Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the ...uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life.Manufacturing a Socialist Modernitycomplicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s.With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers.Manufacturing a Socialist Modernityis the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.
After Hitler, Before Stalinexamines the crucial postwar period in Slovakia, following Nazi occupation and ending with the Communist coup of February1948. Centering his work around the major political ...role of the Catholic Church and its leaders, James Ramon Felak offers a fascinating study of the interrelationship of Slovak Catholics, Democrats, and Communists. He provides an in-depth examination of Communist policies toward Catholics and their strategies to court Catholic voters, and he chronicles the variety of political stances Catholics maintained during Slovakia's political turmoil.Felak opens by providing a background on pre-war and wartime Slovak politics, notably the rise of Slovak Catholic nationalism and Slovakia's alignment with Nazi Germany during World War II. He then describes the union formed in the famed "April Agreement" of 1946 between the Democratic Party and Catholics that guaranteed a landslide victory for the Democrats and insured a position for Catholics in the new regime. Felak views other major political events of the period, including: the 1947 Czechoslovak war crimes trial of Father Jozef Tiso; education policy; the treatment of the Hungarian minority; the trumped-up "anti-state conspiracy" movement led by police in the Fall of 1947; and the subsequent Communist putsch.Through extensive research in Slovak national archives, including those of the Democratic and Communist parties, After Hitler, Before Stalin assembles a comprehensive study of the predominant political forces and events of this tumultuous period and the complex motivations behind them.
Age of Fear Michalek, Slavomir; Stefansky, Michal; Umland, Andreas
2019, 20190430, Letnik:
201
eBook
Czechoslovakia played an important role within the Soviet bloc, yet its history remains underresearched. This monograph blends historical analysis of the superpowers' foreign policies with an ...assessment of their impact on Czechoslovakia and its position within the Soviet bloc. The book thereby places Czechoslovakia on the map of Cold War history, i.e. the era of "mutually assured destruction" that lasted almost half a century. It provides a lucid introduction to some milestones in international Cold War history in their relation to Czecho-Slovak history. The book's novel contribution is to explain Czechoslovakia's domestic situation during the Cold War from the "outside." Drawing on extensive source materials of Slovak, Czech, American, and Russian provenance, it provides a more comprehensive understanding of postwar Czecho-Slovak history while also contributing to general knowledge about the nature and impact of the Cold War.
Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized and helped to carry out the forced relocation of German speakers from their homes across central and southern Europe to ...Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable-between 12,000,000 and 14,000,000 civilians, most of them women and children-and the losses horrifying-at least 500,000 people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, while locked in trains en route, or after arriving in Germany exhausted, malnourished, and homeless. This book is the first in any language to tell the full story of this immense man-made catastrophe.
Based mainly on archival records of the countries that carried out the forced migrations and of the international humanitarian organizations that tried but failed to prevent the disastrous results,Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World Waris an authoritative and objective account. It examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the expulsions were conceived, planned, and executed and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The book is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing," and it may also be the most significant untold story of the Second World War.
When the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina broke out a baffled world sought explanations from a range of experts who offered a variety of reasons for the conflict. The author of this study takes Bosnian ...affairs seriously and in so doing makes it much easier to grasp why the war occurred.
After the entry of the Red Army into Czechoslovak territory in 1945, Red Army authorities began to arrest and deport Czechoslovak citizens to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The regions most ...affected were Eastern and South Slovakia and Prague. The Czechoslovak authorities repeatedly requested a halt to the deportations and that the deported Czechoslovaks be returned immediately. It took a long time before these protests generated any response. Czechoslovak Diplomacy and the Gulag focuses on the diplomatic and political aspects of the deportations. The author explains the steps taken by the Czechoslovak Government in the repatriation agenda from 1945 to 1953 and reconstructs the negotiations with the Soviets. The research tries to answer the question of why and how the Russians deported the civilian population from Czechoslovakia which was their allied country already during the war. Key words: 1. World War, 1939–1945—Deportations from Czechoslovakia. 2. Forced labor—Soviet Union—History. 3. Labor camps—Soviet Union—History. 4. Czechs—Soviet Union—History. 5. Slovaks—Soviet Union--History. 6. Czechoslovakia—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 7. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—Czechoslovakia. 8. Czechoslovakia—Foreign relations—1945–1992. 9. Repatriation—Czechoslovakia—History.
Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the ...regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism. The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Restoring the voice of the working class in history, Musić presents Yugoslavia's workers actors in their own right, rather than as a mass easily manipulated by nationalist or populist politicians. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
The eighteen articles in this book present fresh looks at the meaning of politics, praxis, labour, dialectics and modernity in the work of Czech philosopher Karel Kosík, best known for his book ...Dialectics of the Concrete.
In the first political analysis of unemployment in a socialist
country, Susan Woodward argues that the bloody conflicts that are
destroying Yugoslavia stem not so much from ancient ethnic hatreds
as ...from the political and social divisions created by a failed
socialist program to prevent capitalist joblessness. Under
Communism the concept of socialist unemployment was considered an
oxymoron; when it appeared in postwar Yugoslavia, it was dismissed
as illusory or as a transitory consequence of Yugoslavia's
unorthodox experiments with worker-managed firms. In Woodward's
view, however, it was only a matter of time before countries in the
former Soviet bloc caught up with Yugoslavia, confronting the same
unintended consequences of economic reforms required to bring
socialist states into the world economy. By 1985, Yugoslavia's
unemployment rate had risen to 15 percent. How was it that a
labor-oriented government managed to tolerate so clear a violation
of the socialist commitment to full employment? Proposing a
politically based model to explain this paradox, Woodward analyzes
the ideology of economic growth, and shows that international
constraints, rather than organized political pressures, defined
government policy. She argues that unemployment became politically
"invisible," owing to its redefinition in terms of guaranteed
subsistence and political exclusion, with the result that it
corrupted and ultimately dissolved the authority of all political
institutions. Forced to balance domestic policies aimed at
sustaining minimum standards of living and achieving productivity
growth against the conflicting demands of the world economy and
national security, the leadership inadvertently recreated the
social relations of agrarian communities within a postindustrial
society.
