scholarly journals Instrumentalization of the Border Zone. Environment and Ideology in the Educational Films Made between 1955 and 1989 by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s Film Studio

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-164
Author(s):  
László Strausz

Abstract Analysing the output of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s own film studio, which produced educational films between 1955 and 1989, this essay investigates the modes in which the border zone was represented during the decades of state socialism. Considering the vicinity of the border as an area, where ideological confrontations are battled out, the article argues that there is a significant difference between the films produced in the 1950-60s, and those from the mid-1960s onwards. The earlier pieces depict an emotionally charged border zone the defence of which is a social-political duty: father-type superiors teach rookie soldiers about this obligation in coming-of-age stories. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, the films seem to confine themselves to an instrumental mode of persuasion, which presents border protection as a merely technical question. The article briefly ties these shifts to the changing modes in official discourses during the decades of state socialist Hungary.

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Fehérváry

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).


Circulation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (Suppl_3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saidulu Mattapally ◽  
Jianyi Zhang

Introduction: Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) are among one the most significant discoveries in life sciences. As a promising —biological drug for cell therapy, multiple lineages of iPSC-derived cardiac cells have been administered in human clinical trials in multiple important organ systems. The potential immunogenicity of hiPSC-derived cardiac cells continues to be one of the concerns in large animal models. Methods: In the present study, WT hiPSCs were generated by transfecting male human cardiac fibroblasts with Sendai viruses coding for OCT4, SOX2, KLF4, and C-MYC.Then hiPSCs carrying knockout mutations for both HLA Class I and Class II (HLAI/II-KOhiPSC) were generated via CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology (Mattapally et al, 2018). hiPSCs were differentiated into cardiomyocytes (CM) endothelial cells (ECs) and spheroid cultured was performed as previously described (Mattapally et al, 2018). We evaluated spheroid transplantation and its potency for myocardial repair in the Swine. Programmed stimulation was used to determine the arrhythmogenic outcome. Results: To determine the engraftment efficacy of HLAI/II KO compared to WT Spheroid, a swine study was performed. After LAD ligation in swine, 800μm spheroid was injected into the border zone of the left ventricle. After transplantation, cell engraftment was monitored by Q-PCR. At week 4, there was a significant difference between the 2 groups. Animal groups included: MI hearts treated with 500 WT Spheroid injection (MI+WT Spheroid, n=5), MI hearts treated with 500 KO Spheroid injection (n=6), MI only hearts (n=6); the fourth group of animals underwent sham surgery (Sham, n=6). Arrhythmia was studied by programmed electrical stimulations (PES) and conduction velocities measured with electrode mapping, and the engraftment rate by calculation of quantitative polymerase chain reaction measurements of expression of the human Y chromosome. Engraftment of iPSC-CMs was found in both treatment groups; however, a significantly higher engraftment rate was found in KO Spheroid. The spheroid treatment is associated with significant changes in arrhythmogenicity. Conclusion: Our study established the improved graft but associated with arrhythmogenicity.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lane

While theories of global capitalism have added a new dimension to our understanding of the dynamics of the modern world, a ‘globalisation’ approach to the transformation of the state socialist societies is relatively underdeveloped. This paper studies the role of international and global factors under state socialism and the world system in the pre-1989 period. The paper considers traditional Marxist approaches to the transition to capitalism and criticises the model of state capitalism as well as the world system approach. In contrast, social actors (the ‘acquisition’ and ‘administrative’ social strata and the global political elite)are identified as playing a major role in the fall of state socialism, and were a nascent capitalist class. The transformation of state socialism, it is contended, had the character of a revolution rather than a shift between different types of capitalism.


Author(s):  
Dieter Segert

This chapter examines European state socialism, which emerged in the Russian Revolution of 1917. It has two roots, the social democratic labour movement and specific problems of underdeveloped, peripheral capitalist societies. While generally relying on Marx, the Bolsheviks invented the doctrine of the ‘new type of party’. After the conquest and stabilization of power, they built in Russia the institutions of classical state socialism and led the country on a specific path of modernization. After 1945, there was a second wave of state-socialist transformation in eight states of East Central and South East Europe. In all countries except Yugoslavia, the formal institutions of the Soviet model were established but the informal practices between countries differed considerably. At the end of the chapter, the blind spots and desiderata of three scholarly interpretations of state socialism are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (S1) ◽  
pp. 30-51
Author(s):  
György Péteri

Patron-client relations were a ubiquitous feature of cultural and academic life under the state socialist social order, as were networks crisscrossing the borderlines between the domains of political power and scholarship. Awareness of and due attention to such relations and networks, this article argues, is a sine qua non of any reliable history of economics in the communist era. Pioneering projects, publications presenting innovative new approaches, individual careers yielding significant works of domestic and international acclaim were as much dependent on the support and protection of the politically powerful as on genuine talent and diligence. State socialism was not the kind of social order that would typically enable a spectacular scholarly development just “by force of thought.” The article focuses on the story of one particularly important patron in Hungary over the field of economics, a true communist grand seigneur: István Friss. It shows how his contribution has been systematically neglected, suppressed by both the historical and the memoir literature, and it presents archival evidence highlighting the vital importance of Friss’s patronage for the work and careers of such leading economists as András Bródy and, particularly, János Kornai.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110277
Author(s):  
Kateřina Lišková ◽  
Lucia Moravanská

Over the course of 40 years of state socialism, the explanation that Czechoslovak criminologists gave for spousal murder changed significantly. Initially attributing offences to the perpetrator's class origins, remnants of his bourgeois way of life, and the lack of positive influence from the collective in the long 1950s, criminologists then refocused their attention solely on the individual's psychopathology during the period known as ‘Normalization’, which encompassed the last two decades of state socialism. Based on an analysis of archival sources, including scholarly journals and expert reports, and following Ian Hacking's insight that ‘kinds of people come into being’ through the realignment of systems of knowledge, this article shows how new kinds of spousal murderer emerged as a result of shifting criminological expertise. We explain the change as the result of the psychiatrization of criminology that occurred in Czechoslovakia at a time when the regime needed to consolidate after the upheavals of the Prague Spring of 1968. The criminological framing of spousal murder as belonging squarely in the individualized realm of the private sphere reflected the contemporaneous effort of the regime to enclose the private as a sphere of relative state non-interference.


Author(s):  
Nina Jany

AbstractThis article disentangles and explores some commonly made assumptions about egalitarian state-socialist ideologies. Based on the conceptual framework of the multiprinciple approach of justice, it presents the results of an in-depth analysis of (e)valuation patterns of distributive justice in Cuban state-socialism. The analysis mainly focuses on ideational conceptions of distributive justice (just rewards), but it also accounts for distribution outcomes and resulting (in)equalities (actual rewards). The results of the comparative case study of the Cuban framework of institutions and political leaders’ views in two periods of time, the early 1960s and the 2010s, point to (e)valuation patterns that are generally labelled as egalitarian, such as the allocation rules of outcome equality and (non-functional) needs. However, contrary to common assumptions about egalitarian state-socialist ideologies, the results also point to several other patterns, including equity rules as well as functional and productivist allocation rules. I argue that many of these (e)valuation patterns, in their connection to the discursive storyline of the Cuban economic battle, are indeed compatible with egalitarian state-socialist ideology.


Slavic Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Roberts

Scholars use a variety of terms to refer to the regimes of the former Soviet bloc. Some prefer communist, while others use socialist or state socialist. In this article, Andrew Roberts argues that communism is the better choice. Using socialism or state socialism to refer to these regimes stretches the concept unnecessarily, making one label refer to two regimes with little in common. This conceptual stretching has two negative consequences. First, it impedes efficient scholarly communication. Second, it impoverishes political debate by diminishing the achievements of democratic socialists. A solution to this problem is to use the term communist to refer to Soviet-style regimes.


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