The Cultural Policy of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1956
Author: Jana Neumannova
Publisher:
Published: 1981
Total Pages: 64
ISBN-13:
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Cinema in Service of the State
Author: Lars Karl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2015-12-01
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13: 1782389970
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.
Communist Parties Revisited
Author: Rüdiger Bergien
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2018-01-31
Total Pages: 383
ISBN-13: 1785337777
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries’ informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism
Author: S. A. Smith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-01-09
Total Pages: 834
ISBN-13: 0191667528
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.
The Prague Spring 1968
Author: Jarom¡r Navr til
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 1998-01-01
Total Pages: 656
ISBN-13: 9789639116153
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"In addition to revealing the events surrounding the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is the first book to document a Cold War crisis from both sides of the Iron Curtain. It is based on unprecedented access to the previously closed archives of each member of the Warsaw Pact, as well as once highly classified American documents from the National Security Council, CIA, and other intelligence agencies." "Presented in a highly readable volume, the book offers top-level documents from Kremlin Politburo meetings, multilateral sessions of the Warsaw Pact leading up to the decision to invade, transcripts of KGB-recorded telephone conversations between Leonid Brezhnev and Alexander Dubcek." "To provide a historical and political context, the editors have prepared essays to introduce each section of the volume. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information for the reader." "The editors have a unique perspective to offer to foreign audiences since they are members of the commission appointed by Vaclav Havel to investigate the events of 1967-1970."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation
Author: Bradley F. Abrams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9780742530249
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe material effects of World War II, in combination with Eastern Europe's disappointingly undemocratic interwar history, placed radical social change on the postwar agenda across the region and shaped the debates that took place in immediate postwar Czech society. These debates adopted both a cultural form, in struggles over the meaning of the recent past and the nation's position on the East-West continuum, and a directly political form, in battles over the meaning of socialism. The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation examines the most important and politically resonant fields of historical and cultural debate in Czech society immediately after World War II. Bradley Abrams finds that communist public figures were largely successful in controlling debate over the nation's recent past--the interwar First Republic and the experiences of Munich and World War II--and over its location on the East-West continuum. This success preceded and was mirrored in the struggles over the political issue of the times: socialism. The communists engaged their political foes in the democratic socialist and Roman Catholic camps, and, surprisingly, found significant support from a major Protestant church. Abrams's careful reading of major publications re-creates a postwar mood sympathetic to radical social change, questioning the standard view of the communists' rise to power. This book not only contributes to the specific literature on Czech history, but also raises questions about the relationship between war and radical social change, about the communist takeover of the region, and about the role of intellectuals in public life.
Communism: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Leslie Holmes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-08-27
Total Pages: 177
ISBN-13: 0199551545
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe collapse of communism was one of the most defining moments of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction examines the history behind the political, economic, and social structures of communism as an ideology.
Europe's Intellectuals and the Cold War
Author: Nancy Jachec
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-07-31
Total Pages: 411
ISBN-13: 0857738429
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1950, nearly 300 of Europe's leading artists, philosophers and writers formed an international society intended to end the Cold War. The European Society of Culture was composed of many of Western Europe's best-known intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Julien Benda, Albert Camus, Benedetto Croce, Andre Gide, J. B. Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Henri Matisse, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Albert Schweitzer, among many others; over the next twenty years it would also include many luminaries from the East, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georg Lukacs. Pioneering the earliest political discussions between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe that would serve as a model for the activities of the better-known CCF in its efforts to end communism, the ESC went on to create an informal but powerful, 1,600 member-strong cultural and political network across the world in pursuit of dialogue between the Marxist East and the liberal West, and in pursuit of peace and shared cultural values. Here, in this first, comprehensive history of the SEC's early years, Nancy Jachec demonstrates the influence its members had not only on preventing the isolation of Europe's eastern states, but on enabling the flow of people, publications and ideas from the West into the East, thus playing a vital role in introducing the ideals of human rights and cultural rights in the East in the run-up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. She also shows the profound impact that the SEC had on the development of post-colonial theory through the exchanges it organised between European and African intellectuals, directly shaping the expectations statesmen like Leopold Sedar Senghor, revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and institutions such as Unesco would have of culture in newly emerging countries.
Iron Curtain
Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2012-10-30
Total Pages: 803
ISBN-13: 0385536437
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Civil Society in Communist Eastern Europe
Author: Matt Killingsworth
Publisher: ECPR Press
Published: 2024-10-31
Total Pages: 118
ISBN-13: 1910259349
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs well as promoting debates about liberal democracy, the dramatic events of 1989 also bought forth a powerful revival in the interest of the notion of civil society. This revival was reflected mainly in two broad tracts of literature. The first focused primarily on events surrounding the Solidarity movement in Poland and the tumultuous events of 1980-81. The second was concerned with the Velvet Revolutions more broadly. Following the events of 1989, there appeared a number of works sharing the common central argument that civil society played a key role in the overthrow of these Communist regimes in 1989. Killingsworth's book presents three broad arguments, all of which reject the way civil society has been applied in the analysis of opposition and dissent in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, the GDR and Poland. First, it argues that the totalitarian nature of Soviet-type regimes means that it was not possible for a genuine civil society to exist. Second, the civil society paradigm, as it has been applied to opposition and dissent in Soviet-type regimes in Eastern Europe, lacks analytical rigour. Thirdly, the book argues that the dominant liberal interpretation of dissenting opposition in Soviet-type regimes is politically and morally flawed.
