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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to expose librarians, scholars and other interested parties to the numerous films available concerning the 1989 and 1991 European revolutions. The films that are discussed can potentially be used as ancillary sources that will lead to a more in-depth understanding of these topics. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is a literature review examining films relating to the 1989 and 1991 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The findings are presented in the form of an annotated bibliography. Findings: A total of 24 films from eight countries are presented in this annotated bibliography. Originality/value: In researching this paper, the authors have been unable to find any similar works, which makes this work of particular value to those wanting to learn more about this period of change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes an extension of the understanding of 1968 in a threefold manner: an extension of the timeframe of the events (the action in '68), a further extension to include the legacy of 1968, and a spatial-geographical expansion to make the analysis global. By elaborating on these extensions, the article considers 1968 as a global moment in which diverse histories converge and then diverge again, while the synchronicity of events generates an enhanced consciousness of the world, making the outlines of larger structures and connections more visible. Seeing 1968 in this way, the article argues, can provide a more adequate grasp on eastern Europe's '68 and its variegations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to analyze and evaluate the achievements of research on cultural diplomacy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the last years. The present review does not claim to a complete coverage of recent literature but concentrates on characterizing the basic tendencies and conceptual innovations in the chosen field of study. Our analysis allows to identify several current tendencies. Thus, historians are expanding their understanding of cultural diplomacy and integrating new objects of research. One of the most important trends is the study of agency within cultural diplomacy, e. g. of private-state networks or individual and collective actors of cultural diplomacy with their dynamically changing motivations and complicated interdependence with party-state structures and their own cultural practices. These were communicated by the transnational networks and at the same time kept very stable. The analysis of the phenomenon of cultural diplomacy was extended to intercultural communication in the realm of consumer and mass culture and the media landscape. This landscape was transforming in the post-war period and offered new possibilities to communicate cultural messages and to create new channels for cultural transfer One of the achievements of recent scholarly research on the subject can certainly be seen in the acknowledgment of the paradigm of plural modernity which expands the conventional frames of the "bipolar system" allegedly shaped by the insurmountable discrepancies between capitalism and socialism and allows to approach the world order of the Cold War in a more balanced and diverse way emphasizing not only antagonisms but also similarities. Socialist cultures in a national 'cover' contradicting ideology and speaking the language of Enlightenment find a place in this paradigm, as do fragmented identities. Therefore the study of Soviet cultural diplomacy in Eastern Europe contributes to the recent interdisciplinary discussion on pluralistic modernity, to the cultural diversity of the Cold War, to the dynamics of global trends within consumer culture, and to media and transnational communication in general. In the future, it would be desirable to see more studies that define the criteria of the efficiency of cultural diplomacy more precisely and formulate descriptive models and scenarios of cultural diplomacy for individual regions and countries. New topics will complement this so far only fragmentarily analyzed research landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against what can be called a “double ontological erasure” of state socialism in eastern Europe, by both the east European right-wing intelligentsia and the west European militant left. In an effort to challenge said erasure, the paper draws on the journalistic and fictional work of Bulgaria's major dissident writer of the 1970s, Georgi Markov. Against mainstream readings of his work as staunchly anti-communist, the paper suggests that Markov makes at least three major contributions to the “communist hypothesis” from the perspective of eastern Europe. First, by offering a “postcolonial” (rather than a political-economic) critique of the “cult of things” and consumerism in the region. Second, by developing a truly immanent critique of state socialism from the position of the communist ideal. Lastly, by proposing what could be called a “communism of the abject” among individuals and communities on the margins of socialist governmentality. Arguably, this triple contribution not only proffers a more nuanced and complex understanding of life under socialism, but also has important insights for contemporary debates on the left today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beginnings of Pugwash overlapped with the first stage of the process of de-Stalinization, which had a marked effect on science and on scientific cooperation across the Iron Curtain. In the international context of the late 1950s, Pugwash enabled Soviet officials and scientists to play an active part in the international community at the very point when the World Peace Council (a Soviet front organization) was experiencing its deepest crisis. Despite political pressure from Moscow, the various Academies of Sciences in East European countries, which represented Pugwash national committees in their respective societies, managed to benefit from these circumstances. They developed important contacts with Western analysts such as Henry Kissinger, Paul Doty, and Marshall Shulman. This cooperation helped to shape the research agenda in Eastern Europe, though its scope was still controlled by the USSR. Nevertheless, after 1975—and most importantly after 1982—Pugwash managed to establish contact with non-Communist peace activists and dissident movements in Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that the ideological revolutions of the twentieth century were fundamentally about human rights, and human dignity in particular. By human dignity, I refer to an amalgam of primarily economic but also social and political rights. Throughout the century, revolutionaries capitalized on conditions of human rights deprivations under the ruling regime and mobilized supporters based on promises of rectification. Regime changes were far less about ideology (e.g., communism, democracy) than they were about ensuring human dignity. In most cases, the new ideologies and elites driving change brought new sets of human dignity shortcomings with them. I explore this argument with an in-depth analysis of regime change in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century and Poland at the end. In each case, I find that promises of human dignity, starting with ensuring the preservation of life and basic economic conditions for survival, were the rallying point for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the political urgency and moral indispensability of coming to terms with the traumatic legacies of the past following the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. Topics covered include the impact of several intellectuals that emerged during the period and several conclusions that were formed based on analyses of the struggles of former communist countries like Romania and Czechoslovakia.

An introduction is presented that discusses the notion of Sovietization in Eastern European history, noting issue articles on topics including films and literature about Sovietization in western Ukraine, urbanization in Belarus, and the history of Soviet Karelia.

The article discusses various presentations made at a conference on the legacy of multinational empires and nation-building in eastern Europe during 1917-1923, held at the Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt an der Oder university in Frankfurt, Germany. Topics discussed at the conference included the struggle for political power between Jewish and non-Jewish people in Poland and Lithuania during 1917-1921; and the state-building processes in East Central Europe.

The article presents the proceedings of the conference "Cultural Hegemonies in Spaces of Diversity: Second Annual Conference of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies," held on July 5-9, 2015 in Regensburg, Germany, featuring presentations by Johanna Bockman, Ada Raev, and Maria-Alina Asavei.

Information regarding the May 29-30, 2015 workshop entitled "Epistemologies of In-Betweenness: East Central Europe and the World History of Social Science, 1890-1945" is presented. Topics include a comparative study of the development of legal realism in the early 20th century, the history of sociology in Hungary, and neoliberalism in the late Habsburg Empire. Presenters include scholars Jan Surman, Quinn Slobodian, and Katherine Lebow.

The article presents a report from a July 11, 2014 conference in Berlin, Germany on 20th-century migration to Eastern Central Europe hosted by the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas Leipzig historical society, the Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung – Institut der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft Marburg historical institutes, and the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin college, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde Eastern European historical society. Topics of presentations delivered included return immigration to East-Central Europe, Russian emigration to East-Central Europe after the Russian revolution, and the emigration of Spaniards to East-Central Europe.

During the Greek civil war (1946 -1949), on the basis of a special decision of the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece adopted in the name of "saving the children from the horrors of war", around 28 000 Macedonian and Greek children were evacuated from the areas affected by military actions. Their originally planned short residence in the Eastern European countries lasted a whole decade as a direct consequence of the civil war, in which forces grouped around the Communist Party of Greece were defeated. Although new destinations -- children's homes and boarding schools in the involved countries -- handled the necessary conditions for normal life, education and recreation, the desire of the Macedonian children and their parents was their permanent destinations to be in Yugoslavia respectively the People's Republic of Macedonia, the largest center of Macedonian refugee population from Greece. Repatriation of children will be found in the center of the Cominform conflict and disrupted relations between the countries concerned with the issue of children. Therefore, their arrival in PRM or in the countries where were their parents, will be intensified in the middle of the fifth decade of last century, after the death of Stalin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of articles in this issue on topics such as the monetary policy of the United States after the U.S. Civil War in the late 19th century, the Soviet Union and the creation of its borders in the 1917-1924 period, and the legal aspects of colonial treaties.

The essay discusses the ways Eastern European people, with a focus on artists, represent and view themselves in relation to how they and their region are viewed by others. Topics include the recognition of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the region's relationship with the Soviet Union, and forms of art and culture in the region before and after 1989.

The article considers the history of federalism in East-Central Europe, noting the interrelationship between federalism with nationalism and political security and/or insecurity. It focuses predominantly on the interwar period and the early years of the Cold War. Subjects considered include the Little Entente formed between Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia; Hungary; and the Bulgarian group called Zveno. The impact of such ideas on contemporary politics of the European Union regarding East-Central Europe countries is explored.

The article challenges recent arguments about German relations with eastern Europe that stress pathological continuities, implying a new Sonderweg centred on German violence and expansionism in the region. It examines German policies towards Polish-speaking populations in the Imperial Government-General of Warsaw during the First World War and Nazi debates about whether to include the Polish city of Łódź in the Reich at the beginning of the Second World War. The article suggests that a key similarity existed in German imaginations of the region as an imperial space to be dominated, but that these imaginations competed with ideology, agency and contingency in both world wars. In uncovering key continuities and discontinuities between the two occupation regimes in Poland, it complicates arguments about the singularity and causality of a particular German mission in eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the issue is presented in which the editors focus on the government policy in Eastern European countries in the 1980s and 1990s, reflect on the art of governing in these countries, and discuss the change in local government and decentralization in these countries.

The article reports on a conference on the history of Eastern Europe, held in Freudenstadt, Germany, from May 2-3, 2013. Topics of discussion included Russian tourists in Davos, Switzerland, in the late 19th century, industrial photography in Russia before the 1917 revolution, and the German occupation of Eastern Europe during World War I.

The twentieth century was undoubtedly the bloodiest hundred years in the history of humanity. In this final century of the second millennium more humans suffered from various state-sponsored programs and institutions of mass murder than during the whole stretch of written century. In the twentieth century tens of millions of humans fell victim to these so-called "redeeming" religious and political ideologies. The bloodiest of these ideologies included: (1) an extreme form of nationalism that culminated in racism; (2) applied Marxism that hid under the mantle of Bolshevism and Stalinism; (3) national socialism that manifested itself in Fascism and Nazism; and finally (4) the recently emerging Fundamentalist Islam that attempted to tear down the structure and achievements of Western Christian Civilization. These "redeeming ideologies" competed against each other in their efforts to torture, torment, and annihilate tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of human beings. The best known among these mass exterminations is undoubtedly the Holocaust, which resulted in the torturous death of six million Jews or alleged Jews, among them several hundred-thousand Hungarians. This centrally planned and meticulously executed extermination process is so well known that nowadays it is part of general human consciousness everywhere in the world. Sadly, this does not apply to the other 20th-century mass extermination known as the Gulag, which is not part of that consciousness. In point of fact, one still encounters scholars who don't even believe that the Gulag had ever existed. While Holocaust-research is pursued in the United States at several dozen universities, museums, libraries and various other research centers, this does not apply to the Gulag, which is hardly known to the general public. This is also true for American university students, of whom -- based on my own experiences -- less than five percent is aware of this modern form of slavery and mass extermination. The goal of this paper is to summarize briefly the type of Gulag-research pursued in the United States, which -- in absence of specialized research institutes -- is pursued mostly by individual scholars. Toward the end of this study, reference is also made to the "Gulag-consciousness" and "Gulag-research" in Hungary -- which also leaves much to be desired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transitional justice emerged as a working concept from the need to clarify the relationship between victims and perpetrators and the latters' guilt, after the collapse of abusive regimes in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Since 1995 it has been defined in many ways, by many scholars, according either to its means and goals or to its actors. It has become a very broad concept, describing actions of justice, reparation, search for the truth and reform. While transitional justice policies should result in giving more coherence to a shuttered society, there are at least two threats that must be taken into consideration. One is to transform it into a political myth, by allowing the political factor to confiscate it, the other is to expand its area of concerns in order to cover aspects of daily social problems. The role of the civil society is very important to limit these threats, although what it is that we name "civil society" is still under scholarly debate. The analyses published in this issue of History of Communism in Europe cover these problems in their case studies which come from Latin America or the former Soviet bloc. Most of them stress on the very important role the grassroots actions of members of civil society have on "settling accounts" with the past, actions that seem to be born out of the inefficient "official" measures taken at state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of the novel "Banket u Blitvi" by Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža. Based on a close reading of the character Oktavijan Deziderije Kronberg, the author suggests possible literary and artistic influences on Krleža of Hungarian author Desző Kosztolányi. The reflection of the political and historical context of 20th-century Eastern Europe in the novel is also discussed.

The article introduces this special issue of the journal, which is dedicated to social and institutional change and legal history in Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.

Information about several papers discussed at a conference held May 11-12, 2012 at the Center for Historical Studies and Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, titled "East Central Europe in the Twentieth Century. Roundtable on the State of the Art of Historical Studies," is presented. Topics include regional intellectual history, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and communism in East Central Europe.

A report is presented from an April 18-20, 2012 conference in Berlin, Germany on the history of regional identities in Central and Eastern Europe. Topics of discussion included the destruction of Eastern European cultures by Nazis seeking German expansion, Soviet resettlement of Slovaks, and the history curricula of schools in Polish-German borderlands.

Information is presented on several papers discussed at a conference held in Vienna, Austria from September 28-30, 2011, about East European borders in the 20th centuries. Topics include socialism, ethnic conflict, and migration policy. The conference featured several scholars including Alfred Rieber, Nikola Vukov, and Muriel Blaive.

From the 1950s on, historical and spacial dimension were constructed regarding Soviet Union and the Antarctic continent. From these new perceptions, mechanism os transnational and global interactions were created. The article aims at providing a new viewpoint to observe the Eastern Europe and the Cold War histories.

This article discusses the importance of the availability of information in making the decision to emigrate. It argues that this had a major impact on Jewish emigration: the availability of knowledge alleviated the fear involved in moving to a new land and enabled hundreds of thousands to carry out their decision. The ramified activity of the information bureaux laid a foundation of data that became more and more sophisticated as the volume of emigration increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses twentieth century policy toward war victims and veterans in Eastern Europe. It provides an overview of twentieth century conflicts in Eastern Europe, particularly examining World War I and World War II and considering the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The Kosovo War of 1998-1999 is also explored. The author assesses several common themes, including issues of remembrance, the reintegration of veterans into society and the labor force, and the involvement of veterans in politics.

This article discusses the tendency of many post-communist states to present their past sufferings as genocides. It ties this “search of lost genocides” to the concept of “historical policy” and its intellectual and political promoters throughout the post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, concentrating on the case of Azerbaijan, Georgia and its breakaway regions, Ukraine, and the Baltic States and demonstrates how newly established states and their political elites invest significant efforts in constructing the vision of various cataclysmic events as genocides. Thus, this process has (and will continue to have) an impact on global politics as a result of recognition/denial disputes, often waged in foreign countries' legislatures, conflicts that affect third-party states and international organisations, and attempts to use genocides as a tool to induce international involvement in political conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's opinions about the terminology used in discussions of southern and eastern areas of Europe, including Southeastern Europe and East Central Europe. Comparisons are drawn between the geographic, political, and cultural connotations of the descriptions. The terms' origins are traced to national socialist and Soviet regimes, where, the author argues, they were used as political constructs and impositions on territories the regimes wished to acquire. Suggestions are included for alternative terminology and research perspectives more inclusive of lifestyle, ethnic identity, and terrain.

The author focuses on the historiography of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. He remarks that Eastern Europe experience and history was outside the generally accepted history canon of the USSR and Western Europe, and thus was overlooked and misunderstood. Communist and nationalist movements beginning in roughly 1917 isolated the area from Western Europe and the Soviet Union. During the rise of the Nazi regime and World War II, Eastern Europe became the area in which both Germany and the USSR committed a vast array of atrocities, including mass murders and widespread deportations. The period after World War II saw the area come under communist rule as the Eastern Bloc.

Discusses the significance and meaning of the return of postsocialism in Eastern Europe. Postsocialism as a way back to historical truth and to the roots of the nation; Implications of the 1989 revolutions to the historical process of modernization.

The article reports on a conference on the history of natural resources management in Eastern Central Europe, held in Marburg, Germany, from April 18-19, 2013. Topics of discussion included the mining industry in Hungary in the early 19th century, the exploitation of raw materials in Estonia in the 20th century, and the nuclear energy industry in the Soviet Union.

Information about the June 2012 conference entitled “Challenges of Modernity: Spatial Integration and Industrialisation in the 20th Century and Eastern Europe,” the annual conference of the Imre Kertész Kolleg at Friedrich Schiller University, is presented. Topics include economic liberalization in Czechoslovakia, the creation of infrastructure in nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary, and Poland's industrialization in the interwar period. The symposium featured several historians including Ivan Jakubec, Gábor Gyáni, and Martin Myant.

A report is presented from an April 19-20, 2012 conference on the history of Eastern European political borders in the 20th century in Tübingen, Germany. Topics of discussion included the effects of natural geography on the formation of national borders, spatial perception, and the aesthetics of cartography.

Discusses the process of change in the politics and societies in East Central Europe. Importance of the weight of the past to the political transition of Eastern Europe; Relevance of the socialization patterns to change.