The Influence of Václav Klaus on Czech Public Opinion Regarding the European Union

While president of the Czech Republic between 2003 and 2013, Václav Klaus, an outspoken critic of the European Union, employed speeches, interviews, and writings as a means of discrediting the EU in the eyes of Czech citizens. The author used opinion polls from Eurobarometer and the Public Opinion Research Center (CVVM) of the Czech Academy of Sciences to establish the correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Euroskepticism. In the early years of Klaus’s presidency, scepticism about the EU among Czechs grew, and between 2006 and 2010, there was a strong correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Czech Euroskepticism. As Klaus’s popularity waned during his last years in office, Czech confidence in the EU began to rise. This study not only helps to explain some bases of Czech Euroskepticism, but it also addresses the influence Czech presidents have in shaping public opinion in their country.

The Effects of Religious-Cultural Worldviews on the Lack of Political-Economic Liberalization in Belarus over Twenty Years since rise of Lukashenko

This paper focuses on the effects of political-culture in shaping the lack of political-economic liberalization in Belarus since 1991. Specifically, this paper will elucidate the intricate interplay between historically rooted cultural worldviews, ways of life and historical memories, to explain how the historical roots of Orthodox Christianity had a central influence on the patterns of political-economic development chosen by Belarus, even long after these religious-cultural values had been secularized and taken for granted. In doing so, this paper will help understand why Belarus chose to pursue such an illiberal and authoritarian orientation, and help explain the longevity of President Lukashenko.

The Lviv Train Station Restaurant as a Soviet Enterprise, 1944-1980

This article is a micro-history of a restaurant in post- World War II Lviv, the largest city of Western Ukraine. Offering a case study of one public dining enterprise this paper explores changes in the post-war Soviet public dining; demonstrates how that enterprise’s institutional structure mediated economic demands, ideological directives, and social conflicts. It argues that the Soviet enterprise should be seen as a nexus between economic system, organization structure of the Soviet state, and everyday lives of Soviet people. The article helps to understand Soviet consumerist practices in the sphere of public dining by looking into complex, hierarchical organizations enabling them.

The Hunt for Red Orient: A Soviet industrial trest between Moscow and Bukhara (1922-1929)

This paper narrates the story of Red Orient (Rus. Krasnyi Vostok; Uz. Qizil Sharq) textile trust (trest). This trust was initially owned by the Bukharan People’s Republic, then, after the national delimitation of Central Asia, by the Uzbek SSR. Its activity included all the steps of the added-value chain of industrial transformation of ginned cotton (spinning, twisting, dyeing, finishing, weaving, and printing). Its factories and mills, initially all located in Russia, served as a training ground for the first generation of native Uzbek textile workers while its management participated in the planning and construction of the first cotton textile plant in Fergana towards the end of the decade. Two threads are entangled in this story: first, the day-by-day workings of the New Economic Policy in a small industrial organization; second, the economic side of early Soviet nationality policies. This paper looks at the nitty-gritty aspects of procurements, bookkeeping, audit, and management. It shows how balance sheets were more an item for negotiation and a political weapon, than a diagnostic tool for the efficiency of Red Orient’s business. Above all, the story of Red Orient reveals that early Soviet economic policies did not exclude that the Central Asian cotton harvest could be processed by mills owned by the republics themselves, and result in finished textiles for the Central Asian market. The Bukharan (later, Uzbek) governments, either directly or through their representatives in Moscow, confronted all-Union agencies in the name of the “national” nature of the trust, be it to settle complicated debt relations, to reshape the procurement of raw materials, to acquire additional looms and, ultimately, to negotiate the construction of the first textile factory in Fergana. In other words, the republics, as shareholders and eponymous “nations” of the trust, took ownership of its destiny and day-to-day trade and production activities.

Contesting The Malyn Massacre: The Legacy Of Inter-Ethnic Violence And The Second World War In Eastern Europe

On the morning of July 13, 1943, a German anti-partisan formation surrounded the small village of Malyn and its Czech and Ukrainian inhabitants. The soldiers gathered the entire village population in the town square and, after a document check, proceeded to lock them inside the town church, school and their homes. The soldiers then set fire to these buildings and shot them with machine guns. By the end of the day, Malyn ceased to exist. On the surface, the Malyn Massacre appears as just another ghastly crime committed by a brutal occupying force. Yet, a closer look at archival sources, popular discourse, and scholarly literature on Malyn reveals a much different picture – and a murkier one. In total, there are over fifteen different versions of what happened in Malyn that day. The ethnic identities of the units that accompanied the Germans vary from account to account, as do the details of the crime, the justification for the reprisal, and even the ethnicity of the victims. In analyzing materials from over ten archives in six countries and four historiographical-linguistic narratives, in addition to field research in Ukraine and the Czech Republic, this article explains why so many disparate claims about the Malyn massacre exist. I specify four discursive landscapes about Malyn (Soviet, Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech) and detail how and why each of these has come to construct their own version(s) of Malyn in relation to larger grand narratives about the war in the East. This microhistory also underscores how the trauma and legacy of wartime inter-ethnic violence casts a long shadow over the current understanding of the war and highlights the daunting task scholars face writing the history of this region and time period.

Personal and Political: A Micro-history of the "Red Column" Collective Farm, 1935-36

This article investigates the confluence of personal interests and the official policy on collective farms in the mid 1930s, a period that has received far less scholarly attention than the collectivization drive. The current historiography on collective farmers’ relationship with the state is one-sided, presenting peasants either as passive victims of or idealized resistors to state policies. Both views minimize the complex realities that governed the everyday lives of collective farmers for whom state policies often were secondary to local concerns. My paper, which draws upon rich archival materials in Kirov Krai, employs a micro-historical approach to study the struggle to remove the chairman of the “Red Column” collective farm in Kirov Krai in 1935-36. It demonstrates that local and personal issues (family ties, grudges, and personality traits) had more influence on how collective farmers reacted to state campaigns and investigations than did official state policy and rhetoric. The chairman’s rude and arrogant behavior, mistreatment of the collective farmers, and flaunting of material goods led to his downfall. But to strengthen their arguments, his opponents accused him of associating with kulaks and white guardists. The chairman and his supporters struck back, alleging that his detractors were themselves white guardists and kulaks, who sought revenge for having been expelled from the collective farm. Such a micro-historical approach reveals the importance of popular opinion, attitudes, and behavior on collective farms and the level of control that collective farmers had over shaping the implementation of state policies. This paper enables one to appreciate that peasants knew well how to manipulate official labels, such as kulak or class enemy, as weapons to achieve goals of local and personal importance. It enriches the historiography by offering a different way to appreciate peasant attitudes and behavior, and collective farm life in the mid 1930s.

Tragic Past, Agreeable Heritage: Post-Soviet Intellectual Discussions on the Polish Legacy in Western Ukraine

The study examines intellectual arguments detectable in the public debate on the thorny history of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. It focuses primarily on discourses generated by the Ukrainian (first and foremost, West Ukrainian) party of the dispute. As subordinated to the nation-centric historical accounts, but increasingly important theme opened for multiple uses, the historical diversity of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands became an object of intellectual re-interpretation in Western Ukraine since the 2000s. Framing this intellectual asset in terms of multicultural heritage (bahatokul’turna spadshchyna) has signaled the effort of the Ukrainian intellectuals to inscribe the local—and, at the same time, transnational—past to a coherent national narrative. On the way, however, it proved to be that the multicultural “universes”—in particular, the Polish one—resist the seamless inclusion into the fabrics of Ukrainian-centric historical accounts due to unresolved memory conflicts rooted in the events of WWII and the post-war period. One of them is the resonant Polish-Ukrainian controversy over interpretation of the anti-Polish action of 1943—44 in Volhynia and Galicia whose ups and downs demonstrate, among other things, that a lack of mutually compatible intellectual conceptualizations of the shared past may undermine trustworthiness of gestures of political reconciliation. Nevertheless, taking the lid off the topic of Polish-Ukrainian violence that was hushed up during the Soviet period allowed Western Ukrainian memory actors to start talking about the multicultural heritage as a public good that deserves public attention. Nevertheless, in the author's opinion, it is still unclear whether in the nearest future the narratives on the dismembered Galician polyethnicity will appeal to cultural imagination of wider audiences or will instead remain an exclusive asset of elitist custodians.

The Fascist Kernel of Ukrainian Genocidal Nationalism

This article briefly presents the history of the radical form of Ukrainian nationalism paying especial attention to the geopolitical circumstances which formed this movement. Then, it analyzes some aspects of this phenomenon such as its main ideologists, racism, antisemitism, religion, rituals, leaders, concepts of revolution, and the ethnic, political and mass violence conducted before, during and after the Second World War. The article argues that the extreme and genocidal form of Ukrainian nationalism did have a fascist kernel and should be considered a form of European or East Central European fascism. Nevertheless, because of the specific cultural, social and political Ukrainian circumstances the radical form of Ukrainian nationalism differed from better known fascist movements such as German National Socialism or Italian Fascism, and thus it requires a careful and adequate investigation.

Limits of Protection: Russia and the Orthodox Coreligionists in the Ottoman Empire

Influence over the Ottoman Christians was the single most important manifestation of Imperial Russia’s “soft power.” In the context of the Russian-Ottoman wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, appeals of the Eastern Christian elites to Moscow and St. Petersburg for protection met with the attempts of the tsars and their commanders to rally the support of the co-religionists. However, Russia’s relations with the Orthodox subjects of the sultan were fraught with great ambiguity. Temporary Russian occupations of particular territories of Turkey-in-Europe during the wars incited among the local Christians the hopes for independence that subsequent restoration of the Porte’s authority would all but destroy. In order to maintain Russia’s standing among the co-religionists, the peace treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji of 1774 and subsequent Russian-Ottoman agreements included certain guarantees in favor of the Christian population of the returned territories. The present paper offers a comparative perspective on these arrangements, which served the basis for trilateral relations between Russia, the Porte and the elites of Moldavia, Wallachia, the Archipelago and Serbia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The difference in attitudes and behaviour of the Romanian, Greek and Serbian leaders arguably explains varying degrees of autonomy that the territories in question enjoyed on the basis of the Russian-Ottoman treaty stipulations. More broadly, the paper seeks to problematize the notion of Russia’s protectorate over the Orthodox co-religionists. It shows that the legal basis of this protectorate remained very uneven, and, that for a long time, the makers of Russia’s Eastern policy dealt with particular Christian elites of Turkey-in-Europe rather than with the entire Orthodox community of the Ottoman Empire.

The Public and Private Lives of Mennonite Kolkhoz Chairmen in the Khortytsia and Molochansk German National Raĭony in Ukraine (1928-1934)

This article examines the role that Mennonites played in the establishment and management of kolkhozy in the two largest Mennonite settlements (Khortytsia and Molochansk) in Soviet Ukraine during dekulakization and collectivization (1928-1934). More specifically, it investigates the social and ethnic criteria used in selecting Mennonites to be kolkhoz chairmen; the duties and daily routines of chairmen; the conflicted relationships that chairmen had with local authorities and kolkhoz members; the numerous challenges that chairmen encountered during the 1932-33 famines; and the mechanisms that local authorities and kolkhoz members used to control, embarrass, and discipline chairmen. It also discusses the negative repercussions that the rise of Nazi Germany had for Mennonite chairmen, and how political, economic, agricultural, social, and ethnic policies and conditions made it impossible for Mennonite chairmen to succeed.