After the 'Socialist Spring'

After the 'Socialist Spring' PDF Author: George Last
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

After the 'Socialist Spring'

After the 'Socialist Spring' PDF Author: George Last
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

After the 'socialist Spring'

After the 'socialist Spring' PDF Author: George Last
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455521
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Part III-Stable Instability: Economic Stagnation and the End of TransformationChapter 7-From Ulbright to Honecker; Chapter 8-Stabilisation and Stagnation; Chapter 9-Economic Crisis and Popular Dissatisfaction-The Road to 1989; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

The Greengrocer and His TV

The Greengrocer and His TV PDF Author: Paulina Bren
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.

Making Their Place

Making Their Place PDF Author: Katja Guenther
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804770727
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Offering a comparative analysis of feminist social movements in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism, this book offers a unique opportunity to examine how shifting gender relations interact with local identities to create new understandings of gender, the state, and strategies for resistance.

The Romance of American Communism

The Romance of American Communism PDF Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735501
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Writer and critic Vivian Gornick’s long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life “Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public.

Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond

Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond PDF Author: Friederike Kind-Kovács
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In many ways what is identified today as "cultural globalization" in Eastern Europe has its roots in the Cold War phenomena of samizdat ("do-it-yourself" underground publishing) and tamizdat (publishing abroad). This volume offers a new understanding of how information flowed between East and West during the Cold War, as well as the much broader circulation of cultural products instigated and sustained by these practices. By expanding the definitions of samizdat and tamizdat from explicitly political print publications to include other forms and genres, this volume investigates the wider cultural sphere of alternative and semi-official texts, broadcast media, reproductions of visual art and music, and, in the post-1989 period, new media. The underground circulation of uncensored texts in the Cold War era serves as a useful foundation for comparison when looking at current examples of censorship, independent media, and the use of new media in countries like China, Iran, and the former Yugoslavia.

Conversations with Gorbachev

Conversations with Gorbachev PDF Author: Mikhail Gorbachev
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231529279
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar were friends for half a century, since they first crossed paths as students in 1950. Although one was a Russian and the other a Czech, they were both ardent supporters of communism and socialism. One took part in laying the groundwork for and carrying out the Prague spring; the other opened a new political era in Soviet world politics. In 1993 they decided that their conversations might be of interest to others and so they began to tape-record them. This book is the product of that “thinking out loud” process. It is an absorbing record of two friends trying to explain to one another their views on the problems and events that determined their destinies. From reminiscences of their starry-eyed university days to reflections on the use of force to “save socialism” to contemplation of the end of the cold war, here is a far more candid picture of Gorbachev than we have ever seen before.

Countdown to Socialism

Countdown to Socialism PDF Author: Devin Nunes
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641771879
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 43

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Book Description
The Democratic Party has changed beyond recognition. Once the party of anti-communism and tax-cutting under President Kennedy, it is now dominated by a surging socialist movement and led by a presidential candidate who vows to “transform” America. On a near-daily basis, the Democrats are issuing radical proposals to socialize medicine, industry, and higher education. So how can the Democrats win elections when their agenda is so far to the left of the American people? That’s easy—it’s because the means of public debate are being manipulated. In Countdown to Socialism, Congressman Devin Nunes exposes the nexus between the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the social media corporations. These three entities cooperate to blast out the Democrats’ message and downplay their extremism while suppressing and censoring conservative points of view. Tens of millions of Americans are only seeing one side of the debate. The information they get from newspapers and social media is not “news”—it’s contrived content designed to help one political party and punish its opponents. In the run-up to the most consequential election of our lifetime, read this book to learn how your information is being skewed and regulated to force America onto the path to socialism.

Cities After the Fall of Communism

Cities After the Fall of Communism PDF Author: John Czaplicka
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Cities after the Fall of Communism traces the cultural reorientation of East European cities since 1989. Analyzing the architecture, commemorative practices, and urban planning of cities such as Lviv, Vilnius, and Odessa, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how history may be selectively re-imagined in light of present political and cultural realities. These essays show that while East European cities gravitate nostalgically toward Habsburg, Baltic, Imperial Russian, and Germanic pasts, they are also embracing new urban identities grounded in ethnic-national, European, Western, and global contexts. Ultimately, the editors argue that one can see a "New Europe" taking shape in these cities, where a strained discourse between different versions of the past and variously envisioned futures is being set in stone, steel, and glass.

Which Socialism, Whose D‚tente?

Which Socialism, Whose D‚tente? PDF Author: Maud Bracke
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789637326943
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
"The 1968-1969 Czechoslovak crisis was first and foremost a major crisis of European detente. While the Prague Spring was made possible by the immediate and unchecked consequences of early detente in Europe, its crushing sharply brought out the contradictions of detente as understood by the global Cold War protagonists. In a similar way as the Czecho-slovak crisis reflected the ambivalence at the heart of detente, the West European Communist Parties' responses to it revealed the ambivalence of detente as a context for radical social change, either in the East of the West. The scholarly literature on the PCI and PCF has, often in an unproblematic way, understood the shift from Cold War to detente on the European continent in the mid-1960s as a development essentially positive to these parties. The present study argues against this and demonstrates how the shift from the Cold War of the 1950s to detente in Europe reformulated the impasse of revolution or radical change in the West, rather than putting an end to it." Book jacket.