scholarly journals Sculpture in Socialist Realism—Soviet Patterns and the Polish Reality

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Tomaszewicz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Native Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Second World

Socialist realism was more than just a trend in art. It was also, and perhaps predominantly, a method of educating the new post-revolutionary society in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In socialism, the state became the commissioner, consumer, and critic of art, treating it as a major propaganda tool. It is thus not surprising that the socialist realism patterns were imposed on artists working in those countries which found themselves in the Soviet sphere of influence after the end of the Second World War. In Poland, which was the Soviet Union’s closest neighbour and one of the larger countries in the post-war “Eastern Bloc”, socialist realism was the only permitted creative method in the years 1949–1956. The ideologists of the new art assigned a special role to sculpture, which, next to posters and murals, was considered the most socially accessible form of artistic expression due to the possibility of placing it in public space. Monuments as material carriers of ideology were used as an expression of power, but they also marked the places of strengthening collective identity. During the period of socialist realism in Poland, sculptural activity followed the main three directions: heroic, portrait, and architectural–decorative. Therefore, this paper aims to present theoretical and ideological assumptions relating to socialist sculpture and their confrontation with realisations in Poland during the period of the Soviet artistic doctrine. The paper also presents the aesthetic paradigms of socialist sculptures and their relationships with the canons of European art, and, for Poland, also with the native art, mainly sacral.

The Holy See and Czechoslovakia 1945—1948 in the Context of the Nascent Cold War

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Emilia Hrabovec
Keyword(s):  
International Perspective ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Republic ◽  
To Come ◽  
Post War ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Second World

The spectre of Communist expansion as a result of the Second World War represented for Pope Pius XII one of the greatest concerns. The unambiguously pro-Soviet orientation of the Czechoslovak government in exile and the crucial influence of Communists in the inner architecture of the restored state convinced the Holy See that Czechoslovakia was already in 1945 fully absorbed into the Soviet sphere of influence. This fact strengthened the Pope’s conviction of the necessity to resume relations with Prague as soon as possible and to send a nuncio there who would provide reliable information and protect the interests of the Church threatened both by open persecution and by propaganda manoeuvres in favour of a “progressive Catholicism”. The importance of the relations with Czechoslovakia stood out also in the international perspective, in which Czechoslovakia, in contrast to Poland or Hungary, seemed to be the last observatory still accessible to the Vatican diplomacy in the whole East-Central Europe. The year 1947 represented a caesura in the relations between the Holy See and Czechoslovakia. In the international context, this year was generally perceived by the Vatican as a definitive reinforcement of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the Czechoslovak framework, the greatest importance was ascribed to the political crisis in Slovakia in autumn 1947, during which the Communists definitively took over the political power in Slovakia. The lost struggle over the predominantly Catholic Slovakia, that for some time had been considered by the Vatican one of very few hopes for the defence of Christian interests in the Republic, was perceived by the Holy See as a dominant breakthrough on the way to the total Communist transformation of Czechoslovakia. While in the immediate post-war period the Holy See had tried to come to terms with Czechoslovakia also at the price of some compromises, in winter 1947/1948 the last hopes for a diplomatic solution vanished and were replaced by the conviction that in the confrontation with Communism not diplomatic, but spiritual weapons — prayer, testimony, martyrdom — were of crucial importance.

COMMUNIST PARTIES OF WESTERN EUROPE: PHASES OF HISTORICAL RISE AND DECLINE THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE DYNAMICS OF ELECTORAL PREFERENCES

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
V.E. BAGDASARYAN ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Special Role ◽  
World War ◽  
National Parliaments ◽  
Systemic Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The article presents the results of a study of the history of the communist parties of Western European states in the context of assessing the degree of their social influence. The aim of the work was to identify the phases of the rise and fall of the communist parties in Western Europe. The research methodology consisted in correlating the history of the communist parties with the results of elections to national parliaments. The factors that led to the growth or loss of the popularity of the communist movement among Western Europeans were identified. Special attention was paid to ideological splits within the Communist Parties and their attitude to the CPSU line. The conclusion is made about the achievement of the apogee of the popularity of the Communist parties in the first post-war years on the wave of the Victory in the Second World War, associated with the special role of the USSR. The subsequent decline of the communists in Western Europe is explained by the loss of the attractiveness of the Soviet project, by the erosion of the original values. At the present historical stage, a new rise in the popularity of the left forces is recorded, which is associated with a modern systemic crisis and a search for alternatives to capitalism.

Editors’ Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Schneider ◽  
Daniel Woolf
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
World War ◽  
Radical Islam ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Small Period

This concluding volume in The Oxford History of Historical Writing covers a very small period in comparison with some of its companions: barely two‐thirds of a century. As with the other volumes, the boundary dates are both fluid and imprecise: 1945 is a watershed date for the world in the sense that it marked the end of the Second World War and the division of Europe into a Western and an Eastern bloc. Elsewhere in the world, other dates are more meaningful: for China, 1949 is the critical year; and in much of Africa the decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s marked a significant rupture with past, colonial historiography. Unlike the earlier volumes, our period is also an unfinished one, for though some obvious sub‐periods are broken at points such as the early 1960s, the fall of European communism at the end of the 1980s, and the rapid rise of both globalization and radical Islam during the 1990s, it is difficult to predict, in early 2010 as this introduction is written, just where the story of post‐war historiography will end, or how. What ...

scholarly journals Unrecognizable, abandoned, unnamed, avoided places: On the murders committed against Jews in Poland in the period after the Second World War and their commemoration

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-147
Author(s):  
Andrzej Rykała
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Second World

The fall of the Third Reich, turning the “most tragic page” in the history of the Jewish nation, i .e . the Second World War, did not mean the end of the tragedy for Jews on Polish soil. Even before the end of the greatest confl in the history of humankind, in the areas liberated from Nazi Germany occupation, many survivors of the Holocaust experienced acts of ruthless violence. However, very few of the numerous victims of the post-war anti-Jewish terror have been commemorated in public space. To a very small extent the form of public commemoration also covered earlier wartime cases of collective murders committed against Jews by Polish Christians. Even if the sites of the dramatic events which occurred in the shadow of the Holocaust were marked, the complete truth about their course was not restored everywhere.

scholarly journals Constructing the Monk: Francis Poulenc and the Post-War Context

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 203-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Moore
Keyword(s):  
Olivier Messiaen ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Compositional Language ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Work Up ◽  
Second World

Following the Second World War Francis Poulenc took a keen interest in the music of the French avant-garde and was compelled to react in both his music and his writings to the aesthetic and technical experiments of the younger generation. Although the music of composers like Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez did not elicit a profound change on the substance of Poulenc’s compositional language, he did grow to the realization that the style he had embraced during the interwar period—one generally described as light-hearted and ironic—had become largely out of sync with new critical trends and concerns. Poulenc’s self-conscious aim to assert a personal form of “seriousness” in his works—one constructed with recourse to religiosity, stylistic homogeneity and the ostensibly concomitant values of sincerity and authenticity—formed the backbone of a new tone and persona that emerged following the war and which inflected his entire body of work up to his death in 1963. Poulenc’s desire to reinvent himself during this period forces us to re-examine his works, writings, and elements of his biography for the way in which they were constructed as a means of facilitating the discursive emergence of this new, more “serious,” persona.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

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
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

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.

Western Ethnic Borderlands in the Influence of Russian-Soviet Propagangda Before and in the Years of the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (46) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Russian Identity

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics

“Product Not Available in Pre-War Quantities – but Quality Remains the Same”: Remarks on Advertisements as Historical Sources

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Press ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The article focuses on advertisements as visual and historical sources. The material comes from the German press that appeared immediately after the end of the Second World War. During this time, all kinds of products were scarce. In comparison to this, colorful advertisements of luxury products are more than noteworthy. What do these images tell us about the early post-war years in Germany? The author argues that advertisements are a medium that shapes social norms. Rather than reflecting the historical realities, advertisements construct them. From an aesthetical and cultural point of view, advertisements gave thus a sense of continuity between the pre- and post-war years. The author suggests, therefore, that the advertisements should not be treated as a source for economic history. They are, however, important for studying social developments that occurred in the past.

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