Sullied: The Albanian Student Movement of December 1990

The study analyzes the beginning of the Albanian student movement of December 1990 from a historical–sociological and comparative perspective. This historical interpretation of various sources (newspaper articles, activists’ memoirs, interviews, and archival documents) draws its theoretical arguments from social movement studies, student activism, and the sociology of higher education. The study offers a complex explanation of the role of the movement during the country’s democratic transition by also looking at similar cases. Considerations of the broader international and local implications, the role of the university, the academic staff, and the student organization all are accounted for. After tracing the repertoires of strategies and content of the movement to the Albanian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the study argues that student activism benefitted from the structural opportunities provided by changes introduced in higher education during the historical sequence of late Socialism.

The Influence of Western Pop Culture on the Creation of the Image of the Performer Through the Design of Advertising Posters and Plates in the Period of Late Socialism

The aim of the research is to analyze the formation of the artist’s image through the design of musical posters and records in the period of late socialism by borrowing the semantic component and formal techniques in foreign pop culture, including graphic design, which served as an important component. The research methodology is based on a logical-analytical tool of scientific knowledge. Scientific novelty. Previous research has been supplemented by the analysis of new empirical data, including the design of record covers, visual coincidences of primary sources and borrowings. The revealed facts will be useful for the further development of both modern Ukrainian design and the formation of the artist’s image in show business. Conclusions. As a result of the study we conclude that in the period 1970-1990 in the process of formation of pop culture in the USSR the problem of its visual representation was formed, as evidenced by numerous pieces borrowed from foreign pop design solutions for advertising products: posters, placards, album covers, accompanying products. At an early stage, this trend was manifested despite the existence of the “Iron Curtain”, ideological isolation and was episodic. In the period chronologically close to the collapse of the USSR, such processes of stylistic citation in design became more frequent in line with the growth of information coming from the developed West. Copying Western techniques and visual language can be seen as a desire to break away from the dogmatic patterns of culture instilled by socialist realism, regardless of the conscious or unconscious nature of imitation. Blind imitation was later replaced by a reasonable rethinking, so in the best examples of domestic design of the period under study there were attempts to give formal Western methods the character of the local national color, which requires further exploration.

Green Volunteers in Czechoslovakia: The Youth Magazine Mladý svět and its Environmental Campaign, 1970s-1980s

Concern with environmental degradation was one factor contributing to the discontent preceding the revolutions of 1989 in East-Central Europe. This article identifies the trajectories of environmental activism in Czechoslovakia, one of the most industrialized countries of the post-1945 socialist bloc. Analysing the media representation of environmental volunteers during late socialism, the examination focuses on the youth magazine Mladý svět, which prominently discussed environmental issues and became home to the Brontosaurus youth movement. During the so-called ‘normalization’ era of the 1970s and 1980s, which is often characterized as a time of stagnation, this movement for environmental volunteering provided young people with opportunities for self-realization and alternative lifestyles. While the movement shared several features of the New Social Movements of the 1970s, Czechoslovak green volunteerism took an ambivalent position within formal socialist youth structures, shedding light on the complex relationship between what is considered ‘alternative’ or ‘oppositional’ in late socialism.

O ograniczeniach teorii semiotycznej w badaniach późnego PRL-u na przykładzie Semiotyki Solidarności Pawła Rojka

The article analyses the limitations of the semiotic approach to the studies of late socialism in Poland through the critique of Semiotic of solidarity: an analysis of the discourses of the Polish Unites Workers' Party and the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarność in 1981 written by Paweł Rojek in 2009. This paper questions the assumption made by Rojek about the historical continuity of the Russian ancien régime and Soviet modernisation project as supposedly constituting the same system of intelligibility. There is an alternative approach of reading the discursive relationship between Eastern and Western bloc through the genealogy of discursive practices instead of the duality of two semiotic systems as described by the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. Finally, the article assesses the applicability of Rojek’s interpretation of Solidarity as belonging to the ternary system and the Party as belonging to the binary system.

Historiografie v dialogu o interpretaci pozdního socialismu

Reflection on the interpretation of late socialism.

Same Goal, Different Paths, Different Class: Women’s Feminist Political Engagements in Kosovo from the Mid-1970s until the Mid-1990s

The year 1989, when Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomy, was a break that changed also the course of women’s political engagements. Women had always to negotiate and strategise with different layers of power and against different forms of oppression—state and patriarchal oppression and cultural racism as well as class oppression. The author highlights the convergences and divergences of women’s political activism in the political dynamics of late socialism and then in the 1990s in Kosovo. She looks at gender, class and national dimensions of women’s political engagements with a focus on women who were part of the underground resistance movement commonly known as Ilegalja in the 1970s and 1980s as well as women intellectuals who held high state positions and were considered a part of the elite. After 1989, many engaged in the peacaful resistance movement of the 1990s.

Heal and Serve

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan can be seen as a laboratory for examining the Soviet construction of masculinity during the last decade of the USSR. Focusing on male Soviet military doctors as individuals, this article aims to present how these doctors constructed their virile presentation of self in a war situation and how they managed their position within the military community. Taking a pragmatic historical approach, the article considers the doctors through their interactions with both women and men, examining gendered practices such as “protecting weak people,” “asserting authority,” “expressing emotions (or not),” and “impressing others.” It offers a case study for the analysis of one of the many forms of Soviet military masculinity under late socialism and its place in Soviet society.