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In this tribute, we take a different approach and explore the influence of Southern Africa on Burawoy's sociology. The influence of Southern Africa on Burawoy began early in his career when he himself was just learning what it meant to be a sociologist and continued to influence him in different ways throughout his life. In an interview with Eddie Webster in Johannesburg, 21 October 2023, Burawoy observed: 'My experiences in Southern Africa decisively shaped my sociology at a theoretical level, at a methodological level and at a substantive level. Throughout my career Southern Africa was one reference point for understanding other societies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ferenc Farkas, a remarkable twentieth-century Hungarian composer, was one of the most influential professors of composition throughout the history of the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. A less known chapter of his life is his involvement in the ethnicist and anti-Semitic political movements of Hungary, during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1940, he was among three musicians who elaborated a proposal to establish, in line with the rise of corporatism, a Hungarian Music Chamber. One of the main aims of the new organization would have been a total exclusion of Jewish musicians from all branches of Hungarian musical culture. The Chamber was never actually founded. In 1941, Farkas left Budapest for the Transylvanian city Kolozsvár (Cluj), where he was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatory. One of his first students was György Ligeti, a native Transylvanian, born into a Hungarian family suffering under the anti-Semitic legislation of the Hungarian state. As Ligeti recollected, Farkas "wanted to teach me everything he had learned from his teacher Ottorino Respighi." Based on archival sources, this study offers new insights into the personal and professional connection between Ligeti and Farkas during the 1940s, and also follows Farkas's post-war path from relative isolation and marginalization to the elite of state socialist music culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decree passed by the socialist Romanian state at the beginning of the 1970s stipulated the need to defend state secrets as a condition for the country's economic and social progress in the context of its growing participation in world commerce. While the law operated with a wide notion of state secrecy, referring to any piece of information which, if disclosed, could jeopardize the Romanian state's interests, it included harsh regulations with regard to personal contacts with foreign citizens and served primarily for establishing a heightened operative control over the local economic life. Following the Romanian State Security Council's encouragement of campaigns for popular education, which should help prevent any trespassing of this decree, the early 1970s saw the commissioning of several instruction films made by the newly founded Film Service of the Ministry of the Interior as a form of 'counterintelligence training of the working class'. The present paper contextualizes and closely analyzes some of these films staging fictional cases of industrial espionage and their subsequent investigation by State Security as a form of useful cinema, arguing that, aside from their main educational mission of raising awareness about the legal responsibilities ensuing from the decrees concerning state secrecy, these films also acted as an instrument of national, geopolitical and institutional self-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, socialist states developed a new schooling system aimed at building an egalitarian society. While there is a solid body of research discussing the relationship between the intent and effect of the egalitarian design of socialist school systems, the importance of school maturity assessments for the socialist project has received only minor attention. This article discusses how the introduction of school maturity assessments developed by experts in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy in 1960s Hungary and East Germany contributed to the visibility of children who were deemed immature. It shows that both socialist states developed institutional solutions beyond the standard school system for tackling the problem of school immaturity in children; these solutions, in turn, evoked different reactions from parents. As the article discusses, parents used various avenues to oppose the official expert assessments with which they disagreed. In both countries, parents increasingly voiced their opinions in complaint letters addressed to the state in a quest to overcome what they perceived as a severe threat to their children's 'normal' development. By tracing parental bottom-up initiatives, the article investigates how parental agency ultimately shaped state policies and expertise despite the asymmetrical power relations that were present in these authoritarian societies. To show the interplay of parental agency, experts, and the state, we employ a combination of two methodological approaches, the sociology of expertise and the concept of Eigensinn, for understanding the spaces of negotiation and the role expertise plays in it. This article thereby sheds light on parental agency and its impact on expertise and state policies concerning school maturity in two socialist states that offered very different institutional answers to the problem; bureaucratic approaches towards complaint letters also varied significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, infant mortality rates started dropping steeply. We show how this was accomplished in socialist countries in East-Central Europe. Focusing on the two postwar decades, we explore comparatively how medical experts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany saved fragile newborns. Based on an analysis of medical journals, we argue that the Soviet Union and its medical practices had only a marginal influence; the four countries followed the recommendations of the World Health Organization instead, despite not being members. Importantly, we analyze the expert clashes over definitions of livebirth, which impact infant mortality statistics. We analyze the divergent practices and negotiations between countries: since the infant mortality rate came to represent the level of socioeconomic advancement, its political significance was paramount. Analyzing the struggle to reduce infant mortality thus helps us understand how socialist countries positioned themselves within the transnational framework while being members of the "socialist bloc." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 1989–1992 collapse of the Soviet bloc, Eastern European countries underwent rapid socioeconomic changes from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. Yet, research from these countries has been only scarcely used to study the neoliberalization of sexuality. To fill this gap, this article examines heterosexual masculinity in Poland at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Using Foucauldian approaches to discourse, I analyze how sexual problems were discussed in Pan, the first Polish lifestyle magazine for men (1987–1993). I demonstrate that, in contrast to the neoliberal models of heterosexuality, the state-socialist masculinity of Pan did not advocate discipline, control, and sexual mastery, but it repudiated egalitarianism and reciprocity of pleasure. Heterosexual dynamics in Pan prioritized men's interests at the expense of women, whom various sexual experts silenced, admonished, and blamed for sexual difficulties. As a result, Pan constructed a deeply patriarchal masculinity of unaccountability and entitlement to women's submissiveness. These findings add novel insights that help understand the ideologies of sexuality under state socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What eating and drinking habits can be observed in Hungarian cinema before 1989? What are the occasions and circumstances under which the characters in the films sit down to eat? Do meals serve merely as the background to dialogues in scenes? When and how do food and drink become the “main course” on Hungarian screen? The social commentary of Hungarian cinema is greatly shaped by the dining scenes in films. The article explores the topic through a selection of classic films made between the two world wars, as well as by looking at the gastronomic depictions in post-war cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East-Central Europe is often perceived in the literature discussing housing as an area unified by its common state-socialist legacy. Based on data covering developments in housing tenure and housing policy in the past 140 years in seven East-Central European countries, we trace the long history of a division between a northern (Germany, Poland and Czechia) and southern (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and partially Slovakia) group of countries in terms of their support for and share of housing in collective (cooperative and nonprofit rental) versus private ownership. We find that the initially less urbanized and industrialized southern group started out with a weak cooperative tradition, focused state support on home ownership under state socialism and privatized more radically post-1990. The paper argues that differences between the two groups, persisting despite the number of transformative changes affecting the region, are rooted in different housing policy choices made by (predecessor) states before and following World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relevance of the decolonial approach for analyses of postsocialist disablement, taking as its test case the analytical tool of the 'postsocialist disability matrix'. The question we pose is how much decolonial critique can the analyses of postsocialist disablement embrace without becoming reactionary amidst growing illiberalism and social abandonment in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? We provide an overview of postsocialist illiberalism, assess critically some central arguments in decolonial disability studies and outline the production of 'southern bodies/minds' as a key feature of social abandonment in CEE. We conclude that decolonising disability in the postsocialist region needs to go beyond the North versus South binary to account for the specific experiences of disabled people inhabiting the 'poor North'. Given these considerations, the double-edged critique implied in the original formulation of the 'postsocialist disability matrix' as scepticism towards both the state and the market could also help embrace the decolonising imperative while remaining sceptical towards both Northern and Southern theory production in disability studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of Katherine Verdery's work on gender under socialism as exemplified by her article "From parent-state to family patriarchs: Gender and nation in contemporary Eastern Europe." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of the article is to expose how the Czechoslovak state socialism shaped scholarly habitus through various mechanisms, institutions and policies, especially through the intrusion of the secret police into the scholarly world. The article is informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and presents a case study focusing on the ethnographer Vladimír Karbusický. In the 1960s, Karbusický was under surveillance by the State Security, the secret police of the socialist Czechoslovakia. His surviving dossier from the State Security archives allows us to see precisely how exactly the actions of the State Security diminished the autonomy of the scholarly world, influenced career paths and contributed to the formation of academic habitus. At the same time, the dossier, which emerged as part of the effort of the state to maximize its control over society, can be also used as evidence of the persistence of (surviving) academic autonomy and the concomitant scholarly ethos. This suggests that the socialist state of Czechoslovakia under the hegemony of its Communist Party may have not been entirely successful in its policies to control society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State socialist Hungary undertook historically unparalleled action to satisfy the health needs of its population. To support its efforts, it recognized in its constitution the protection of health as an essential state task and, later, a right to health. Although formulated as a right of citizens, the right to health was not available to enfranchise the individual. Instead, it expressed common social needs, as well as the responsibility and the institutional obligation of the socialist state to take care of those needs. This emphasis on needs over individual rights had a crucial impact on the implementation of the right to health. Contemporary and retrospective policy and sociological analyses reveal that the healthcare system in state socialist Hungary left the individual exposed to institutional and professional interests within the health system, and their vulnerability as a patient was regularly exploited.

This essay examines the investigation of high-ranking Security Office officer Jan Tataj during increasing numbers of internal purges in Stalinist Poland. Although the starting point for the investigation was provided by “inconsistencies” in Tataj’s curriculum vitae, the investigating officers of the Security Office soon declared his acquaintance with two young women to be the main subject of the entire proceedings. Since both women had previous ties to the anti-communist resistance, it was insinuated that they had used their acquaintance with Tataj for espionage purposes, and thus the Security Office accused Tataj of a lack of vigilance toward these women. Both Tataj and the two women were eventually sentenced to several years of imprisonment by the Military Tribunal in Warsaw after a year-long investigation. The paper primarily analyzes the extent to which the investigating officers considered the two women dangerous because of their gender in the context of contemporary images of women (co-)created by the Stalinist regime, and how incriminating evidence of Tataj’s lack of “vigilance” was generated in this context.

After his release from prison in 1963, Ferenc Mérei (1909–1986), a Hungarian psychologist and pedagogue, started working at the National Institute of Neurology and Mental Health (OIE), where he and his colleagues established the foundations of Hungarian clinical psychology. The OIE was a closed institution dealing with mentally ill patients living on the margins of society, but prisonization also affected the healthy staff. Mérei did not see this liminal situation as a twist of fate but as an opportunity: it was not synonymous with social exclusion but a kind of inverted status in which it was possible to develop a framework for truth-telling and authentic living. According to Victor Turner's approach, people in a liminal state form communities and learn the implicit language that guarantees the conditions for truth-telling and protects truth-tellers from possible retaliation. Connotation is the key concept in this hermetic use of language, which, as Mérei writes, is "only a part of a hidden whole, known and understood only by the 'accomplices,' the 'initiated' [...]." By examining the expressions, "informal rank," "hiding kuruc ," "hiding college," and "hiding school," which often appear in Mérei's works, we can observe that these were not only the key concepts of his life story but also the outlines of the social organization of the socialist era in Hungary. They are concepts of a non-democratic age in which "real life" in the moral sense and "real achievement" in the scientific sense were politically persecuted. In this approach, what is seen, read, heard, consumed, and publicly available is all just a false front; the true spirit is forced into opposition or moved underground. This framework refers to the Rákosi and Kádár eras, but at the same time, it opens up to us the meta-history of centuries of persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new findings on the perception of social justice in a country comparison of Austria with its three post-socialist neighboring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The analysis considers both, changes in the structure and perception of inequality. The first part of this article deals with the historical roots of the countries during the Habsburg monarchy and continues with the different developments after World War I and II up to the present. In the second part, socio-economic trends from 1960 to 2020, and the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys 1987 to 2019 are investigated. The findings show that most of the population in all four countries thinks that income differences are too large, while judgments are also subject to dynamic change. In addition, there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves higher than people in the other three countries and see their society as dominated by the middle classes. The opposite is true in Hungary, where most people think that they live in a society characterized by small elite, while the mass of the people belong to the bottom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article I cover Hungarian documentaries from the 1960s, 70s and 80s that focus on beat music and its reception to explore the contradictory relationship between the state socialist system and youth culture. Films featured in the analysis are Ezek a fiatalok (These Youth, Banovich Tamás, 1967), Meghallgatás (Audition, Jeles András 1968), Extázis 7-tõl 10-ig (Ecstasy from 7 to 10, Kovács András 1969), Válogatás (The Selection, Gazdag Gyula 1970), Az volt a hej… igazi szép idõ (Yeah, Those Were the Days, Szomjas György, 1978), Mikor megszülettem (When I Was Born, Gazdag Gyula, 1979), Az õszinte szó kevés (Honest Words Are Not Enough, B. Révész László, 1980), Kölyköd voltam (I Was Your Kid, Almási Tamás, 1983), Úgy érezte, szabadon él (Felt to Be Free, Vitézy László, 1988) etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fundamental changes in the management of technological innovation took place over the course of the 40-year history of the German Democratic Republic. This article analyzes management culture in electronics and microelectronics R&D, as well as at Carl Zeiss Jena. R&D directors of the 1950s and 1960s, whose careers started in the Weimar or Nazi era, had a professional ethos and managerial style not rooted in state socialism. This article analyzes their approaches to management according to criteria such as reliance on authority and hierarchy, promotion of communication, and importance attached to political conformity. Developments in R&D management at Carl Zeiss are traced up into the 1980s. The role of the Stasi (secret police) in high tech R&D is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, local urban processes are still very often associated with that historic period or post-socialist transformation. This article aims to undermine the concept of the post-socialist city itself as reductionist, given the crucial importance of factors that differ from the influence of the pre-1989/91 times. The article confronts the discussion on the applicability of the post-socialist framework with field research conducted in selected Polish and Ukrainian cities, in particular the examples of the Kvity Ukrainy (Flowers of Ukraine) protest movement in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the 2003 spatial planning reform’s results in Krakow, Poland. The analysis is based on interviews with representatives of different actors involved in the policymaking process, such as local government representatives, policy advisors, urban planners, journalists, business circles, and members of grassroots initiatives.

This essay examines the investigation of high-ranking Security Office officer Jan Tataj during increasing numbers of internal purges in Stalinist Poland. Although the starting point for the investigation was provided by “inconsistencies” in Tataj’s curriculum vitae, the investigating officers of the Security Office soon declared his acquaintance with two young women to be the main subject of the entire proceedings. Since both women had previous ties to the anti-communist resistance, it was insinuated that they had used their acquaintance with Tataj for espionage purposes, and thus the Security Office accused Tataj of a lack of vigilance toward these women. Both Tataj and the two women were eventually sentenced to several years of imprisonment by the Military Tribunal in Warsaw after a year-long investigation. The paper primarily analyzes the extent to which the investigating officers considered the two women dangerous because of their gender in the context of contemporary images of women (co-)created by the Stalinist regime, and how incriminating evidence of Tataj’s lack of “vigilance” was generated in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I choose struggles over skill development as an entry point to uncovering features of women's labor activism in state-owned tobacco factories in Romania, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. I look at the processes that constructed women tobacco workers, especially those at the Tobacco Manufactory in the city of Cluj, as non-skilled workers, and examine the forms of labor activism in the tobacco industry that challenged those constructs. I describe how women's work at the Cluj Tobacco Manufactory, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, was shaped by successive waves of production intensification and rationalization, demonstrating that these reorganizations affected female workers more than they affected their male coworkers. I point out that although they were considered non-skilled laborers, female tobacco workers exercised an amount of control over their work and were important contributors to their families' maintenance. I show that spanning two different political regimes, matters of skill were at the core of labor activism. For female workers, in the interwar period, labor activism in male-dominated organizations and structures entailed skill-mediated political strategies that emphasized experience and shopfloor status besides skill. By the 1950s, labor activism encompassed engaging in confrontational politics over seasoned women workers' lack of access to skill training programs. I show that both in the late 1920s and in the early 1950s, illiteracy and women's more limited access to formal schooling in general shaped new experiences of participation in labor politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the Hungarian state socialist regime to renew the operetta art manifested in the transformation of operetta-playing via the setting of its main cultural objectives. Once private theatre organizations were disbanded in 1949, newly written and composed operetta pieces had to be adjusted to meet the expectations cultivated by those responsible for the drawing up of the contemporary cultural policies, not only in terms of theme, subject, and dramaturgy but also, as productions designed for stage performance. At that time, questions regarding the realm of operetta dance and choreography arose as significant professional issues. The remarkable case of operetta dance was brought to the notice of the larger professional community by an article written by choreographer Ágnes Roboz, which was published in 1952 in the Táncművészet magazine (1951). Due to its professional nature, this magazine served as a suitable platform for the discussion of the operetta dance genre. The present study reflects upon its publications from the period between 1952 and 1956. Throughout these years, 16 articles discussing the categorization of operettas were published. I aimed to analyze these primary sources according to their genre before presenting, juxtaposing, and contextualizing them. Thus, my objective is to gain a thorough understanding and comprehensive overview of professional discussions and arguments over 1950s operetta dances and choreographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores guild socialism in China after the First World War, arguing that it presented a pluralist vision of the state and society, posing an alternative to the collectivist vision of socialism put forward by the Chinese Communist Party as well as the state-centered notion of politics endorsed by the Chinese Nationalist Party. In an effort to break from the existing scholarly tendency to focus on the theme of state building in the history of Republican China, which tends to restrict the historical meaning of Chinese socialism to national revolution, this article situates interwar Chinese socialisms, including guild socialism, within a global context. It investigates how the Chinese guild socialist Zhang Dongsun and his colleagues formulated their theory in connection to the postwar global trend of criticizing established theories of the state. In so doing, this article will show that Chinese guildsmen attempted to transform socialism into a humanitarian movement, rather than a class revolution, aiming to overcome capitalist alienation and realize freedom as the general principle of human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article deals with Polish construction companies in Czechoslovakia during the last two decades of state socialism. Although Czechoslovakia became the largest importer of Polish construction services in the world, this aspect of the relations between the two countries remains almost entirely unknown. I am seeking the answers to two questions. First, why did Czechoslovak leaders grant the Poles such a large share of crucial investments in the modernization of the country, even though the services were not cheap? Second, how did the local population integrate encounters with foreign builders into their working-class culture and their ethnic stereotype of the Poles? I argue that Polish construction companies, operating under de facto market conditions, achieved significantly better and faster results than their Czechoslovak counterparts. In the second part of the article, I explain the paradox of why the Czech population held the Polish builders in high esteem while simultaneously rejecting them as role models. I argue that the Poles were discredited because they seriously violated the Czechs' deep-held sense of egalitarian values. Yet in their interactions both Czechs and Poles defended their working-class values and maintained a perceived moral superiority over each other and the communist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the gynecologist Włodzimierz Fijałkowski, the key promoter of preparation for childbirth in Communist and early democratic Poland. From the late 1950s until the 1990s, Fijałkowski developed a childbirth preparation training protocol that served as an inspiration for childbirth preparation schools across the country. Through analysis of Fijałkowski's publications in medical journals, books aimed at both professional and lay readers, visual aids for childbirth training, and archival material, we demonstrate that a specific vision of gender roles and relationships lay at the core of Fijałkowski's psychoprophylactic project. This vision represented a re-definition and re-essentialization of femininity and masculinity, and motherhood and fatherhood, while simultaneously advocating for radical change in the relationship between women in labor and obstetric professionals. Fijałkowski's ideas and advocacy were intimately connected with a humanization of the embryo and fetus from the earliest stages of pregnancy, and we show how his work became an important transmission medium for the gradual mainstreaming of anti-abortion ideas within public discourse in late-Communist Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the value of scalable reading of historical travel guides, combining traditional close reading with computer-assisted distant reading. Aiming to scrutinize the persistence of older tourist attractions under communism, we analyse guidebooks intended for similar audiences but produced under different political regimes. More specifically, we compare three travel guides to the same geographical area produced between 1905 and 1959: one to communist cold war Czechoslovakia, one to democratic interwar Czechoslovakia, and one to the Habsburg-era Czech lands and Slovakia. We analyse the geographic distribution of attractions by geolocating the guidebook toponyms and visualizing them with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This distant reading is complemented with a hermeneutic analysis grounded in a close reading of the guidebook text. The combination of these approaches documents the similarities in the symbolic representation of the country's attractions across political caesuras and provides a methodological template for future explorations of travel guides with historical GIS. This article demonstrates the value of scalable reading of historical travel guides, combining traditional close reading with computer-assisted distant reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood nutrition is an important element of lifestyle research, since the regularity and nutritional content of our meals as children, and the way in which they are eaten, determine our physical and mental health throughout our lives. Prior to 2018, there was no basic interdisciplinary research on this topic in Hungary, thus to fill the gap, an interdisciplinary research group was established in 2018 at the Institute of Ethnography, which carried out nationwide research. The present study is based on fieldwork undertaken by the author in two schools — the János Lenkey Primary School in Eger (formerly Primary School No. 1) and the Tamás Bolyki Primary School in Ózd — as well as a large amount of information gleaned from questionnaires and interviews. My research was also extended in terms of a historical and geographical perspective: I studied archival sources and expanded the field of my investigations by including Salgótarján, a research location familiar from my earlier research, which provided a vantage point alongside Ózd and Eger, as a third city typical of Northern Hungary. Public catering for children has undergone significant changes in the last six to seven years, although prior to this it had appeared relatively uniform, in line with the ingredients available at the time. The obligation to provide public catering and the general obligation to work, which began in the Rákosi era and culminated in the Kádár era, significantly changed family eating habits. Traditional elements typical of a particular locality disappeared as the globalization efforts of socialism were accomplished. The ever-decreasing amount of time devoted to preparing, cooking, and consuming food moved society in the direction of canteens, fast-food restaurants, and later, after the regime change, global fast-food chains. Education on proper nutrition is not currently part of academic teacher training, thus for want of a better alternative, teachers organize children's school meals based on their own experience and socialization or following the school's regulations (where they exist), without having a unified concept. The number of meals eaten at home has been reduced to light breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, with families mostly sitting down together at the table for dinner, when they often consume ready meals. Lack of contact with foodstuffs and with the person preparing the food has a negative impact on children's psychological development. Relying on extensive basic research and participant observation, and through the joint efforts of specialists from several fields of the social sciences, a significant improvement could be achieved in both public catering and education on healthy nutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study is to present Hungary's first project related to today's co-housing model in many ways, and which was thus ahead of its time in terms of its social, technical, and economic aspects. The building was completed in 1979 at the initiative of architecture students in Miskolc, Northern Hungary, where young engineers were needed due to the forced industrialization of state socialism. For this reason, the city administration of the era accepted the novel initiative of a university architectural community and built the so-called Collective House, which created the framework for a form of housing previously unknown in Hungary. In addition to the unique use of space, the building was experimental in several ways, including the plans being prepared within the framework of participation, with the involvement of later movers. In addition, panel technology was used for the structure of the building, which until then was mainly typical for the construction of monotonous 5-10-story panel apartment buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This excellent edited volume sheds light on many understudied aspects of the moorings and (dis)entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War. Topics that are dealt with range from women's accounts to friendship brigades, from socialist international organizations to the fate of individual Mozambicans in the GDR and beyond, and from trade unions to schools. The tome draws on sources that include photographs, many new and relevant archival finds, as well as oral history and newly unearthed manuscripts. The volume's main weakness results from not critiquing liberal paradigms when assessing the record of African Marxist states or the GDR record in terms of influencing people's lives and well-being, and the negative effects of racism and neocolonialism in the second half of the twentieth century in Africa and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical reflection on the current state of research into the history of the production of geographical knowledge during the period of state socialism is presented in this report. Using the example of the Czechoslovak administrative reform from 1949, several questionable aspects of current interpretations are identified. In particular, the problematic use of three crucial concepts in the study of the history of geography: time (a politics of memory); space (spatial imaginations); and geographical knowledge. Examples of approaches to each concept are presented, which can overcome the insufficiencies and contribute to a better understanding of the mutual relations between state socialism and the production of geographical knowledge. Research into the history of geography during the period of state socialism is important both to understand the current state of ‘post-socialist’ national geographies, and to add to the production of an inclusive history of global geography. One necessary condition is, however, to leave the current descriptive and encyclopaedic styles, which are marked with ahistoricism and presentism. In contrast, it is essential that the history of geography during the period of the state socialism become a serious issue, which is analysed through critical and reflexive approaches.

ČÍŽOVÁ, Júlia – ĎURČO, Michal. Positive Deviance in 1980s Czechoslovakia: The Case of the Bratislava Environmental Movement. Historický časopis, 2022, 70, 3, pp. 461–486, Bratislava. 1980s Czechoslovakia provides the backdrop for an emergence of an approach to social change conceptualized within sociology as positive deviance. The term is used to describe individuals and communities which defy negative behaviour patterns in society. The Normalization period in Czechoslovakia was generally characterized by passivity and reluctance to engage in public matters. It was within this atmosphere that the so-called “islands of positive deviance” became antidotes to general resignation and proved to be hotbeds of citizen activism, later paving the way for the emergence of civil society. One such example of activism within the setting of devastated nature in Slovakia was the Slovak environmental movement formally constituted under the Slovak Union of Nature and Landscape Protectors (SZOPK). The aim of this paper is to analyse the factors leading up to the transformation of an official, state-controlled organization into a well-respected social movement. Due to the broad scope of their pursuits, the paper mainly focuses on activities which raised their public profile and contributed to the spread of positive behaviour patterns in society.

The Communist parties of Eastern Europe depended on gathering information, producing and accumulating knowledge, and curating and disseminating it to their citizens. Promising to establish a form of government that rested on rationality and science, these processes needed to be regulated and monitored to ensure they corresponded to the (supposed) party line at every step of the way. But how could individuals down the chain of command conceptualize the party line and what role did their subjectivity play in shaping their actions? How should we deconstruct knowledge-producing and -curating processes to better understand what the parties knew and what and how this knowledge was 'handled'? Our dossier brings together case studies from various national contexts from Stalinist, post-Stalinist and late socialist contexts from Eastern Europe, where cadres and experts with different relationships with the ruling parties negotiated their various identities. In the introduction, we situate these case studies against the backdrop of a procedural view of knowledge, distinguishing between the stages of production, gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledge, drawing on the framework proposed by Peter Burke. We argue that adopting the procedural view of knowledge questions the binary of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in following the party line effectively. Second, we draw attention to heterodoxies as spaces of resistance without the inherent intention of dissent. Thus, we introduce a new angle through which the constraints of individual knowledge-producing actors under state socialism can be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the long 1960s (mid-1950s to early 1970s), mass culture developed in Poland and Romania at the intersection of state policies in the field of socialist culture, ideas of democratic participation and the growing importance of expert social scientific knowledge for governance. By comparing studies that critically examined the outcomes of socialist cultural policies at the time, the article contributes an East–East perspective to the scholarship on the global 60s and socialist modernity. It reconstructs the main features of the model of socialist culture and analyses how researchers engaged with this model and its implementation. Some emphasized people's participation in line with the party-state's yet unfulfilled aspiration to create a democratic 'socialist culture'. Others produced expert knowledge based on theoretical and empirical sociological research on mass culture. The article reveals how the relationship between party-state and 'the masses' – both as subjects of cultural policy and as consumers of culture – was mediated in research on socialist culture in Poland and Romania in the long 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The former chief architect of the Lviv region described urban planners as people who 'own the territory' in terms of knowing the land specifics, available resources, possibilities and restrictions of each spatial intervention. At the same time, such implicit knowledge had to be codified to become usable in the decision-making process. The Soviet city constantly collected information but lacked the tools to administer all this totality. The paper discusses the role of urban professionals in conceptualizing urban environment management developed during the last decades of state socialism in Lviv, western Ukraine. It outlines the connections between academics from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and party authorities, and between scientific approaches to automated management systems and a specific location. How could the information about the city be organized? What kind of data was necessary to build a model for urban planning? Who could (and how could they) access these materials? How were experts involved in the discussion about urban management? What were their strategies? Based on oral history interviews, memoirs and publications from the period, the author discusses how the ideas of scientific urban environment management became one of the last Soviet urban utopias, which combined technological optimism and striving towards automation with rediscovering the user and attempts to reform the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the state socialist regimes of the Soviet Bloc acquire knowledge about the 'West'? Despite the ready-made ideological framework about the nature of Western capitalism and 'imperialism', state socialist authorities constantly sought out and relied on new information about the societies and governments beyond the Iron Curtain. Since this learning process exceeded the competences and the energies of the Party and state organs, they relied on the observations and assessments of privileged individuals who were allowed to explore the world outside the Soviet Bloc. Focusing on the cultural and scientific contacts between Hungary and the United States, the article analyses a specific form of information-gathering: travel reports that reflected on work and study trips to the 'West'. Hungary, like most of its regional neighbours, became more open in the 1960s, signing a series of economic and cultural agreements with capitalist countries. The regime encouraged tourism and the number of travellers from and to the West quickly increased. Scholarly exchanges with the United States started through the Ford scholarships (since 1964) and then the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) (since 1968), and connections multiplied as Hungarian academics, artists and professionals were integrated into transnational networks. While the authorities could not control and shape all aspects related to the cross-systemic mobility of information, goods and people, they aimed to monitor closely the process through institutional bodies like the Institute for Cultural Relations which had strong ties to the State Security. All officially monitored travellers were required to attend an 'orientation' session before leaving and were expected to produce a written report afterwards in which they evaluated their trip, their hosts and the experience. The article investigates the form and the function of such travel reports in the wider context of covert and public knowledge production and dissemination about the 'West' in state socialist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every time the Czech nationhood has appeared to be threatened, stage (re) interpretations of national history have been produced with renewed urgency. This was the case after the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the following Nazi occupation, and again after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. In this article, I engage with the ways motives and themes used to raise national awareness in these times of crisis were naturalized, or neutralized, to serve the cultural politics of state socialism in the decades that followed, and especially the period of "normalization" in the 1970s and 1980s. I focus on two contemporary operas on historical themes that were produced at the Prague National Theatre in relation to its centenary celebrations: Zuzana Vojířová by Jiří Pauer (NT 1959 and 1981) and Mistr Jeroným by Ivo Jirásek (NT 1984). They both help demonstrate the paradoxical demand for grand themes from national history on the one hand, and absence of concrete meaning on the other. I argue that Zuzana Vojířová ultimately served the political needs of "normalization" much better than Mistr Jeroným. Pauer's "folk opera" used traditional dramaturgy and conventionalized musical means and capitalized on the popularity of its subject matter during World War II. With its romanticized depiction of the past and generic form of nationalism, it could be consumed as a politically neutral and "timeless" product of high culture. Mistr Jeroným proved much more controversial, due to its ambiguous depiction of the eponymous Hussite hero as well as its modernist music. The libretto was written by the blacklisted poet Karel Šiktanc, a fact that remained well hidden at the time. Like Zuzana Vojířová, Mistr Jeroným was discursively framed through references to World War II, which worked to suppress the more recent historical parallels the opera could evoke (e.g., to the self-immolation of the Czech student Jan Palach in protest of the 1968 invasion). While the opera thus carried a certain subversive potential, I suggest that it was so obscured as to effectively become unreadable to contemporary audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay introduces "Between Subversion and Opposition: Multiple Challenges to Communist Rule," a special issue of East Central Europe. It focuses on four broader questions raised by the contributions: the different periodizations associated with communist rule; the meanings attached to different forms of subversion and dissent; the broader transnational contexts in which activists operated – including the role of contacts with activists in the West; and, finally, the different ways oppositional activity has been remembered and represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the West, the 1970s were the decade of rapid sexual liberalization. Similarly, in state-socialist Poland new approaches toward sex and nudity also gained momentum. Female nudes started being printed in the popular press and displayed in gallery rooms. Simultaneously, early feminist artists such as Natalia LL, Teresa Murak, and Ewa Partum experimented with nudity to question gendered discourses and social norms. This article compares popular nude photography exhibitions with the works of women artists to analyze two approaches toward female nudity that developed in 1970s Poland. Thus, it showcases the ambiguities surrounding the project of socialist sexual modernity and highlights confl icting visions of femininity and liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of knowledge production about the former Eastern Bloc in the American and Polish academic contexts. It explores how debates about authority and authenticity are embedded in the deeper histories of area studies and in long-standing confl icts dating from the earliest years of the fi eld of Slavic and East European Studies. The discussion about authority and authenticity within feminist circles mirrors larger confl icts between proponents of the totalitarian thesis and the so-called revisionists. The confl icts between these two schools precipitated a continuing epistemic crisis that also infects the academic cultures of Eastern Europe and is exacerbated by the neoliberalization of academic knowledge production. The epistemic cultures perpetuating Cold War stereotypes may lead to self-censorship or dissuade young researchers from studying the gendered aspects of lived experience in the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resettlement of the inhabitants of the village of Bara, Bulgaria, due to the construction of the 'Aleksandar Stamboliyski' Dam prolongs from 1942 to 1953. During this long period, social and economic life in the village is marked by uncertainty. A number of unpredictabilities, caused mainly by political and economic factors, hinder people from making informed choices and adequate decisions. My research interest is focused on the context that produced uncertainty and on resettlers' worries. The reconstruction is based on archival documents dealing with the resettlement; they include also local complaints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will argue that the popularization of the amateur genre 'family film' in guides, manuals and a leisure film festival became a paternalistic strategy to regulate individual moviemakers in state socialism. It reveals the benefits of historical research on guiding literature and guidelines at an amateur festival in East Germany. Analyzing promoted norms diachronically points to a changing understanding of leisure in socialism. Additionally, it reveals a complex media history that is not reduced to top-down orders. On the contrary, guides display constant negotiations between state regulation and individualism. Thus, this paper questions a perspective on private media production in the GDR that is often politicized by categories such as propaganda or subversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to outline recent trends in historical research on disability during state socialism in Eastern Europe. In doing so, it explores how an emerging generation of historians have investigated various aspects of disability in Eastern Europe before 1989 and raises the question of whether there was a distinct experience of disability under state socialism. Drawing on studies published in English and German, the paper traces both Soviet discourses and practices after 1917 and Central and Eastern European trajectories after 1945. It argues that disability policies and expert discourses were informed by a productivist logic as a governing strategy to increase work capacity and to integrate the disabled into socialist society. The paper concludes by discussing the need for a transnational, comparative approach for conceptualising how disability was construed during communism in Eastern Europe.

The aim of the Hungarian state socialist regime to renew the operetta art manifested in the transformation of operetta-playing via the setting of its main cultural objectives. Once private theatre organizations were disbanded in 1949, newly written and composed operetta pieces had to be adjusted to meet the expectations cultivated by those responsible for the drawing up of the contemporary cultural policies, not only in terms of theme, subject, and dramaturgy but also, as productions designed for stage performance. At that time, questions regarding the realm of operetta dance and choreography arose as significant professional issues. The remarkable case of operetta dance was brought to the notice of the larger professional community by an article written by choreographer Ágnes Roboz, which was published in 1952 in the Táncművészet magazine (1951). Due to its professional nature, this magazine served as a suitable platform for the discussion of the operetta dance genre. The present study reflects upon its publications from the period between 1952 and 1956. Throughout these years, 16 articles discussing the categorization of operettas were published. I aimed to analyze these primary sources according to their genre before presenting, juxtaposing, and contextualizing them. Thus, my objective is to gain a thorough understanding and comprehensive overview of professional discussions and arguments over 1950s operetta dances and choreographies.

Analysing the output of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s own film studio, which produced educational films between 1955 and 1989, this essay investigates the modes in which the border zone was represented during the decades of state socialism. Considering the vicinity of the border as an area, where ideological confrontations are battled out, the article argues that there is a significant difference between the films produced in the 1950-60s, and those from the mid-1960s onwards. The earlier pieces depict an emotionally charged border zone the defence of which is a social-political duty: father-type superiors teach rookie soldiers about this obligation in coming-of-age stories. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, the films seem to confine themselves to an instrumental mode of persuasion, which presents border protection as a merely technical question. The article briefly ties these shifts to the changing modes in official discourses during the decades of state socialist Hungary.

In this article I will present a relational, and multiscalar, perspective on how state socialism interacted with and shaped the Capitalocene. I introduce a heuristic device, the term Socialocene, a transnational waste regime dominant through the Cold War‐era, that is, during what Will Steffen and colleagues call “the great acceleration”. When extending the concept of waste beyond contamination to include squandered resources, the Socialocene emerges as a transnational waste regime in which the modes of waste generation of Western capitalism and central planning are mutually determining. One key relation is the effect of communism on mass consumption and throwaway society in the West; the other is the use of centrally planned economies as “cheap nature”, in Jason Moore’s sense. I will demonstrate the latter through several empirical examples and, in greater detail, through a case study of an Austrian chemical company outsourcing a toxic‐waste‐intensive product to a Hungarian chemical company in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender is rarely considered in the works on state socialism in Czech history writing. Given the prominence of the equality of the sexes in communist rhetoric and the heated anti- and pro-feminism media and intellectual debates of the 1990s, the omission stands out as a remarkable loss of opportunity in historical research. It also defies logic. For if "emancipation" and "equality" were so strongly present in pre-1989 discourse and women constituted half the population, does it not follow that the plain demographic fact should drive the interest of researchers to inquire where this population was, what it did, and what it had to say? The question has so far attracted primarily sociologists, but how does it fare in historiography? What are the losses of the absence and the gains of the inclusion of a gender perspective on the history and memory-making of state socialism? This article will first consider the status quo of gender blindness in Czech historiography and its possible reasons in the context of the legacy that state socialism left to social sciences and humanities: the legacy of expertise, disciplinary legitimation and epistemological legacy. A discussion of the consequences of the near absence of gender history and analysis from post-1989 interpretations of state socialism in historiography follows: blind spots and loss of knowledge, lack of precision and a gender bias of historical accounts, and perpetuation of false legacy. Finally, the article discusses the gains to Czech historiography, memory-making and international discussion, if scholars do consider gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to show examples of feminist art in relation to contemporary gender policies and political situation in socialist Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s. Czechoslovak gender policies that enabled women to access employment opportunities in the 1950s simultaneously led to their high over-employment that was not resolved during the period of state socialism. The conflicting relationship between the role of mother and working woman therefore became one of the main topics of the feminist art production of that time.

Over the course of 40 years of state socialism, the explanation that Czechoslovak criminologists gave for spousal murder changed significantly. Initially attributing offences to the perpetrator's class origins, remnants of his bourgeois way of life, and the lack of positive influence from the collective in the long 1950s, criminologists then refocused their attention solely on the individual's psychopathology during the period known as 'Normalization', which encompassed the last two decades of state socialism. Based on an analysis of archival sources, including scholarly journals and expert reports, and following Ian Hacking's insight that 'kinds of people come into being' through the realignment of systems of knowledge, this article shows how new kinds of spousal murderer emerged as a result of shifting criminological expertise. We explain the change as the result of the psychiatrization of criminology that occurred in Czechoslovakia at a time when the regime needed to consolidate after the upheavals of the Prague Spring of 1968. The criminological framing of spousal murder as belonging squarely in the individualized realm of the private sphere reflected the contemporaneous effort of the regime to enclose the private as a sphere of relative state non-interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]