scholarly journals Piotr Piotrowski Awangarda w cieniu Jałty. Sztuka w Europie środkowo-wschodniej w latach 1945–89 (Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta. Art in East-Central Europe, 1945–1989) 2005.

Nordlit ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 293
Author(s):  
Piotr Bernatowicz
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Research Field ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Virgin Land ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Polish Art ◽  
East Central European

Mieczysław Porębski, a distinguished Polish art historian of the 20th century, once expressed the demand for Polish art history to be researched simultaneously with foreign studies - as parallel fields. "We entered the research field of the old masters' art as partners in, so to say, a ‘furnished household', whereas in the field of contemporary art we are co-explorers, exploring a ‘virgin land'", as Porębski put it. The book by professor Piotr Piotrowski Awangarda w cieniu Jałty. Sztuka w Europie środkowo-wschodniej w latach 1945-89 (The Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta. The Art in East-Central Europe, 1945-1989) fully accomplishes this demanding postulate which nowadays seems to be rather rarely remembered by Polish art historians. The explored area, the East-Central European countries, which emerged, as a result of the Yalta Conference, between the iron curtain and the border of The Soviet Union (including former Yugoslavia) appears at least as an ‘old maiden' land, where scientific penetration still seems to be necessary.

Hungary and the “Third Europe” in 1938

Slavic Review ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Jo Winchester
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Economic Pressure ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
East Central European

The period of the 1930s has been called the time of the “Diplomatic War.“ During these years Nazi Germany seized the initiative in international affairs and tried to impose its will on the other states of Europe. The reaction of Britain and France to the threat of German expansion was appeasement until March 1939, when, with Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, it became clear that the Führer’s aims were not limited to the German-inhabited areas. Thus the states of East Central Europe found themselves in a highly vulnerable position: in the West they faced increasing political and economic pressure from the Reich; in the East there was the Soviet Union with its very exportable Communist ideology which would have undermined the political and social order of all these states. In this situation the East Central European states all sought some way of being independent from their two powerful neighbors.

What Comes After Communism?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shafir
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
Historical Antecedents

Was it communism or socialism that succumbed in 1989? Was communism dead in 1989, when the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’ (‘each does it his own way’) replaced the Brezhnev Doctrine in East Central Europe? Or did the patient agonise until the official dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991? Twenty-seven countries share a communist past in Europe and Asia. Of the surviving five, not all would pass the ‘Leninist test’. Which legacies affect post-communist systems has been an issue under debate since shortly after the fall of the Old Regimes. Claus Offe pointed out that post-communist regimes are faced with a ‘dilemma of simultaneity’, amounting to a ‘triple transition’: the process of having to cope concomitantly with unconsolidated borders, democratisation, and property redistribution. While other authors have often wondered which legacies ‘count’ in post-communism (those of communism itself or the ante-communist heritage), it is Herbert Kitschelt's merit to have pointed out that the modes of communist rule have been in turn influenced by historical antecedents.

The End of Communist Rule in East-Central Europe: A Four-Country Comparison

1991 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Batt
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Radical Reform ◽  
Country Comparison ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Systemic Crisis ◽  
East German

This article compares the patterns of breakdown of communist rule and the processes by which power was transferred to new ruling groups in four countries: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR. In the countries covered in this paper, two paths to systemic crisis and breakdown are identified: the path of failed reform in Hungary and Poland, and the path of intransigent resistance to reform in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. The lesson of the Czechoslovak and East German experience was clearly that those regimes which totally rejected reform, because they saw it as incompatible with communist power, faced total and rapid collapse when confronted with the challenge of Gorbachev's perestroika and when deprived of the support of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’; but the experience of Poland and Hungary suggests that those regimes which embarked on reform were no more successful in preserving communist power — half-way reform turned out in many ways to be even worse than no reform at all, while radical reform, that is, reform which would bring about the intended economic results, in the end could not be achieved without sweeping away communist power. Gorbachev himself now seems to be impaled on the horns of this same dilemma in the Soviet Union.

Negotiation of the Prehistoric Past for the Creation of the Global Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Baltic Countries ◽  
Central European Region ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Spiritual Movement ◽  
East Central European

The article presents a study into the implementation of environmental and spiritual ideas of alternative communitarian movements during the establishing of quickly spreading nature-based spirituality communities and their settlements in the East-Central European region. It focuses on the Anastasia “spiritual” movement, classifiable as New Age, which emerged in Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and since has spread to East-Central Europe and beyond. It considers the process of indigenization via assembled nature-based spiritualities and traditionalistic ideas in the movement. It will discuss how the Anastasian process of sacralization of natural space, together with the romantic mode of a narrativization of the archaic past, serve as a source for the formation of images of “indigenousness” in the movement. During the process of “indigenization,” a negotiation, interpretation and presentation of nationalistic and traditionalistic ideas serve as a basis for an imagination of (trans)local prehistoric and local national pasts— including a golden age myth, a “back to nature” worldview with attempts to reconstruct variously perceived traditions, as well as a development of utopian visions of a prospective heaven on earth—intended to widely spread future social projects. The findings are based on data obtained from fieldwork in 2005–2015, including participant observation and interviews with respondents in the Baltic countries and Russia.

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