Immediately after 1989, newly emerging polities in Eastern Europe had to contend with an overbearing and dominant legacy: the Soviet model of the state. At that time, the strength of the state looked like a massive obstacle to change; less than a decade later, the state's dominant characteristic was no longer its overweening powerfulness, but rather its utter decrepitude. Consequently, the role of the central state in managing economies, providing social services, and maintaining infrastructure came into question. Focusing on his native Bulgaria, Venelin I. Ganev explores in fine-grained detail the weakening of the central state in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.Ganev starts with the structural characteristics of the Soviet satellites, and in particular the forms of elite agency favored in the socialist party-state. As state socialism collapsed, Ganev demonstrates, its institutional legacy presented functionaries who had become accustomed to power with a matrix of opportunities and constraints. In order to maximize their advantage under such conditions, these elites did not need a robust state apparatus—in fact, all of the incentives under postsocialism pushed them to subvert the infrastructure of governance.Throughout Preying on the State, Ganev argues that the causes of state malfunctioning go much deeper than the policy preferences of "free marketeers" who deliberately dismantled the state. He systematically analyzes the multiple dimensions, implications, and significance of the institutional and social processes that transformed the organizational basis of effective governance.
Автор: Cameron, Sarah I., Название: The hungry steppe : ISBN: 1501730436 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781501730436 Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan) Рейтинг: Цена: 7142.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание:
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society.
Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991.
Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
In this social and cultural history of Czechoslovakia's "gentle revolution," James Krapfl shifts the focus away from elites to ordinary citizens who endeavored—from the outbreak of revolution in 1989 to the demise of the Czechoslovak federation in 1992—to establish a new, democratic political culture. Unique in its balanced coverage of developments in both Czech and Slovak lands, including the Hungarian minority of southern Slovakia, this book looks beyond Prague and Bratislava to collective action in small towns, provincial factories, and collective farms.Through his broad and deep analysis of workers' declarations, student bulletins, newspapers, film footage, and the proceedings of local administrative bodies, Krapfl contends that Czechoslovaks rejected Communism not because it was socialist, but because it was arbitrarily bureaucratic and inhumane. The restoration of a basic "humanness"—in politics and in daily relations among citizens—was the central goal of the revolution. In the strikes and demonstrations that began in the last weeks of 1989, Krapfl argues, citizens forged new symbols and a new symbolic system to reflect the humane, democratic, and nonviolent community they sought to create. Tracing the course of the revolution from early, idealistic euphoria through turns to radicalism and ultimately subversive reaction, Revolution with a Human Face finds in Czechoslovakia’s experiences lessons of both inspiration and caution for people in other countries striving to democratize their governments.
Автор: Arnis Sauka , Danica Purg Название: Entrepreneurship in central and eastern europe ISBN: 1138228516 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781138228511 Издательство: Taylor&Francis Рейтинг: Цена: 10104.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: This text provides an overview of entrepreneurship in a range of important emerging markets. A team of expert contributors provide analysis of entrepreneurship practice. Empirical insight into how entrepreneurial firms in Central and Eastern Europe internationalize is supplemented with context provided by world-renowned editors.
Название: Historical memory of central and east european communism ISBN: 1138542261 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781138542266 Издательство: Taylor&Francis Рейтинг: Цена: 24499.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: This volume deals with the historical memory of the communist movement in Central and Eastern Europe when it was in power, with the memory of communism as a part of post-1989 left identity, and with state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes.
Описание: Much attention has been given to the role of intellectual dissidents, labor, and religion in the historic overthrow of communism in Poland during the 1980s. Books Are Weapons presents the first English-language study of that which connected them--the press. Siobhan Doucette provides a comprehensive examination of the Polish opposition's independent, often underground, press and its crucial role in the events leading to the historic Round Table and popular elections of 1989. While other studies have emphasized the role that the Solidarity movement played in bringing about civil society in 1980-1981, Doucette instead argues that the independent press was the essential binding element in the establishment of a true civil society during the mid- to late-1980s. Based on a thorough investigation of underground publications and interviews with important activists of the period from 1976-1989, Doucette shows how the independent press, rooted in the long Polish tradition of well-organized resistance to foreign occupation, reshaped this tradition to embrace nonviolent civil resistance while creating a network that evolved from a small group of dissidents into a broad opposition movement with cross-national ties and millions of sympathizers. It was the galvanizing force in the resistance to communism and the rebuilding of Poland's democratic society.
Описание: In this study in the psychology of communism, the author, taking Hungary as his example, examines the deliberate imposition of an alien political, social, and economic policy on the people of the seven European countries that the Soviet armies had overrun by the end of the war.<BR><BR>A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Описание: This book showcases extensive research on gender under state socialism, examining the subject in terms of state policy and law; sexuality and reproduction; the academy; leisure; the private sphere; the work world; opposition activism; and memory and identity.
Описание: The role of gender in the Middle East and North Africa is widely discussed - but often little understood. Seeking to close that gap, the authors of this comprehensive study explore a wide range of issues related to gender in the region as they have been unfolding since the Arab Spring.
Автор: Lebow Katherine Название: Unfinished Utopia ISBN: 0801451248 ISBN-13(EAN): 9780801451249 Издательство: Wiley EDC Рейтинг: Цена: 8580.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание:
"Unfinished Utopia is an extremely interesting and beautifully executed book.... This book will appeal to a very wide audience. It will of course interest historians of the Polish postwar first and foremost, but beyond that it will appeal to Eastern Europeanists and, notably, to historians of the Western European postwar as well. The book succeeds on many levels: as Polish history, as a history of postwar European recovery, as a history of Stalinism and of Communist identity formation, and, lastly, as a history of twentieth-century political and social transformations." — Eva Plach ? The Journal of Modern History
Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland’s "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.
Focusing on Nowa Huta’s construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.
Автор: Beissinger Название: Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe ISBN: 1107054176 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781107054172 Издательство: Cambridge Academ Рейтинг: Цена: 14256.00 р. Наличие на складе: Есть у поставщика Поставка под заказ.
Описание: This book takes stock of arguments about the historical legacies of communism that have become common within the study of Russia and East Europe, more than two decades after communism`s demise. It elaborates an empirical approach to the study of historical legacies revolving around relationships and mechanisms rather than correlation and outward similarities.
