indeed, we mean to indicate that the surveillance of culture in a police regime does result in a culture of surveillance. Hence we chose here to study surveillance as a self-standing culture of its own. In fact we extended our reflection on surveillance all the way to our present democracies, as we took into account the current development of mass surveillance via the internet. Work Group 1, “Culture Under Surveillance,” chaired by Muriel Blaive and James Kapaló, was one of six groups within the cost project New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent, led in 2017–2022 by Maciej Maryl and Piotr Wciślik. The aim of the project was to study the cultures of dissent under socialism in a transnational and multidisciplinary perspective. The narrower aim of Work Group 1 was to “explore the effects of the
{"title":"Surveillance of Culture, Culture of Surveillance","authors":"Muriel Blaive, Jose M. Faraldo","doi":"10.30965/18763308-49020001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-49020001","url":null,"abstract":"The chiasmus in our title (“surveillance of culture, culture of surveillance”) was not meant as a frivolous, would-be elegant catchphrase: it is rife with meaning.1 The rhetorical figure of chiasmus involves the notion of reciprocity (Forsyth 2013), implying that the second arm of the formula is an unavoidable consequence of the first. It is precisely this reciprocity that is at the heart of our special issue of East Central Europe. Indeed, we mean to indicate that the surveillance of culture in a police regime does result in a culture of surveillance. Hence we chose here to study surveillance as a self-standing culture of its own. In fact we extended our reflection on surveillance all the way to our present democracies, as we took into account the current development of mass surveillance via the internet. Work Group 1, “Culture Under Surveillance,” chaired by Muriel Blaive and James Kapaló, was one of six groups within the cost project New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent, led in 2017–2022 by Maciej Maryl and Piotr Wciślik. The aim of the project was to study the cultures of dissent under socialism in a transnational and multidisciplinary perspective. The narrower aim of Work Group 1 was to “explore the effects of the","PeriodicalId":40651,"journal":{"name":"East Central Europe","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46383709","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}
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