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It was the massive and peaceful civic eruption in Czechoslovakia in November 1989 which first generated the name “Velvet Revolution”: an accelerating wave of demonstrations and strikes, initially led by a handful of young students in the performing arts, which led within three weeks to the fall of the supposedly “hard-line” socialist regime in Prague. Subsequently, the name “Velvet Revolution” was extended to include the whole sequence of peaceful (except for Romania) revolutions in 1989 that initiated the fall of state socialism in Europe. Keywords: authoritarian regimes; borders; class; communism; democracy; elections; empire; human rights; revolution; state; Eastern Europe; Atlantic world

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.

Does the politico-economic system affect preferences for immigration? In this study, I show that individuals exposed to life under state socialism have formed, and persistently hold different attitudes toward immigration. By exploiting the natural experiment of the division and reunification of Germany, I estimate the effect of state socialism on various measures of attitudes toward immigration. Drawing on rich individual panel data, I find that East Germans who lived under state socialism, are 12.9 percent more likely to oppose immigration than West Germans who spent their entire life in a democratic, capitalist country. The effect is persistent over time and across space, and largest for cohorts born and raised under state socialism. This gap in attitudes is not driven by individuals' experiences in the transition years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but instead can be traced back to a longer-term deterioration in trust. Evidence relating to members of a group that opposed the authoritarian system highlights the importance of state socialist ideology for attitude formation.

In recent years, the permeability of the Iron Curtain seems to have become a new paradigm in the field of post-war history – urban history included. It is clear, however, that significant differences existed among Eastern Bloc countries in terms of how open they were to Western influences, and to what extent their governments allowed those countries’ citizens – professionals among them – to gain experiences abroad. This article investigates the ways city planning and heritage policy in state socialist Hungary were influenced by international trends; it explores the roles Hungarian architects, urban planners and other experts played after 1956 in knowledge transfers, i.e. the transmission of novel ideas in the field of architecture and urban planning, with special regard to the renewal of inner-city areas and historic town centres. Besides reflecting critically on concepts of the strict East–West divide, the article also calls attention to the limits of freedom inherent even in a relatively liberal Eastern Bloc regime: various forms of state control – including state security surveillance – continued to characterize the system until its collapse in 1989, affecting the mobility of urbanists and architects as well as all other professional groups.

In the past couple of decades, “real existing socialism” (as the political system of the Soviet Union and its satellites was often known), has been transformed from the most polarizing aspect of global politics to a distant memory. In 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution provoked multiple reflections on the Russian Revolution and its legacy. Only two years later, in 2019, the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to complementary, if more muted, d...

In this article, I analyse Czech and Slovak fanzine-making during the transition from state socialism to post-socialism. The regime change ushered in new dominant forms of cultural production, and thus a situation emerged in which cultural hierarchies were being negotiated and new ways of collective action being formed. Fanzines played a crucial role in building up alternative communities in the new neoliberal system, when there was strong demand for Western subcultural styles and the need of safe space of domestic scenes. Independent publishing depends heavily upon that which it opposes, and when major social changes occur, fanzine-making provided a space for negotiating cultural hierarchies, resulting in specific ways in which fanzines help build and maintain alternative scenes.

The Soviet educative system was one of the most highly regarded achievements of state socialism, and today’s Russian public school curriculum represents an important site of legacy – and contestati...

The concept of “post-socialism” not only foregrounds the momentous historical rupture of 1989/1991; it also affirms the persistence of state socialist legacies. Regardless of where transitional pro...

In the history of mankind, there has never been a case where, in a brief episode of the life of one generation, mutual economic relations have changed on such a large scale for so many people as they did in China and Russia in 1989-2020. Both countries are undergoing profound structural and institutional changes, but while the former recorded impressive results in terms of developing and catching up with advanced economies, the latter’s achievements have been very modest. This happened due to many factors – from the traditional cultural heritage to geopolitical conditions, from the legacy from the previous state socialism to different natural resources bases – however, the nature and duration of the political leadership of Deng Xiaoping in China and Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia were of fundamental importance. Without taking into account the influence of the thoughts and actions of these two statesmen, it is impossible to understand the essence of tectonic changes that have occurred in the world economy recently.

As central transport hubs of commodities, people and information, ports play a specific and important role in modern societies. This is valid even more so in socialist states. As we argue in this introduction, and subsequently throughout this Forum, socialist ports were in many ways places of exception: in a political system that preferred closed borders, ports symbolized the ‘gates to the world’; in an economic system that was thoroughly planned, ports became the main contact point for global trade outside of a planned economy. Therefore, while socialist ports differed from other socialist entities, they also differed from non-socialist ports, especially regarding the influence of government control and decision-making through state-owned companies or the ‘primacy of politics’ over economic argument. This specificity of socialist ports during the Cold War is analysed from three perspectives in the articles collected in this Forum: first, on the local or micro level, attention is afforded to agents such as sailors or port workers navigating the particular conditions of the ports; second, the top-down approaches of local or national management of the ports are discussed; third, ports are appraised as part of larger networks in their international context.

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 el...

Based on our collective ethnography of Cuba's socialist system for the provision of state-subsidised food, this article explores manners in which the state weaves itself into the fabric of people's everyday lives in state-socialist society. Instituted by Cuba's revolutionary government in the early 1960s, Cuba's 'state system for provisioning' is still today the backbone of household subsistence, propelling individuals into direct daily relations with the state via its neighbourhood-level network of stores that distribute food catering to citizens' 'basic needs'. Our ethnography brings together a series of studies conducted by the members of our team in different parts of Havana, charting the most salient aspects of people's interaction with the state in this alimentary context. We argue that the state becomes pervasive in people's daily lives not just because it is present in so much of it, but also as the basic normative premise on which people interpret and evaluate everyday comportments in the interactions food provisioning involves. Life in state socialism involves the constant and intricate comparison of its own realities against the normative ideals the state purports to institute. These 'vernacular comparisons' between life and state, as we call them, are the 'local knowledge' of state socialism in Cuba.A partir de nuestra etnografía colectiva del sistema del abastecimiento de alimentos subsidiados por el Estado cubano este artículo explora las formas en las que el estado se imbrica en el tejido de la vida cotidiana de las personas en el socialismo de estado. Instituido por el gobierno revolucionario cubano a principios de la década de 1960, el ‘sistema estatal de abastecimiento’ de Cuba es todavía hoy la espina dorsal de la subsistencia de los hogares, el cual impele a los individuos a establecer una relación cotidiana y directa con el estado a través de la red de establecimientos comerciales a nivel de barrio que distribuyen alimentos de acuerdo con las “necesidades básicas” de los ciudadanos. Nuestra etnografía reúne una serie de estudios llevados a cabo por los miembros de nuestro equipo en diferentes partes de La Habana, describiendo los aspectos más significativos de la interacción entre las personas y el estado en este contexto alimentario. Argumentamos que el estado se vuelve ubicuo en la vida cotidiana de las personas no sólo por estar presente en numerosos aspectos de la misma, sino también por ser el supuesto básico y normativo con el que la gente interpreta y evalúa sus comportamientos en las interacciones cotidianas relacionadas con el abastecimiento alimentario. La vida en el socialismo de estado involucra una constante e intrincada comparación entre los ideales normativos que el estado pretende institucionalizar y sus realidades. Estas ‘comparaciones vernáculas’ entre vida y estado, como las llamamos, son el ‘conocimiento local’ del socialismo de estado en Cuba.S’appuyant sur une ethnographie collective du système socialiste cubain en matière d’approvisionnement de nourriture subventionné par l'État, cet article étudie la manière dont l'État s'immisce dans la vie quotidienne des gens, dans une société socialiste. Instauré à Cuba au début des années 1960 par le gouvernement révolutionnaire, le « système étatique d'approvisionnement » constitue encore aujourd’hui l'épine dorsale de la subsistance des foyers, et pousse les individus à entretenir des relations quotidiennes directes avec l'État à travers son réseau de magasins de quartier, qui distribuent des aliments correspondant aux « besoins vitaux » des citoyens. Nos travaux ethnographiques réunissent une série d'études, menées par les membres de notre équipe dans différents secteurs de La Havane, mettant en évidence les aspects les plus saillants de l'interaction entre les individus et l'État dans le domaine de l’alimentation. Nous soutenons que l'État pénètre dans la vie quotidienne des gens, non seulement parce qu'il y est presque omniprésent, mais aussi comme une prémisse normative fondamentale à partir de laquelle on interprète et évalue les comportements quotidiens dans les interactions faisant partie de l'approvisionnement alimentaire. La vie sous le socialisme étatique implique une comparaison complexe et constante entre ses propres réalités et les idéaux normatifs que l'État prétend instaurer. Ce que nous appelons les « comparaisons vernaculaires » entre la vie et l'État composent la « connaissance locale » du socialisme étatique à Cuba.

Existing literature on self-building suggests classic state-socialism restricted the practice and it expanded only during the disintegration of the regime. The current article challenges this, to d...

Мета статті. Реформа децентралізації України передбачає створення нового територіального устрою. Усі запропоновані підходи побудовані на географічних, історичних, економічних, транспортних критеріях, проте не враховують специфіку ідентичності населення регіонів. Метоюпублікації є привернення увагидо своєрідності населення територій, що колись входили до складу Брацлавщини. Методологія. Теоретичною основою аналізу є теорія фронтиру в австралійському доробку –«big man's frontier». Наукова новизна.Своєрідність брацлавського варіанту українського фронтиру полягає в тому, що саме тут відбувалося основне гаряче протистояння кількох потужних претендентів на українські землі: Речі Посполитої, Московського царства/Російської імперії, Кримського ханату і Оттоманської імперії. Унаслідок цієї боротьби навколо земельного питання формувалися подібні до австралійського фронтиру наслідки: велике землеволодіння, тривала перевага підневільної праці, популярність соціалістичних ідей, перемога державного соціалізму, –що обумовило такі риси ідентичності, як подвійність поведінки населення – колективізм таіндивідуалізм, лояльність до влади іготовність до спротиву. Утім,природа формування ззовні схожих рис брацлавського фронтируінша. Оптика «земельного питання» дозволяє розглянути ідентичність населення цих теренів в умовах фронтиру з майнового, правового, етнографічногопогляду.Висновки.Оскільки аналіз здійснювався лише у розрізі земельного питання, є необхідність його продовжити з інших ракурсів, наприклад, релігії, звичаєвого права, національної самосвідомості у ХХ ст., колективної та історичної пам’яті, використовуючи теоретичний доробок австралійських вчених. Подібні дослідження дозволять під час продовження реформи децентралізації адміністративного управління приймати більш виважені рішення при створенні нових регіонів.

‘One day a poster announcing the preparatory course at the university appeared in a village. Pokusa [surname, “desire” in Polish] was among the first to enrol. He was accepted after passing an exam...

The collapse of state socialism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have had critical impacts on the former state-socialist countries. Alongside with the political and economic restructuring, p...

The economic policy agenda of the SED has often been described as extremely orthodox in nature and—with the exception of a short period in the 1960s—hostile to reform. It is often overlooked that t...

The article follows the theme of "socialist content in national form" in Romanian architecture during a period stretching from approximately 1944 to 1989 – a time interval that is usually associated with the specific political agenda that dominated society in a decisive and profound way throughout the era, which is usually indicated as "communism". This time interval can also be indicated by using other keywords and concepts, such as "socialism", "state socialism", "totalitarianism" or others, sometimes in association with the keyword "communism". For reasons that will be presented in the introduction, the title of the article will prefer the use of the term "the communist project" for indicating the chronological focus of the article; the word "project" also holds a conceptual meaning – therefore being considered appropriate in the context of a mostly conceptual discussion that the article focusses on – as it tries to examine one of the most powerful and influential key concepts of the era: "socialist content in national form".

The film studio of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior produced educational and instructional films for more than three decades during the state socialist regime. In this article I present the first...

During the past decade, the states situated on the territory of the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe have made newspaper headlines around the world for topics on gender and sexuality: it seems that each step towards gender equality and inclusive sexual citizenship in the region has been accompanied by counter-actions on different scales. In what way is the present day of appropriate legislation and recent backlash connected to the legacies of regulations of gender relationships, intimacies, and sexualities under state socialism? What role do economic, political, and educational changes that took place in the region in the 1990s play in these developments? And finally, can we speak about certain similarities between discourses on sexuality and intimacy in the “West,” on the one hand, and in post-Soviet and East European countries, on the other? Reflecting on current changes in post-socialist societies, the authors of this special issue give their own answers to these questions.

This paper is dedicated to the history of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (further WIDF), the influential transnational organization of the period of the Cold War. The scholars who were dealing with the history of this organization have different opinions about its activities and historical role. Indeed, several researches have shown that the federation realized a lot of solidarity work; the federation was important not least with respect to the anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles as well for cooperation between women from inside and outside Europe. But on the other hand, historically this organization was seen as dependent from the Soviet Union or as the organization where Communist ideas and Soviet bloc’s geopolitical interests have played an important role. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the contradictory aspects of the WIDF’s ideology and activities. I use the WIDF’s official publications, first of all, the federation’s journal Women of the Whole World/ Zhenshchiny mira (published from 1951 in English, French, Russian and, later on German, Spanish and Arabic) vis-à-vis the material from the archive in Moscow, belonging to the WIDF’s member organization from the Soviet Union (GARF, Fond of the Committee of the Soviet Women). In this paper I discuss the federation’s use of the achievements of the state socialist countries on the way to women’s emancipation as well as WIDF’s main political concepts and some of their interpretations. Thus, I explore the contradictions with respect to how the concepts as human rights, democracy and women’s rights were used in WIDF’s documents from different periods as well as discuss conflicts connected to their use.

Across former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.

The report looks at the development of the official Bulgarian holiday calendar and especially during the years of state socialism. The analysis shows that military victories are not the primary motive in choosing official memorial days. Even the Bulgarian military exploits are not of special honor in forming the official state holiday of new Bulgaria. The festive calendar does not include the victories for the Bulgarians of the Middle Ages, and there are no new military exploits in the twentieth century. During the period of socialism, the holidays of May 1 (International Labor Day) and September 9 (1944), proclaimed as "Freedom Day" in 1945, became the main focus. Like all other events in the life of the People's Republic, the holiday is used for a purely functional purpose - to unite, to emphasize unity, to reaffirm loyalty to the ruling party and the new ideology, to show confidence in the imminent onset of prosperity and a "bright future" - communism. Particular attention is paid to substantiating the claim that the Third March was imposed as a national holiday by communist rule in the early 1990s. It is not as suitable for this role as the oldest all-Bulgarian holiday on May 24th. It is because of public holidays, incl. and the only national one so far (March 3) have always been determined by political decisions - until 1944 of the monarch, the National Assembly, and a specially authorized ministry, and after 1944 - predominantly the Council of Ministers or the State Council, rarely at the National Assembly.

In the context of modern industrial capitalism and the expansion of wage labor, the consumption of alcohol has gradually increased since the 18th century. This growth was present, both in Eastern and Western Europe, also in restructured state-socialist systems after the World War II, like in Romania. The present study analyzes the dynamics of alcohol consumption in the state-socialist period, using as a starting point the alcohol policies of that period. Three phases can be distinguished: alcohol, as considered a stable state income (due to increasing consumption), expanding access as an indicator of prosperity (increasing consumption), the third phase is on restraining consumption opportunities, consequently consumption too. Keywords: social history, alcohol consumption, lifestyle, communism, Romania

The paper addresses the question of why we should continue to study state socialism. In view of the rise of China and the resurgence of economic nationalism pursued by illiberal and populist governments in East-Central Europe, questions of state-led development have become topical again. Today, few authors would subscribe to Francis Fukuyama's excessively optimistic prediction of the "end of history," when the Cold War ended with what seemed at that time to be an unqualified triumph of the West. In the formerly socialist countries, history neither ended in 1989 nor when they joined the European Union. In the following section three temporal and spatial contexts in which state socialism can make sense will be discussed, by asking: (1) what is state socialism's place in the longue durée of Eastern Europe's historical legacies; (2) how does state socialism relate to general European history; and (3) what is state socialism’s place in global history - and vice versa.

The article presents state-socialist and Catholic reproductive and population politics of Cold War Poland, focusing on competing discourses of population growth that were present in public debates ...

This article examines patterns of within-building vertical segregation in Bucharest, Romania under late socialism using micro-data (individual/household level information) from the 1992 Romanian na...

This article compares Austria with three of its former state-socialist neighbouring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The authors are guided by the assumption that it is necessary to analyse changes in both the structure and the perception of inequality and that the two are interconnected. They assume that some general differences exist as a result of the legacy of state socialism in the three post-communist countries, but also that significant differences exist between those three countries themselves that stem from their different paths of development in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the first part of this article, differences in the societal-political aims of a Western country such as Austria and those of state-socialist countries are discussed. The authors argue that the state-socialist countries were able to contain income inequality but were less successful at limiting other aspects of inequality. Austria, on the other hand, was able to avoid the severe income inequalities of the capitalist system by introducing democratic-corporatist institutions and a strong welfare state. In the second part of the article the authors investigate the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys. The majority of the population in all four countries think that income differences are too large, but there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves significantly higher than do 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 characterised by a small elite, and they see the mass of the people at the bottom.

This article explores the political effects of the development of systems analysis as a form of “infrastructural knowledge”—that is, as a form of knowledge concerned with infrastructure, and an infrastructure of knowledge—that contributed to internal dissensus among scientific experts in the Soviet Union. Systems expertise is largely missing from existing work on the history of Soviet infrastructure. The article analyzes the development of governmental, managerial, and industrial applications of systems analysis in the Soviet context, as well as the transfer of Soviet systems expertise to developing countries. It argues that systems analysis constitutes a form of infrastructural knowledge that enabled Soviet scientists to criticize governmental policies, particularly largescale, top-down infrastructure projects. This critique is interpreted as an expression of a new normativity about what constitutes good governance; it became particularly salient when Soviet scientists were facing infrastructural projects in the global South. Systems analysis, in this way, constituted an important intellectual resource for endogenous liberalization of the authoritarian regime.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the political thought of the Polish Socialist Party former Revolutionary Faction (PSPdFrRew) formed in 1928. The focus is primarily on the PSPdFR's attitude towards issues such as the state, economy, and democracy. The research utilised text analysis and document analysis methods. The results of the research found that the former PSP Revolutionary Faction proclaimed the principles of state socialism and used evolutionary methods to raise the standard of living of workers and introduced the Polish Socialist Republic. Although the PSP former Revolutionary Faction perceived its place in the broadly understood Sanation camp, it had negative attitudes towards the proposals of political, economic and social solutions of conservative and liberal representatives. Despite the often-declared attachment to democracy, the PSPdFR strongly criticised parliamentarism and proposed the introduction of strong arm rule.

In the mid-1980s, the Eastern Bloc faced increased pressure on the issue of human rights from western governments, ngos, and indigenous dissident. Although the Socialist Bloc had claimed to represent the ideals of human rights throughout the Cold War, by 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev called on the leaders of the Eastern Bloc to work together on a coordinated response to this threat and in response East Germany proposed the creation of an international declaration based on the principles of socialist—rather than bourgeois—human rights. Within a few years, however, the project collapsed in ignominious failure as it provided a vehicle for reformers to challenge the status quo in the name of human rights by demanding greater democratization. Although the project was originally devised to refute the human rights claims of the West, it instead acted to spur on the intellectual collapse of the Eastern Bloc’s ideological unity at its time of greatest crisis.

In this paper, we explore critically deinstitutionalisation reform, focusing specifically on the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We argue that\ud deinstitutionalisation in postsocialist CEE has generated re-institutionalising outcomes, including renovation of existing institutions and/or creation of new, smaller settings that have nevertheless reproduced key features of institutional life. To explain these trends, we first consider the historical background of the reform, highlighting the legacy of state socialism and the effects of postsocialist neoliberalisation. We then discuss the impact of ‘external’ drivers of deinstitutionalisation in CEE, particularly the European Union and its funding, as well as human rights discourses incorporated in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The analysis is supported by looking at the current situation in Hungary and Bulgaria through recent reports by local civil society organisations. In conclusion, we propose some definitional tactics for redirecting existing resources towards genuine community-based services.

In Conakry, the capital city of the Republic of Guinea, dance ceremonies calledsabars, derived from a Senegalese genre of the same name, have become extremely popular for wedding celebrations. Sabar's rise in Guinea coincided with the liberalization of the country's economy and the opening of national borders in the wake of state socialism (1958–84) – events that have produced profound uncertainty for average citizens. This article explores sabar as a practice that grapples affectively with the social and economic changes neoliberal reform has engendered within Guinea. Sabar ceremonies are characterized by instantiations of excess, including hypersexualized dancing, electric amplification and theatrical displays of opulence. By examining excess as an ‘emergent’ quality whose cultural value is undetermined, the article demonstrates how dancers participate in the active constitution and questioning of collective value in Conakry, and how embodiment is central to an anthropology of precarity.

This article examines the ways in which Romanian socialist politics and state-sanctioned film journalism intersected around film sexuality and foreign film stardom, in order to reinforce the official discourse on sexual morality in the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘60s represented a decade of political and ideological semi-relaxation in socialist Romania. Film audiences retained some access to Western productions, and foreign film stars carried significant erotic appeal to viewers. The state-funded Cinema magazine aimed to disrupt these tendencies either by arguing that the objects of desire were representative of lower quality cinema, or, in full-on Cold War style, by building the case for the decline of Western capitalism through pinpointing all manifestations of sexuality as a symptom of it. This article looks at the ways in which ideological arguments to “redact” film sexuality, while failing to repurpose it, managed to redirect it and reposition it as alien to socialist culture. The article also explores the continuation of this trend during the 1970s, when film stardom and the seductive appeal of film stars were validated by their conformation to political and historical ideologies directly linked to the concerns of the Romanian Communist Party. Publisher PDF

After the demise of state socialism, public space became an issue of contention that occupied an important place within societies’ efforts to come to terms with the recent past. Extant scholarship documented extensively how postcommunist societies in Central and Eastern Europe have reconfigured the public space by removing the symbolic presence of the former regime (e.g., monuments and statues, but also place- and street names). However, there is a scarcity of research done on exploring the reception of these broad changes brought to the public statuary and urban nomenclature. In this study, we aim to contribute to this nascent strand of literature by investigating the generational differences in social attitudes towards the symbolic transformation of public space in postcommunist Romania. Data collected through a national web-survey conducted in February 2021 (n = 1156) revealed significant intergenerational differences regarding the removal of monuments and the renaming of streets. In particular, higher approval of such memory work was found among the generations born during communism in comparison to the postcommunist generation. Taking stock of these generational differences, as well as the factors underpinning them, contributes to a better understanding of how ordinary people relate to the politics of memory enacted in transforming societies.

This chapter examines the most important debates and research trends in relation to social welfare and family policies in Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries, with an emphasis on how these policies shaped gender relations in the region. This scholarship reveals how important regional differences in construction of gender roles and corresponding welfare policies in postcommunism were present already in the pre-World War I period. Moreover, the period of state socialism was internally differentiated: while the regime’s goal was to mobilize the female labor force immediately after World War II, following 1956, welfare policies were aimed at shifting gender roles to emphasize women’s maternal role. After the communist system collapsed, the research on gender and welfare policies in the region was at first engaged in characterizing the common trend of welfare policy refamilialization and then started to define and explain differences between CEE. New concepts, such as “degenderization,” started to play a role in placing gender at the center of analysis. The chapter concludes with remarks on how recent anti-feminist trends in public debates again inspire welfare policies aimed at retraditionalization and regenderization of work and care.

This chapter argues that in order to understand the historical trajectory of women’s representation in politics in Central-Eastern Europe since the collapse of state socialism, it is important to focus on the interaction of two main factors: the persistence of significant structural barriers over this period and the sustained efforts made by women’s advocates. Women had relatively high representation in communist legislatures, with scholars debating whether these women were merely tokens or could advance women’s interests. In the postcommunist period, there has been a gradual, albeit uneven, rise in women’s representation, including some notable women prime ministers and presidents in the 2010s and as European Union commissioners. Scholars point to some obstacles that are legacies of the communist system, such as the relegation of women in politics to “women’s issues,” women’s double burden, and stereotypes that women are unfit for leadership. Others point to obstacles that relate to the postcommunist competition for power, such as negative media representation, party-based candidate recruitment systems, and the function of the electoral systems. But, as considered in the literature on women’s substantive representation in the region, some women in politics have carved out authority on some social issues, some legislatures and parties have adopted gender quotas (even if they are only partially implemented in practice), and some gender equality advocates have promoted policies to increase the visibility of women and strengthen institutional structures focused on gender equality. This study shows that both structure and agency matter for women’s representation, and that the balance between agency and structure shifts over time and across countries.

Roman Krakovský’s State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia presents a multi-faceted social and cultural history of state socialism in Czechoslovakia from its dawn in the early postwar years to...