Dyplomacja Nicolae Ceauşescu wobec przemian politycznych w Polsce w 1989 roku

Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Diplomacy in the Face of Political Changes in Poland in 1989 In 1989, Romania belonged to the communist countries, which particularly strongly attacked communist Poland for carrying out democratic reforms. For many months the diplomacy of communist leader Nicolae Ceaşescu tried to organize a conference of socialist countries on the subject of Poland, but as a result of Moscow’s opposition it did not come to fruition. During the Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union rejected the Brezhnev doctrine, while Romania actually urged its restoration. This was in contradiction with the current political line of Ceauşescu in favor of not interfering in the internal affairs of socialist countries. However, in 1989 it was a threat to communism, which is why historians also have polemics about Romanian suggestions for the armed intervention of the Warsaw Pact in Poland. In turn, Romania did not allow Poland to interfere in the problems of the Polish minority in Bukovina.

Revolution Rekindled

A major late Soviet initiative, the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) series, was launched to rekindle popular enthusiasm for the revolution, eventually giving rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels authored by many key post-Stalinist writers. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by writers including dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists? How did their millions of readers engage with these highly varied texts? To what extent does this Brezhnev-era publishing phenomenon challenge the notion of late socialism as a time of ‘stagnation’, and how does it confirm it? Through exploring the complex processes of writing, editing, censorship, and reading of late Soviet literature, Revolution Rekindled highlights the dynamic negotiations that continued within Soviet culture well past the apparent turning point of 1968 through to the late Gorbachev era. It also complicates the opposition between ‘official’ and underground post-Stalinist culture by showing how Soviet writers and readers engaged with both, as they sought answers to key questions of revolutionary history, ethics, and ideology: it thus reveals the enormous breadth and vitality of the ‘historical turn’ amongst the late Soviet population. Revolution Rekindled is the first archival, oral history, and literary study of this unique late socialist publishing experiment, from its beginnings in the early 1960s to its collapse in the early 1990s. It draws on a wide range of previously untapped archives, uses in-depth interviews with Brezhnev-era writers, editors, and publishers, and assesses the generic and stylistic innovations within the series’ biographies and novels.

Transgressing the Leninist Line in the Gorbachev Era

With the advent of the Gorbachev era, there emerged a genuine diversity of opinion on the French Revolution, with ‘hardliners’ reiterating the Leninist orthodoxy, and ‘liberals’, most notably Alexander Yakovlev, the actual architect of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (‘reconstruction’), arguing publicly—and almost certainly with Gorbachev’s approval and agreement—that the revolution inaugurated a sequence of revolutions in modern history in which the October Revolution, while going well beyond the French Revolution, was itself superseded by the peaceful revolution that was perestroika. A corrective of the worst excrescences of Stalinism, Gorbachev’s policy of ‘reconstruction’ would redirect the course of history, culminating in a humane and liberal (though not necessarily democratic) socialism that was prefigured in the French Revolution and the revolutions in France that followed it.

Perestroika and Post-Soviet Afterlives

This chapter focusses on the dramatic changes that the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series underwent over the last decade of Soviet power. It first analyses the difficult conditions for the series in the early 1980s, as official suspicion of the series and its ‘niche’ mounted, and as censorship became more oppressive. However, these conditions of the late Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko periods ultimately proved easier and more productive than the Gorbachev era: glasnost and perestroika marked the peak of popular interest in Soviet history nationwide, but also a full-blown crisis for the series. It came under threat in the mid- to late 1980s, as both public and internal criticism singled out ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ for its historical falsifications and declining literary quality; sales and popular interest went into free fall, and the series closed in 1990. The conclusion traces Politizdat’s transformation into a post-Soviet philosophical publishing house, and shows that the series itself has been selectively reimagined, from the late 1990s to the present, as a dissident and liberal project, rather than fully revived in all its diversity.