Suchergebnisse

"An archivally based exploration of the everyday life in Hungary's communist apparatus class after 1956, this book covers consumption, mobility, and leisure. Péteri shows how class power and privilege as well as Western patterns asserted themselves in the everyday of state-socialist society"--

Introduction: The oblique coordinate systems of modern identity / György Péteri -- Were the Czechs more Western than Slavic? Nineteenth-century travel literature from Russia by disillusioned Czechs / Karen Gammelgaard -- Privileged origins : "national models" and reforms of public health in interwar Hungary / Erik Ingebrigtsen -- Defending children's rights, "in defense of peace" : children and Soviet cultural diplomacy / Catriona Kelly -- East as true West : redeeming bourgeois culture, from socialist realism to Ostalgie / Greg Castillo -- Paris or Moscow? Warsaw architects and the image of the modern city in the 1950s / David Crowley -- Imagining Richard Wagner : the Janus head of a divided nation / Elaine Kelly -- From Iron Curtain to silver screen : imagining the West in the Khrushchev era / Anne E. Gorsuch -- Mirror, mirror, on the wall-- is the West the fairest of them all? Czechoslovak normalization and its (dis)contents / Paulina Bren -- Who will beat whom? Soviet popular reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959 / Susan E. Reid -- Moscow human rights defenders look West : attitudes toward U.S. journalists in the 1960s and 1970s / Barbara Walker -- Conclusion: Transnational history and the East-West divide / Michael David-Fox

Abstract
Through a detailed analysis of Alexander Szalai's career as a major transsystemic academic entrepreneur in the Kádár era, this paper has been written to discern and assess how such activities impacted the ways in which science and scholarship worked at both sides of the systemic divide (the "Iron Curtain"). The single most important finding is the emergence of transsystemic spaces (fields), the undoing of national and systemic boundaries. These transsystemic configurations tended to provide social (formal and informal) frameworks within which reputations are generated and distributed, reputational hierarchies are established and reproduced. For scholars in the East such transsystemic spaces brought with them a great deal of good news: they could mean increased freedom and/or an unbiased assessment and genuine acknowledgement for what one has accomplished. Transsystemic fields brought with them a whole array of new (kinds of) opportunities. Acting as a nod of networks that generated transsystemic spaces could yield increased reputation and power at home. As all structures in the social world, however, transsystemic spaces could enable as well as constrain, they could propel you to the skies and might also crush you. As any other resources constituting social capital in academia, the space spanning along transsystemic networks of scholars and scientists could also be weaponized for the wrong purposes: they could enable impostors to acquire a status and reputation way over and above the person's actual accomplishments, due to imperfect information available in foreign environments. Time would, of course, always show who they really are – but before that happens, they could bring havoc upon their field back home by distorted reputational hierarchies, by skewed distribution of competitive power between rivaling intellectual tendencies or "schools" and, eventually, by "paradigmatic" streamlining and contra-selection. This is, in a nutshell, what the story of A. Szalai shows.

Patron-client relations were a ubiquitous feature of cultural and academic life under the state socialist social order, as were networks crisscrossing the borderlines between the domains of political power and scholarship. Awareness of and due attention to such relations and networks, this article argues, is a sine qua non of any reliable history of economics in the communist era. Pioneering projects, publications presenting innovative new approaches, individual careers yielding significant works of domestic and international acclaim were as much dependent on the support and protection of the politically powerful as on genuine talent and diligence. State socialism was not the kind of social order that would typically enable a spectacular scholarly development just "by force of thought." The article focuses on the story of one particularly important patron in Hungary over the field of economics, a true communist grand seigneur: István Friss. It shows how his contribution has been systematically neglected, suppressed by both the historical and the memoir literature, and it presents archival evidence highlighting the vital importance of Friss's patronage for the work and careers of such leading economists as András Bródy and, particularly, János Kornai.

In this article, the author discusses two episodes in the history of Hungarian communist era social scientific research where changes occurring within the academic field had major tremors of momentous political change as their background. The first case is the breakthrough of an empiricist research program in economics in 1954–56, no doubt enabled and conditioned by the New Course following Stalin's death. The second case is the purge in social theory and sociology (the so-called "Philosophers' Process") in the first half of the 1970s propelled by the conservative backlash in high politics in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The main objective of the article is to explain the seeming paradox that in these two seemingly opposite kinds of cases (the one in the mid-1950s was about the emancipation of the field from under the yoke of Stalinist ideology, while the one in the early 1970s was undoubtedly a case of political repression) the transformation of the field was reasoned about and justified with the same positivist scientific ethos of a politically and ideologically unbiased, "value-free" science.

In this essay, the discussion proceeds from the public image of the functionary at the end of the Rákosi era, through the Kádárist policies of 'new sobriety' disciplining the functionary in order not to irritate and provoke the rest of society, to the new contrat sociale established by the mid-1960s in which the party-state apparatus class and the commoners join one another in pursuing shared (consumerist) ideas of good life and happiness, within the constraints and coping with the conditions of demand side abundance (the tension between consumerist aspirations, desires and an economy of sustained shortages). The article draws on archival sources as well as texts from contemporary cabarets and an analysis of the 1964 feature film, Don't Waste the Gas!, and its manuscript.

This article explains two paradoxes: Firstly, why did counterrevolutionary Hungary decide to participate in Expo '58, at a time of great economic stringency and grave political problems? Secondly, it is pointed out that the Hungarian pavilion, if it was to be raised at all, would have been expected to be thoroughly soaked in projections affirming the state-socialist identity of the country and its people. From plans to implementation, however, the pavilion was all but up to such expectations. It had, both in terms of its architecture and in terms of its exhibitions, a distinctly modernist complexion and a universalistic-ecumenistic appeal. On the basis of archival sources related to the politicians, administrators and artists-professionals involved in creating the show, this article explains this transsystemic appeal of the pavilion as a manifestation of the emerging kádárist consolidation and its political and social order.