communism

This study deals with the idea of nationalism in the thinking of Slovak communist intellectuals from the early 1920s until the end of the 1960s. The variety of roles that national communism took during these decades are detailed, including an “intellectual exercise” in the 1930s, an ideological deviation in the 1950s, a program of national emancipation in 1960s and finally, the narrative of legitimizing the normalization orthodoxy after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion into Czechoslovakia.

The history of rock in Communist Europe has been viewed by a number of domestic and foreign authors as a series of events with a dominant political content, either in the form of a general youth revolt or directly in the spirit of anti-communist opposition. In this regard, the present study extends the current simplifying concept with an emphasis on the reception history, including relevant issues related to the typology of listeners and aesthetics.

During the period of so-called normalization in the former Czechoslovakia, the restrictive cultural policy ousted numerous oppositional artists, theoreticians, and writers from the public cultural sphere through bans on exhibitions and publications. As a consequence, the affected individuals developed their own means of enabling creative, scientific, and literary work beyond censorship. A key medium for the realization of officially banned texts, studies, and projects was illegal and clandestine self-publishing, also called “samizdat”.

During the recent years, we have witnessed an ever-growing nostalgia towards state socialism as well as continuing attempts to normalize the communist regime. The article examines one of the reactions to this phenomenon, namely the attempts to create an anti-communist grand narrative in historiography and the intrinsic contradictions of this endeavor. It demonstrates that, to a large extent, the new anti-communist canon uses explanatory models and rhetorical techniques borrowed from the communist historiography itself.

The aim of study is an analysis of collectivization in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in fifties of the 20th century. On the basis of the new institutional economics and the theory of public choice text defines new questions during the research of efficiency of agriculture in the context of centrally planned economy. New institutional economics is concerned with the role of formal and informal institutions during human decision making, expectations and motivation.

The study deals with the circumstances of the formation of social protests within the context of the lower classes during the first years after the establishment of Czechoslovakia and with the relationship between social radicalism and radical socialism during this period. On one hand, the author focuses on the social causes of the protests, on the other hand, the ways in which the protests were expressed are analysed.