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This chapter examines the means of repression that each side applied during the Cold War. The Eastern Bloc created an elaborate system of secret policing, concentration camps, and executions. Most Western nations did not resort to such means, but some nations allied to the Western Bloc did, including Greece, Spain, and Turkey. Western powers were also extremely repressive in colonial and Global South settings. The anti-Communist policies within Western nations are sometimes collectively known as a “Red Scare” or even witch hunts, but these labels are misleading to the extent that they ignore the actual threat of Communist activism during successive crises.

Ecology has been a growing trend in Europe for the last 20 years. As a consequence, companies are pressured to produce more environmentally-friendly products. The main aim of our study was to explore how consumers answer to the pro-ecological trends, and what are their pro-ecological attitudes and behaviors. The pro-ecological attitudes and behaviors of consumers from two countries were explored: Poland—with a shorter tradition of ecological trends (former Eastern Bloc), and Belgium—with a longer tradition (Western country). To verify if there are differences in approach towards ecology between two countries, online surveys were conducted (in Poland and in Belgium) based on representative nationwide samples: people aged 18+ (quotas on gender, age and region), responsible for household shopping (Belgium: n = 823; Poland: n = 1075). Polish and Belgian consumers differ in respect of pro-ecological attitudes and behaviors. On the level of declarations, Polish consumers claim to be more concerned about ecology, and also declare more ecologically responsible behavior. Moreover, pro-ecological attitudes are more prevalent among women than men as well as among people with a higher education, however, this effect can only be seen among Polish customers. The study has both scientific and managerial implications. It contributes to general discussion regarding relationship between attitudes and behaviors and can be useful for building product strategies, communication and decision-making managers concerned with the environmental responsibility in brand positioning.

This chapter begins by noting the manner which detente provoked the re-emergence of exemplarist forms of statecraft. In particular, it demonstrates that Carter mounted a Jeffersonian critique of detente, and of containment more broadly, by arguing that the means of grand strategy had in fact corrupted its ends whereby the “inordinate fear of communism” had encouraged the United States to forgo its principles to support unsavoury but “anti-communist” regimes and undertake secretive, morally repugnant and ultimately short-sighted “regime change” and assassinations of foreign leaders. Carter thus sought an exemplarist version of containment that would not only be consistent with American morality and principles but also serve American interests in an era where the superpower confrontation was joined by intensifying economic interdependence, energy, resource and environmental crises, and global inequality as key drivers of international politics. Ronald Reagan’s approach to American grand strategy, in turn, was a reaction to the perceived errors of detente and the failure of the Carter administration to harness its quest for a moral foreign policy to the pursuit of American strategic and security interests. Reagan’s alternative, especially during his first term (1981–1985), returned to the “rollback” rhetoric of the Eisenhower-Dulles years in concert with a (re)commitment to the fundamental objective of containment as enunciated by George F. Kennan in 1947 “to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate” in order to force upon it “a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection”. This was to be achieved through a concerted effort to out-spend and out-compete Moscow’s in the arms race, increased rhetorical and material support for dissidents in the Eastern bloc, and covert operations to combat Soviet expansion in the Middle East and Latin America.

After the Second World War, the term “reconciliation” disappeared from the language for the time being, since the German–French and also the reconciliation in Europe in the interwar period had remained only superficial and had neither been able to prevent the rise of National Socialism nor the Second World War. Thus, in the first ten years after the Second World War, more neutral terms such as “rapprochement” and “understanding” were chosen above all. It was only at the end of the 1980s that the term experienced its real breakthrough, which it owed not least to impulses from the present. This development was accompanied on the one hand by the overcoming of apartheid in South Africa and the way it was dealt with, and also by the reconciliation policy in Rwanda. On the other hand, the term was also used in the states of the former Eastern Bloc after the Cold War had been overcome. Now, initiatives under the sign of reconciliation began in order to jointly come to terms with the divided history of conflict. The focus of this chapter is precisely how history is dealt with in post-conflict constellations.

This chapter explores the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA, also known as Comecon). The CMEA existed from 1949 to 1991 and was the most important international organisation in the socialist Eastern bloc alongside the Warsaw Pact. In contrast to comparable Western institutions such as the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), however, the CMEA is largely forgotten today. In order to fill this gap, this chapter will illustrate the CMEA’s structure, the main actors of which it comprised and their relative room for manoeuvre in an organisation known for the asymmetrical power of Soviet Russia. Close attention will be paid to CMEA activities in the energy sector and the way these activities were implemented. This chapter argues that the Eastern European energy sector is one of the few examples, where (technology-based) integration among CMEA countries was successful, because the construction and extensions of large-scale energy infrastructures was in the interest of all participating countries. When the Soviet Union changed its political and economic priorities in the 1980s, however, a disintegration process set in, ending with the CMEA’s dissolution in 1991.

This chapter explores the affective atmosphere of pro-Western alignment between Ankara and Tehran under the global Cold War rules. The first part examines the local impact of international polarization between the US-led Western camp and the Eastern bloc dominated by the Soviet Union. Sharing similar concerns regarding the Soviet-communist threat, Turkish and Iranian regimes have moved toward the Anglo-American axis. However, the regional rapprochement in the northern tier could not alleviate structural socio-economic predicaments faced by both countries. The dual failures in addressing domestic sources of disorder have created disturbing relational consequences. The Baghdad Pact and the CENTO have not helped to overcome the cold relational sentiments surrounding the affective atmosphere of Turkey-Iran neighborhood.

The creation of the Fabrica de Arte Cubano, in 2008, a community project space in Havana that gathers contemporary music, art, and performance artists, is an indicator of the Cuban capital’s transformation into a music city. Cuba’s musical development is strongly anchored in the presence of the State and policies that preserve Afro-Cubanness and music genres such as son, rumba, and salsa. With the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the end of the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1990s, the country has reorganized its economy, opening itself up to tourism and partnerships with private enterprise. It is from this set of historical and political factors that the Fabrica de Arte Cubano emerges as a space to question the nostalgic ideals of Havana and to negotiate with global and cosmopolitan worldviews. This chapter addresses the challenges surrounding music cities in Latin America, discusses the existing political and economic vulnerabilities in Latin American metropolises, describes and interprets Havana’s historical development as a music city, and presents the Fabrica de Arte Cubano as an important environment for the construction of the ideals of modernity on the socialist Caribbean island.

The Hungarian agricultural sector underwent a series of transformations in the last hundred years. The starting point of it was the land redistribution immediately after the Second World War, followed by the first wave of (Soviet type) collectivisation between 1948 and 1953. The second wave of collectivisation after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 was more successful. The agricultural sector was characterised by the duality of large state farms and cooperatives and intensively cultivated household plots until the political and economic transition. After the transition, due the land privatisation and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, the agricultural sector once again underwent fundamental restructuring. In the recent period, the course of agricultural development is increasingly influenced by the Common Agricultural Policy and the EU subsidies. This paper attempts to give a holistic view of the agrarian development and modernisation after 1990. The different aspects of change (in ownership structure, in production etc.) will be identified and their spatial patterns will be analysed. The paper will also explore the distinctive features of the two latest periods of agrarian development (the period of privatisation and the period dominated by the Common Agricultural Policy).

In the year that the Berlin Wall fell, 1989, 11 auto-producing nations of Western Europe (WE) built 14,906,050 passenger cars. Meanwhile, state-led automakers in the former Eastern Bloc nations of Central-Eastern Europe (CEE)—Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland—produced 703,305 cars. Another 445,409 were assembled by state-run firms in the ex-Socialist Southeastern Europe (SEE) nations of Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In 2017, however, WE built 12,271,100 cars, or 17.68% less than in 1989. In contrast, CEE nations produced 4,147,740 cars in 2017 and SEE produced 632,865 cars, for respective gains of 489.75% and 42.09% compared with 1989. Moreover, unlike in 1989, all the cars assembled in CEE and SEE in 2017 were produced by private Western European, American, Japanese, and Korean companies (Ward’s (1956–2018) Ward’s Automotive Yearbook, 1956 to 2018 (Detroit: Ward’s Communications); OICA (1999–2018) Annual Vehicle Production and Sales, and New Registrations Statistics by Nation and/or Manufacturer, 1998 to 2017. Paris: Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles, http://www.oica.net/, last 31 January 2019; Jacobs (2017) Automotive FDI in Emerging Europe: Shifting Locales in the Motor Vehicle Industry (London: Palgrave Macmillan); ACEA (2018) The Automobile Industry Pocket Guide 2018/2019 (Brussels: European Automobile Manufacturers Association). Whereas Czechoslovakia encompassed the current nations of Czechia and Slovakia, Yugoslavia traversed today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia).

This chapter will address the relationship between eastern European socialist states and apartheid South Africa. Employing material from archives in South Africa, Poland, Hungary and the GDR, and from international organisations that dealt with anti-apartheid (e.g. UN - WFTU - IUS - World Peace Council), this piece will address the changing relationship between apartheid/anti-apartheid and the region’s elites, intellectuals and societies. It explores the support that eastern bloc regimes gave to the anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s, focusing in particular on the importance of new alliances between the region and Africa in a host of international organisations. In the second part, it examines the limitations in these relationships, addressing (a) the increasing entanglement between eastern European Communists and the apartheid regime in the 1980s; (b) the often limited reach of anti-apartheid sentiment in eastern European societies (compared to support for e.g. Vietnam or Chile) and (c) the tensions that emerged between the region’s dissident movements and organisations that opposed apartheid.

Following the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1974 and the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the transnational political conditions became increasingly favorable for political opposition behind the Iron Curtain. Two Central European initiatives became pivotal in establishing dissidence as a new object of Western attention: the Polish Workers Defense Committee (KOR) and the Czechoslovak Charter 77. Though differing in their goals, they shared their openness, emphasis on legality, and invocations of international human rights norms. The chapter describes international and domestic reactions to these two initiatives in the West and in the Eastern Bloc, and the visible fashion for the “dissidents” which by 1977 was undeniable.

Gabor Polyak looks at the media and politics in illiberal Hungary. This chapter examines some of the typical methods that illiberal regimes, such as that of Hungary in recent years, employ and combine into a sustainable state censorship system. These systems are neither hold-overs nor re-makes of the preceding totalitarian control systems. Limitations are imposed simultaneously on media pluralism, on freedom of opinion, and on freedom of information, both in the legacy, and in the online, media. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s second arrival to power in 2010 gave him a constitutional majority in Parliament, which he has used to an extent unprecedented in the EU, although it is will have many familiar aspect to those schooled in the world of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. His establishment of ruling party domination has relied heavily on the use of media laws, coupled with control of the both the regulatory bodies and the media market. The chapter gives and overview of the major objectives of these policies and the means employed to effect the ensuing transformation in the media landscape.

The Eastern European opposition quickly noticed the “dissident” label as one imposed on them by the West. But by whom precisely? Drawing on the concept of Orientalism, this chapter describes how Western experts—“Sovietologists” and media correspondents in particular—helped to create the dissident figure and shape it into something not necessarily resembling any real-life political actors. Experts would “make sense” of the East, but some would also “go native” in Central Europe, and later help propagate the dissidents’ own self-narrative of the struggle with Communism. Finally, the chapter discusses the striking absence of women in the pantheon of “prominent dissidents,” even if actual political dissent and human rights activism in the Eastern Bloc relied to a great extent on their blood, sweat, and tears.

After World War II both Poland and the German Democratic Republic became members of the so-called socialist camp, but there were considerable differences between the two states. In the 1970s, the GDR, compared with Poland, had a higher material standard of living, but its citizens were subjected to intense political invigilation and could not travel abroad, especially outside the Eastern bloc. In Poland of the 1970s, the political climate was on the whole more liberal and its citizens had the possibility of travel to the West. The text looks at the life story of Wolfgang Johling (born 1944), a graduate of Slavonic Studies at Leipzig University and an employee of the East German Ministry of Culture, who (under the circumstances) had a fairly good job which included travel to socialist countries and meeting interesting people from the sphere of the arts. He was also a gay person living in a ‘glass closet’ and having begun a steady, closeted relationship with a young Polish medical doctor, decided to move permanently to the other country, obtained Polish nationality and developed a second professional career there. The aim is to consider the multifarious aspects of a gay (queer) life in two socialist countries and put forward the question if the decade of the 1970s in Poland could—in a sense—be regarded as ‘the golden age for queers’ in the socialist camp.

In 1989, the fall of the Communist regime in Central European countries also changed the political situation in former Czechoslovakia. The process of transition from the Communist, centrally-controlled economy to that based on market principles was started. The transformation of economy and society in Czechia as well as other post-totalitarian states was quite a unique process. After 1989 the agricultural sector changed especially in the production structure—the amount of livestock was reduced, the number of employees decreased significantly and many legislative changes were enacted. The structure of agricultural holdings changed deeply. The changes of Czech agriculture, which had been started during the period of transition of economy and society, continued also during the period of European integration. In Central European countries agricultural sector has had a long tradition. In some of them, such as Hungary and Poland, the agricultural sector has played an important role in the employment of their inhabitants and has had a major economic significance. On the other hand, the importance of the agricultural sector in Czechia and Slovakia has weakened. Attention will also be paid to the question of how the transition of agriculture of Central European countries, with all its changes and specific features, has influenced the future development of the agricultural sector and integration into the European agriculture.

After the iconoclastic destruction of statues of communist leaders in the countries of the Eastern Bloc and the former Yugoslavia following the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the dissolution of the Communist system, Stalin and Tito became symbols of a former imperial power and glory. At the same time, both leaders were detached from the negative part of history and embedded into its positive pole—as heros. They are no longer real historical figures but pathos formulas representing fathers of the Russian and the transnational Yugoslav nations who contributed to the glory of their homelands. The use of their images resembles the use of images in advertising, which can be detached from their original meaning in order to evoke positve connotations. Nostalgia is thus not an approach to memories of the past or to an ideal, utopic future, but a creative means of promoting new political and social ideas in the present, an activity whose aims are in contrast with the forms used to express it.

The crisis that modernist urban planning went through in the mid-seventies led to the appearance of different new formulae both in Europe and other parts of the Western world. Globalisation and the breakdown of the Eastern Bloc in the 1990s gave rise to a new approach in the discipline which, despite its obvious internationalisation, remained linked to important cultural traditions specific to each country. This chapter explains how after the ‘golden age of planning’ new cultural and environmental sensibilities emerged that gave rise to a more complex urbanism that dealt with the changes experienced by cities, paving the way for the rise of the strategic urban projects.

The housing estate is perceived to be one of the main symbols of the socialist regime in the former Eastern Bloc. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution, housing estates were to some extent rejected by the general public as well as neglected in spatial planning and policies. At the same time, Prague’s housing estates contained more than 40% of the city’s population, thus representing the most important part of the built environment within the city. The main aims of this chapter are to evaluate the specific development of Prague’s housing estates in the second half of the twentieth century, and then to explore the finer details of their inherent socio-spatial differentiation. The role of state and local housing policy is evaluated as the crucial factor in the current and future development of housing estates. The results are similar to those for many other CEE cities, and confirm that the transformation period had little impact on social structures within these residential areas and that the social mix sustains the main attribute of Prague’s housing estates. New housing construction and ethnic differentiation are the most important processes to have changed the social environment of housing estates in Prague during the post-transformation period.

The history of the CESEE has been stormy over time. Its strategic geographical location and the policy of conquest by neighbouring countries, such as Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Turkey, have significantly impacted the development of societies and economies of CESEE. After World War II, the CESEE countries found themselves behind the Iron Curtain and were under total influence of the Soviet Union. The situation changed in the late 1980s when communism started to collapse in the Eastern Bloc. From then on, the CESEE countries have begun to move from centrally planned towards market economies. This is the reason why they have been referred to as transition economies. In this chapter, we present a brief history of this region, with special attention paid to the period of transition.

This chapter focuses on the history of homosexuality in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989. Analysing the Eastern Europe Information Pool reports—produced in the 1980s by Western homosexual activists working for ILGA and HOSI—Szulc elaborates on such issues as state laws and practices regarding homosexuals, public discourses on homosexuality as well as homosexual activism in the Eastern Bloc during the twilight years of the Cold War. He concludes by emphasizing the complexity of the Eastern Bloc in relation to homosexuality and highlighting the transnational dimensions of early homosexual groups in communist Europe, allegedly ‘locked’ behind the Iron Curtain.

Lysenkoism as a practice, theory and ideology was introduced in Romania in 1949, as part of the structural changes of the scientific institutions, namely the subordination of the Romanian Academy to the communist state. Beyond the similarity with other countries of the Eastern bloc, the original trend in the case of Romania was the interference between Lysenkoism and the neo-Lamarckian context, strongly represented before World War II in biology and agronomy. This explains the fact that Romanian scientists maintained references to Michurin until the early 1970s, long after the official introduction of genetics. The national pattern of Lysenkoism focused on the continuity of the Romanian science.

The historian Timothy Scarnecchia’s chapter offers a paradigm shift from the conventional narrative of Nkomo as a vacillating and inconsistent anti-colonial revolutionary through a counter-narrative which highlights Nkomo as a confident nationalist diplomat. Scarnecchia posits that less has been written by historians about the extensive diplomatic work Nkomo engaged in after his release from detention in 1974. This chapter further asserts that unlike Mugabe, Nkomo was the recognised leader of the nationalist movement from the perspective of both sides of the Cold War. He had managed through his connections developed in the early 1960s to receive training and military weapons for ZIPRA from the Soviet Union and important Eastern bloc countries that were willing to invest in the liberation wars of Southern Africa, most notably Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

In communist Poland, the output of every active artist was affected by the political context. Involvement in various relationships with the authorities became a survival strategy, and often allowed artists to gain recognition not only within the countries of the Eastern bloc, but also from wider audiences. During the Cold War, artists who are now part of the canon of Polish art either emigrated and worked abroad, or, like Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, remained in Poland and in various ways struggled to be able to present their work to the world. The aim of this paper is to show Kantor’s and Grotowski’s political connotations as artists as well as the reception of their art in the West, perceived as art from behind the Iron Curtain.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of the former Eastern bloc, which include countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and those of the former Soviet Union, experienced turbulent economic, political, and institutional changes that were a remarkable departure from socialism. Steep drops in life satisfaction levels reflected the large drops in gross national product associated with the transition and the erosion of key social welfare mechanisms. Life satisfaction levels gradually recovered along with economic growth and stability. Income inequality and inequality in life satisfaction both increased. Yet it is difficult to generalize about such a diverse set of countries; they entered the transition with very different initial conditions and emerged from it with various degrees of success. Those countries with historical links to Europe fared the best. Those countries that were closer to the Soviet empire had less complete transitions and larger increases in inequality, and life satisfaction levels dropped more and recovered less. The outlying countries in Central Asia emerged from the transition with the dual challenges of underdevelopment and the shift from central planning. The transition provided major opportunities for change—including economic and political freedom—for the countries (and cohorts within them) that were positioned to take advantage of them. Younger people who were better equipped to adapt to new economic and political systems, such as those with more skills and education, were the clear “winners” in the process. This fact is reflected in their life satisfaction, their satisfaction with political and economic regimes, and their faith in the system in general. The transition widened preexisting differences among countries, both in terms of economic and institutional indicators and in terms of life satisfaction and individuals’ perceptions of their future opportunities. A major challenge for policy is crafting new mechanisms to facilitate the participation of those individuals who have fallen behind.

The following article explores the interaction between intensifying youth politicisation and the growing dissemination of Brecht’s plays in Greece during the 1970s. It stresses that ideas that were circulating transnationally shaped the diverse approaches that young left-wingers developed towards the plays of Bertolt Brecht. Such cultural transfers cannot be subsumed under the heading of Americanisation, the dominant story in the forging of youth identities in postwar Europe. In this vein, the article situates these transfers in the context of the Cold War and demonstrates that a significant number of young Communists lauded Brecht as a cultural figure of the Eastern bloc on the basis of arguments put forth by Soviet scholars. Thus, it critically addresses the hitherto perfunctory attention that scholars have paid to transnational flows from the Eastern bloc to the West and their impact on young people residing in the latter.

Lysenkoism as a practice, theory and ideology was introduced in Romania in 1949, as part of the structural changes of the scientific institutions, namely the subordination of the Romanian Academy to the communist state. Beyond the similarity with other countries of the Eastern bloc, the original trend in the case of Romania was the interference between Lysenkoism and the neo-Lamarckian context, strongly represented before World War II in biology and agronomy. This explains the fact that Romanian scientists maintained references to Michurin until the early 1970s, long after the official introduction of genetics. The national pattern of Lysenkoism focused on the continuity of the Romanian science.

As the Eastern bloc coalesced in the later 1940s, its leaders sought to present themselves to their citizens as both building a socialist utopia and offering a model for the rest of the world. Mao’s 1949 victory in China, the world’s most populous country, seemed to prefigure this inexorable deepening and broadening of communism, and Central European communists sought to deploy a representation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in service of constructing a socialist society at home. Party officials, artists and intellectuals, and ordinary citizens helped to fashion this image of China, which circulated widely throughout the public sphere in the mass media of newspapers, popular magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, music, television, and film, as well as through the wide distribution of informational pamphlets and booklets. Public demonstrations and parades featured speeches and slogans thematizing China, as did more intense campaigns like the “Month of Chinese-German Friendship.” Posters and other public visual material, especially showpiece cultural exhibitions, also helped to construct and propagate an image of the PRC. A particularly compelling source is that of visiting delegations of artists, scientists, experts, and ordinary citizens, going in both directions, as these guests gathered and left impressions open to interpretation, both official and otherwise. This dynamic began to change with the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, but even as a problematic ally and then enemy, the image of China helped to build socialism in Central Europe.

With the Soyuz-40 mission, which had carried Leonid Popov and Romanian cosmonaut-researcher Dumitru Prunariu to the Salyut-6 station, the structured Interkosmos program of flying Eastern Bloc participants on week-long flights to the orbiting space laboratory was at an end. However, there were already plans to continue to fly other international ‘guests’ on science missions with bilateral agreements, and the participants were no longer restricted to fraternal socialist nations.

This paper considers the implications for countertrade (CT) of recent liberalisation of politico/economic structures in the former Eastern Bloc. Because CT is a response to market imperfections, more relaxed institutional restrictions with greater availability of information may remove the need for CT. However, orthodox trade requires mutual currency convertibility or reliable access to trade finance. Until these are established, CT is likely to feature strongly in trade with former CMEA countries. Meanwhile, lower institutional barriers will drive Western and Eastern partners toward more formal strategic alliances. The experiences of a small group of UK exporters illustrates these tendencies.

The impacts on international tourism demand of the recent political and economic upheavals which have taken place in Eastern Europe are considered. Substantial changes in previously established patterns of travel to the Eastern bloc countries have occurred. Data on the sizes of the inbound international tourism markets are presented for the former Soviet bloc countries and these are compared with corresponding destinations in Western Europe in order to provide a yardstick of progress in tourism development. Opportunities for the development of the tourism markets in Eastern Europe and the constraints on their growth are considered. In particular, it is clear that a general lack of marketing expertise and marketing education opportunities will restrict potential growth.