Twenty Years After Communism
Twenty Years After Communism

Author: Michael H. Bernhard

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0199375143

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"Remembering the past, especially as collectivity, is a political process, thus the politics of memory and commemoration is an integral part of the establishment of new political regimes, new identities, and new principles of political legitimacy. This volume is about the explosion of the politics of memory triggered by the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe, particularly about the politics of its commemoration twenty years later. It offers seventeen in-depth case studies, an original theoretical framework, and a comparative study of memory regime types and their origins. Four different kinds of mnemonic actors are identified: mnemonic warriors, mnemonic pluralists, mnemonic abnegators, and mnemonic prospectives. Their combinations render three different types of memory regimes: fractured, pillarized, and unified. Disciplined comparative analysis shows how several different configurations of factors affect the emergence of mnemonic actors and different varieties of memory regimes. There are three groups of causal factors that influence the political form of the memory regime: the range of structural constraints the actors face (e.g., the type of regime transformation), cultural constraints linked to past political conflict (e.g., salient ethnic or religious cleavages), and cultural and strategic choices actors make (e.g. framing post-communist political identities)"--

Remembering Communism
Remembering Communism

Author: Maria N. Todorova

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 9633860326

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Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

A Normal Country
A Normal Country

Author: Andrei Shleifer

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780674015821

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This book offers a firsthand glimpse into the intellectual challenges that Russia's turbulent transition generated. It deals with many of the most important reforms, from Gorbachev's half-hearted "perestroika," to the mass privatization program, to the efforts to build legal and regulatory institutions of a market economy.

Twenty Years After Communism
Twenty Years After Communism

Author: Michael Bernhard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-07-02

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0199375151

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While the fall of the Berlin Wall is positively commemorated in the West, the intervening years have shown that the former Soviet Bloc has a more complicated view of its legacy. In post-communist Eastern Europe, the way people remember state socialism is closely intertwined with the manner in which they envision historical justice. Twenty Years After Communism is concerned with the explosion of a politics of memory triggered by the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe, and it takes a comparative look at the ways that communism and its demise have been commemorated (or not commemorated) by major political actors across the region. The book is built on three premises. The first is that political actors always strive to come to terms with the history of their communities in order to generate a sense of order in their personal and collective lives. Second, new leaders sometimes find it advantageous to mete out justice on the politicians of abolished regimes, and whether and how they do so depends heavily on their interpretation and assessment of the collective past. Finally, remembering the past, particularly collectively, is always a political process, thus the politics of memory and commemoration needs to be studied as an integral part of the establishment of new collective identities and new principles of political legitimacy. Each chapter takes a detailed look at the commemorative ceremony of a different country of the former Soviet Bloc. Collectively the book looks at patterns of extrication from state socialism, patterns of ethnic and class conflict, the strategies of communist successor parties, and the cultural traditions of a given country that influence the way official collective memory is constructed. Twenty Years After Communism develops a new analytical and explanatory framework that helps readers to understand the utility of historical memory as an important and understudied part of democratization.

The Black Book of Communism
The Black Book of Communism

Author: Stéphane Courtois

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 920

ISBN-13: 9780674076082

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This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

Museums of Communism
Museums of Communism

Author: Stephen M. Norris

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0253050316

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How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.

Islam after Communism
Islam after Communism

Author: Adeeb Khalid

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-02-08

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0520957865

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How do Muslims relate to Islam in societies that experienced seventy years of Soviet rule? How did the utopian Bolshevik project of remaking the world by extirpating religion from it affect Central Asia? Adeeb Khalid combines insights from the study of both Islam and Soviet history to answer these questions. Arguing that the sustained Soviet assault on Islam destroyed patterns of Islamic learning and thoroughly de-Islamized public life, Khalid demonstrates that Islam became synonymous with tradition and was subordinated to powerful ethnonational identities that crystallized during the Soviet period. He shows how this legacy endures today and how, for the vast majority of the population, a return to Islam means the recovery of traditions destroyed under Communism. Islam after Communism reasons that the fear of a rampant radical Islam that dominates both Western thought and many of Central Asia’s governments should be tempered with an understanding of the politics of antiterrorism, which allows governments to justify their own authoritarian policies by casting all opposition as extremist. Placing the Central Asian experience in the broad comparative perspective of the history of modern Islam, Khalid argues against essentialist views of Islam and Muslims and provides a nuanced and well-informed discussion of the forces at work in this crucial region.

Lost in Transition
Lost in Transition

Author: Kristen Ghodsee

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-09-14

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0822351021

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Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past.

Red Hangover
Red Hangover

Author: Kristen Ghodsee

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 082237241X

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In Red Hangover Kristen Ghodsee examines the legacies of twentieth-century communism twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall fell. Ghodsee's essays and short stories reflect on the lived experience of postsocialism and how many ordinary men and women across Eastern Europe suffered from the massive social and economic upheavals in their lives after 1989. Ghodsee shows how recent major crises—from the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Syrian Civil War to the rise of Islamic State and the influx of migrants in Europe—are linked to mistakes made after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc when fantasies about the triumph of free markets and liberal democracy blinded Western leaders to the human costs of "regime change." Just as the communist ideal has become permanently tainted by its association with the worst excesses of twentieth-century Eastern European regimes, today the democratic ideal is increasingly sullied by its links to the ravages of neoliberalism. An accessible introduction to the history of European state socialism and postcommunism, Red Hangover reveals how the events of 1989 continue to shape the world today.

The Long 1989
The Long 1989

Author: Piotr H. Kosicki

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2019-08-14

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9633862841

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The fall of communism in Europe is now the frame of reference for any mass mobilization, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to Brexit. Even thirty years on, 1989 still figures as a guide and motivation for political change. It is now a platitude to call 1989 a "world event," but the chapters in this volume show how it actually became one. The authors of these nine essays consider how revolutionary events in Europe resonated years later and thousands of miles away: in China and South Africa, Chile and Afghanistan, Turkey and the USA. They trace the circulation of people, practices, and concepts that linked these countries, turning local developments into a global phenomenon. At the same time, they examine the many shifts that revolution underwent in transit. All nine chapters detail the process of mutation, adaptation, and appropriation through which foreign affairs found new meanings on the ground. They interrogate the uses and understandings of 1989 in particular national contexts, often many years after the fact. Taken together, this volume asks how the fall of communism in Europe became the basis for revolutionary action around the world, proposing a paradigm shift in global thinking about revolution and protest.