Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-84
Author(s):  
Susan Corbesero

AbstractDuring the troublous post-war and post-Soviet periods, the iconography of Stalin has served as a powerful interpreter of the past. Since World War II, portraits and attendant mass reproductions of the notorious Soviet leader have conveyed a historical memory that fused the triumphalist mythology of the Second World War and the cult of Stalin. Appropriated for political, national, nostalgic and commercial purposes, these iconic vehicles have functioned as integral “vectors of memory” in times of political change. In that vein, this article traces the remarkably dynamic and influential life of Aleksandr Laktionov's Portrait of I. V. Stalin (1949) in order to illuminate how its meaning and use, past and present, reflects and refracts the political landscape that deploys it.


Author(s):  
Sabine Lee

This chapter explores the relationship between soldiers and local women in various theatres of war during World War II, tracing in particular nationalistic and racial undercurrents in the development of national policies vis-à-vis,military-civilian relations. It traces in particular Nazi policies in both East and West with view to eugenics, as well as Allied policies in preparing for and implementing post-war occupations in Germany and Austria, including guidance for soldiers on relations with the (former) enemy. The final part of the chapter gives a voice to children born of war themselves. Using a variety of sources ranging from ego-documents including autobiographies and memoirs as well as interviews and narratives as well as contemporary media reports, it analyses the CBOW reflections on their lifecourses.


2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-241
Author(s):  
Michael A. Hennessy

Abstract Twice before the Second World War the Canadian merchant marine had collapsed in the face of competing conceptions of empire and commercial interest. Though once home to a thriving merchant fleet, the passing of the age of sail marked Canada's decline as a maritime nation. Most of the surviving merchant fleet sailed under British registry, employing British crews and officers. During the Second World War, Canada rebuilt its merchant marine. As the war drew to a close, the state, labour and enterprise supported the framing of a Canadian maritime policy to preserve the merchant shipping capacity developed during the war. The fleet's ambiguous origins, conflicting national trade policy, the absence of a laissez-faire international shipping market, the rise of cold-war tensions and the very peculiar problems of trade to the sterling bloc savaged post-war efforts to maintain the fleet. The timing and nature of the collapse were particularly Canadian. Barriers to currency convertibility, carriage restrictions, and high labour and production costs, proved formidable obstacles which representatives of the Canadian state were very largely powerless to overcome. In combination, these elements, rather than some invisible hand, explain why Canadian ship owners led the way in abandoning their national flag and why the state helped them. Sole attribution for the death of the merchant marine should no longer fall to unfavourable labour costs or union activism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIUS RUIZ

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Aygul Raimova ◽  

The article examines the state of science and education in Uzbekistan in the post-war period. The issues of opening new higher educational institutions, building schools and training personnel are investigated. The article analyzes the achievements of science, the exit of scientists of Uzbekistan into the international arena, achievements in the field of natural and humanitarian areas of science. In general, the article considers the attempts to reform the education system after the end of the Second World War, the difficulties associated with them, their positive and negative consequences, as well as the impact of education on the spiritual and cultural life of the country.


Polar Record ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 342-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Dudeney ◽  
David W.H. Walton

ABSTRACTThe roots of a British Antarctic policy can be traced, paradoxically, back to the establishment of a meteorological station by the Scottish Antarctic Expedition in the South Orkneys, in 1903, and the indifference of the British Government to its almost immediate transfer to the Argentine Government. It was from that modest physical presence upon Laurie Island that Argentina came increasingly to challenge British claims to the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands Dependencies (FID), first in the late 1920s and then more extensively in the second world war. This challenge shaped British policy for the next forty years, with further complications caused by overlapping territorial claims made by Chile and the possible territorial ambitions of the USA. Britain's eventual response, at the height of World War II, was to establish permanent occupation of Antarctica from the southern summer of 1943–1944. This occupation was given the military codename Operation Tabarin. However, it was never a military operation as such, although monitoring the activities of enemy surface raiders and submarines provided a convenient cover story, as did scientific research once the operation became public. Whilst successive parties, rich in professional scientists, considerably expanded the pre-war survey and research of the Discovery Investigations Committee, their physical occupancy of the Antarctic islands and Peninsula was essentially a political statement, whereby the Admiralty and Colonial Office (CO) strove to protect British territorial rights, whilst the Foreign Office (FO) endeavoured to minimise disruption to Britain's long-standing economic and cultural ties with Argentina, and most critically, the shipment of war-time meat supplies. In meeting that immediate need, Tabarin also provided the basis from which Britain's subsequent post-war leadership in Antarctic affairs developed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-674
Author(s):  
Ilya A. Pomiguev ◽  
Eldar R. Salakhetdinov

The paper analyses the politics of memory of the World War II (WWII) in socialist Yugoslavia and compares the corresponding commemorative practices in the post-Yugoslav republics. The focus is on the design of holidays and memorial dates that reflect the symbolic and valuable attitudes of society, as well as the trajectory of nation-building. The formation of the state metanarrative in post-war Yugoslavia was closely related to the monopolisation of the leadership roles of the national liberation war by the communists, who united the six South Slavic nations in their struggle against the Nazi invaders. The state holidays and memorial days were derived from the history of resistance to foreign occupiers and internal enemies in order to legitimise and strengthen the triumph of the new socialist order. Alternative Yugoslavian non-communist movements, especially the Ustash and Chetniks who were potentially capable of competing in the symbolic field, were declared class enemies, reactionary elements, and quislings. As the processes of disintegration increased in socialist Yugoslavia, there were several attempts to revise its ideological attitudes and symbolic heritage of WWII. Nevertheless, as the study shows these attempts became, rather, a marginal phenomenon, and most post-Yugoslav states retained the commemorative, albeit de-ideologised, practices of the previous period.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Andrzej Rykała

Abstract The article presents the origins, development and liquidation of the Jewish cooperative movement in Poland after the Second World War. It outlines the socio-political background, which contributed to the creation of a kind of national-cultural autonomy for the Jews, including one of its pillars - the cooperative movement. The functioning of cooperative institutions was analyzed for the structure of the industry, distribution and their number, and the number of workers employed there. I also assessed the role that their own cooperatives played in the reconstruction of post-war life of the Jewish population in Poland, both in the material as well as social and psychological fields, and also in the development of the cooperative movement in general.


2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-141
Author(s):  
LORNA SHAUGHNESSY

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s novella, Ifigenia (1950) has been read consistently as a critique of the consolidating Francoist state of the 1940s and an early example of his ‘demythologizing’ technique. This article seeks to open discussion on aspects of the text that have not attracted critical attention to date. It traces the unacknowledged legacies of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis in the text, most visible in both authors’ emphasis on the capacity of language for deceit. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, it argues that Torrente’s Ifigenia should be read not only in the context of post-Civil War Spain but also in the wider socio-political context of post-Second World War Europe. It argues that the consistent suppression of expression of emotion throughout the text produces an absence of tragedy in Torrente’s retelling of the myth, and outlines how this relates to the post-war contexts of Spain and Europe.


2020 ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Efim. I. Pivovar ◽  
◽  
Alexander S. Levchenkov ◽  
Elena A. Kosovan ◽  
◽  
...  

This article is devoted to the coverage of a number of major historical and educational projects implemented in recent years by the Russian archivists in the context of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War of 1939-1945. Having analyzed the activities of the leading national archives in this area, including their use of modern information technologies and Internet resources, the authors link these projects with discourse of world politics and historiography on the most important factors and causes that resulted in the outbreak of World War II. In connection with heated discussions and disputes on the prerequisites and causes of the Second World War that are escalating among politicians and historians of various countries on the eve of its 80th anniversary, the Russian historians and archivists have done a tremendous job in preparing thematic historical and documentary exhibitions devoted to the most significant (from historical point of view) events that directly affected international relations in the pre-war months. Complex of audiovisual sources, which has been reviewed in this article as a part of historical and documentary exhibitions complex, confirms that it was a complex of factors and events associated with the collapse of the Versailles-Washington system of international relations that led to the outbreak of World War II; but, most of all, the policy of pandering to the aggressive revanchist aspirations of Nazi Germany by the major European powers and concern of the European allies of the USSR for strengthening of its position in international affairs. Introduction of new sources and expansion of documentary base available to general public by means of exhibitions and permanent Internet projects plays a huge role in historical and educational work in general, and in counteraction of falsification of history and of dividing the historical memory of the peoples of the former USSR and the allies of World War II in particular. Finally, it contributes to the consolidation of efforts of the national professional community of historians and archivists and to propagation of dialogue of Russian historians and archivists with their colleagues from near and far abroad.


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