Download or read book The Road to Disillusion From Critical Marxism to Post communism in Eastern Europe written by Raymond C. Taras and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Handbook of Political Science Research on the USSR and Eastern Europe written by Ray Taras and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1992-10-23 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical history of, and guide to, Soviet studies aims to take stock of the achievements and shortcomings in Western research on the region's politics and to serve as a "who's who" of Western Sovietologists, identifying many prominent political scientists from the former Communist states.
Download or read book The Devil in History written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
Download or read book Why Communism Did Not Collapse written by Martin K. Dimitrov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working to address the puzzling durability of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, which are the longest-lasting type of non-democratic regime to emerge after World War I. The volume conceptualizes the communist universe as consisting of the ten regimes in Eastern Europe and Mongolia that eventually collapsed in 1989–91, and the five regimes that survived the fall of the Berlin Wall: China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba. The essays offer a theoretical argument that emphasizes the importance of institutional adaptations as a foundation of communist resilience. In particular, the contributors focus on four adaptations: of the economy, of ideology, of the mechanisms for inclusion of potential rivals, and of the institutions of vertical and horizontal accountability. The volume argues that when regimes are no longer able to implement adaptive change, contingent leadership choices and contagion dynamics make collapse more likely.
Download or read book Between Utopia and Disillusionment written by Henri Vogt and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarly interpretations of the collapse of communism and developments thereafter have tended to be primarily concerned with people's need to rid themselves of the communist system, of their past. The expectations, dreams, and hopes that ordinary Eastern Europeans had when they took to the streets in 1989, and have had ever since, have therefore been overlooked - and our understanding of the changes in post-communist Europe has remained incomplete. Focusing primarily on five key areas, such as the heritage of 1989 revolutions, ambivalence, disillusionment, individualism, and collective identities, this book explores the expectations and goals that ordinary Eastern Europeans had during the 1989 revolutions and the decade thereafter, and also the problems and disappointments they encountered in the course of the transformation. The analysis is based on extensive interviews with university students and young intellectuals in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Estonia in the 1990s, which in themselves have considerable value as historical documents.
Download or read book One Hundred Years of Communist Experiments written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has communism’s humanist quest for freedom and social justice without exception resulted in the reign of terror and lies? The authors of this collective volume address this urgent question covering the one hundred years since Lenin’s coup brought the first communist regime to power in St. Petersburg, Russia in November 1917. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the varieties of communist fantasies of salvation, and the remaining three consider how communist experiments over many different times and regions attempted to manage economics, politics, as well as society and culture. Although each communist project was adapted to the situation of the country where it operated, the studies in this volume find that because of its ideological nature, communism had a consistent penchant for totalitarianism in all of its manifestations. This book is also concerned with the future. As the world witnesses a new wave of ideological authoritarianism and collectivistic projects, the authors of the nineteen essays suggest lessons from their analyses of communism’s past to help better resist totalitarian projects in the future.
Download or read book Civil Society in Communist Eastern Europe written by Matt Killingsworth and published by ECPR Press. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As well as promoting debates about liberal democracy, the dramatic events of 1989 also bought forth a powerful revival in the interest of the notion of civil society. This revival was reflected mainly in two broad tracts of literature. The first was primarily focused on the events surrounding the Solidarity movement in Poland and the tumultuous events of 1980-81. The second was concerned with the ‘Velvet Revolutions’ more broadly. Following the events of 1989, there appeared a number of works sharing the common central argument that civil society played a key role in the overthrow of these Communist regimes in 1989
Download or read book Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism written by Agnieszka Mrozik and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every political movement creates its own historical memory. The communist movement, though originally oriented towards the future, was no exception: The theory of human history constitutes a substantial part of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s writings, and the movement inspired by them very soon developed its own strong historical identity, combining the Marxist theory of history with the movement’s victorious milestones such as the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, which served as communist legitimization myths throughout almost the entire twentieth century. During the Stalinist period, however, the movement ́s history became strongly reinterpreted to suit Joseph Stalin’s political goals. After 1956, this reinterpretation lost most of its legitimating power and instead began to be a burden. The (unwanted) memory of Stalinism and subsequent examples of violence (the Gulag, Katyń, the 1956 Budapest uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring) contributed to the crisis of Eastern European state socialism in the late 1980s and led to attempts at reformulating or even rejecting communist self-identity. This book’s first section analyzes the post-1989 memory of communism and state socialism and the self-identity of the Eastern and Western European left. The second section examines the state-socialist and post-socialist memorial landscapes in the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. The final section concentrates on the narratives the movement established, when in power, about its own past, with the examples of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
Download or read book Central and Eastern Europe in Transition written by Frank H. Columbus and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 1998 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is part of a two-volume set presenting current analyses of political and economic developments and trends in central and Eastern Europe. In this volume, emphasis is on social and political developments. Coverage includes parties and party systems in Eastern Europe, Central European moralist diplomacy, the emergence of the Hungarian party system, educational reconstruction, and xenophobic attitudes towards migrants and ethnic minorities in the region. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Eastern Europe in the Postwar World written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book De Stalinising Eastern Europe written by Kevin McDermott and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique volume examines how and to what extent former victims of Stalinist terror from across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were received, reintegrated and rehabilitated following the mass releases from prisons and labour camps which came in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's reforms in the subsequent decade.
Download or read book The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 written by Peter Siani-Davies and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romanian Revolution of 1989 was the most spectacularly violent and remains today the most controversial of all the East European upheavals of that year. Despite (or perhaps because of) the media attention the revolution received, it remains shrouded in mystery. How did the seemingly impregnable Ceausescu regime come to be toppled so swiftly and how did Ion Iliescu and the National Salvation Front come to power? Was it by coup d'état? Who were the mysterious "terrorists" who wreaked such havoc on the streets of Bucharest and the other major cities of Romania? Were they members of the notorious securitate? What was the role of the Soviet Union?Blending narrative with analysis, Peter Siani-Davies seeks to answer these and other questions while placing the events and their immediate aftermath within a wider context. Based on fieldwork conducted in Romania and drawing heavily on Romanian sources, including television and radio transcripts, official documents, newspaper reports, and interviews, this book is the most thorough study of the Romanian Revolution that has appeared in English or any other major European language.Recognizing that a definitive history of these events may be impossible, Siani-Davies focuses on the ways in which participants interpreted the events according to particular scripts and myths of revolution rooted in the Romanian historical experience. In the process the author sheds light on the ways in which history and the conflicting retellings of the 1989 events are put to political use in the transitional societies of Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Central and Eastern Europe 1944 1993 written by Tibor Iván Berend and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious, comparative analysis of 'Eastern Bloc' economies during a period of revolutionary change.
Download or read book The End of Communist Power written by Leslie Holmes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Account of the collapse of the communist-ruled states. Analyses the nature of the legitimation crisis that developed following the failure of the economic reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, and considers the role of official corruption and anti-corruption campaigns. Includes a bibliography and an index. The author is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne.
Download or read book The Fall written by Steven Saxonberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a foreword by Seymour Lipset, Hoover Institution and George Mason University, USAThe Fall examines one of the twentieth century's great historical puzzles: why did the communist-led regimes in Eastern Europe collapse so quickly and why was the process of collapse so different from country to country? This major study explains why the impetus for change in Poland and Hungary came from the regimes themselves, while in Czechoslovakia and East Germany it was mass movements which led to the downfall of the regimes.
Download or read book Narratives Unbound written by Balázs Trencsényi and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first work that covers the post-Communist development of historical studies in six Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. A uniquely critical and qualitative analysis from a comparative and critical perspective, written by scholars from the region itself. Focusing on the first post-Communist decade, 1989–1999, the book offers a longer-term perspective that includes the immediate 'prehistory' of that momentous decade as well as its 'posthistoire'. The authors capture the spirit of 1989, that heady mix of elation, surprise, determination, and hope: l'ivresse du possible. This was the paradoxical beginning of Eastern European post-Communism: ushered in by 'anti-Utopian' revolutions, and slowly finding its course towards a bureaucratic, imitative, challenging, and anachronistic restoration of a capitalism that had changed almost beyond recognition when it had mutated into the negative double of Communism. Each individual chapter has numerous and detailed notes and references.
Download or read book From Revolution to Uncertainty written by Joachim von Puttkamer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout Eastern Europe, the unexpected and irrevocable fall of communism that began in the late 1980s presented enormous challenges in the spheres of politics and society, as well as at the level of individual experience. Excitement, uncertainty, and fear predicated the shaping of a new order, the outcome of which was anything but predetermined. Recent studies have focused on the ambivalent impact of capitalism. Yet, at the time, parliamentary democracy had equally few traditions to return to, and membership in the European Union was a distant dream at best. Nowadays, as new threats arise, Europe’s current political crises prompt us to reconsider how liberal democracy in Eastern Europe came about in the first place. This book undertakes an analysis of the year 1990 in several countries throughout Europe to consider the role of uncertainty and change in shaping political nations.
