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 collection of well researched chapters assesses the uses and misuses of history 25 years after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. As opposed to the emphasis on the recovery of ...memory or revival of national histories that seemed to be the prevelant historiographical approaches of the 1990s, the last decade has seen a particular set of narratives equating Nazism and communism and so providing opportunities to exonerate wartime collaboration, cast the nation as victim even when its government was allied with Germany, and acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust while obfuscating its meaning and significance. In their comparative analysis the authors are also interested in new practices of performing ‘Europeanness’. Therefore their presentations of Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian post-communist memory politics move beyond the common national myths in order to provide a new insight into transnational interactions and exchanges in Europe in general. The juxtaposition of these politics, the processes in other parts of Europe, the modes of remembering shaped by displacement and the transnational memory practices enable a close encounter with the divergences and assess the potential of the formation of common, European memory practices.
The Emergence of Global Maoism examines the spread of Mao Zedong's writings, ideology, and institutions when they traveled outside of China. Matthew Galway links Chinese Communist Party efforts to ...globalize Maoism to the dialectical engagement of exported Maoism by Cambodian Maoist intellectuals. How do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin? Galway analyzes how universal ideological systems became localized, both in Mao's indigenization of Marxism-Leninism and in the Communist Party of Kampuchea's indigenization of Maoism into its own revolutionary ideology. By examining the intellectual journeys of CPK leaders who, during their studies in Paris in the 1950s, became progressive activist-intellectuals and full-fledged Communists, he shows that they responded to political and socioeconomic crises by speaking back to Maoism—adapting it through practice, without abandoning its universality. Among Mao's greatest achievements, the Sinification of Marxism enabled the CCP to canonize Mao's thought and export it to a progressive audience of international intellectuals. These intellectuals would come to embrace the ideology as they set a course for social change. The Emergence of Global Maoism illuminates the process through which China moved its goal from class revolution to a larger anticolonial project that sought to cast out European and American imperialism from Asia.
Post-Soviet social Collier, Stephen J
2011., 20110808, 2011, 2011-08-08
eBook
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across ...a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.
Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state ...itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ‘organized over-world’, the ‘state employing mafia methods’ and the ’adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework.The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.
The past may be approached from a variety of directions. A myth provides a sense of direction: it reunites people around certain values and projects and pushes them in one direction or another. The ...present volume brings together a range of case studies of myth making and myth breaking in east Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, it focuses on the complex process through which memories are transformed into myths. This problematic interplay between memory and myth-making is analyzed in conjunction with the role of myths in the political and social life of the region. The essays include cases of forging myths about national pre-history, about the endorsement of nation building by means of historiography, and above all, about communist and post-communist mythologies. The studies shed new light on the creation of local and national identities, as well as the legitimization of ideologies through myth-making. Together, the individual contributions show that myths were often instrumental in the vast projects of social and political mobilization during a period which has witnessed, among others, two world wars and the harsh oppression of the communist regimes.
