Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the phenomenon of child and youth labour in the post-Stalin era in the Soviet Union. The starting point for the consideration constitutes the analysis of the law adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1958 titled "On the strengthening of the link between school and life and the further development of people's education in the USSR". This law placed great emphasis on combining education with practice and involving pupils from the earliest grades in various forms of both productive and socially useful labour. Subsequently, four categories of labour to which children and young people in the USSR were systemically forced has been distinguished. These included: occasional labours, work and leisure camps, so-called subbotniki and little communal works, as well as compulsory recycling. The paper thoroughly depicts all of them in the light of memoir material.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of selected aspects how Ukrainian schools present the historical narrative that covers the post-World War II history of this country – particularly the period of late socialism. My goal was to establish how post-Maidan textbooks presented the times when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union in its superpower phase. I was especially interested in the current assessment of such phenomena as: post-Stalinist modernization, the movements opposing communist ideology, and the late socialist concept of the Soviet people. The source material was five new textbooks for historical education at high-school level approved for use by the Ukrainian authorities in 2019. The basic research method was discourse analysis: the content of the textbooks were critically evaluated in light of the ongoing political and social situation. Among the theoretical assumptions that were applied in the paper was that the historical narrative has a key importance as a function of the nation-state and as such serves its interests. To conclude the analysis below, it should be emphasized that historical narrative of Ukrainian Schools presents the past of the country in the second half of the 20th century as a general process of gaining independence from the Soviet centre. In the context of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, it should be assumed that the emancipatory nature of the interpretation of Ukraine's national history is now irreversible.

This article analyzes the phenomenon of Ukrainian Russian-language patriotism. In the first part, the author concentrates on the socio-linguistic situation in Ukraine since 1991. The next part contains a brief description of language policy in Ukraine in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century, and presents the attitude of contemporary Ukrainian society to the Russian language. The main part of the text presents the changes in perception of the Russian language that have occurred in Ukraine as a consequence of the anti-regime protests at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 and then Russia's violation of the country's territorial integrity. The author predicts that the Russian language will not only continue to be widely represented in the Ukrainian public sphere, but will also form part of Ukraine's cultural heritage. At the same time, she suggests that it is likely that the Russian language in Ukraine will become an object for expressions of resentment, contempt, or even hatred toward Russia.

The authors of this article use the examples of the Donbass and Pridnestrovie regions to examine the relationship between regional identity, separatism, and armed conflict. On the basis of comparative methods of analysis, they describe the historical and sociological processes and political conditions that, over the course of history, produced the formation of a specific sense of regional separateness among the inhabitants of those regions. They prove that regional identity need not rest on centuries of tradition and that Soviet modernization could be a key component of that identity.This analysis of the relation between regional identity and war indicates that the popular explanation of the underpinnings of separatism in Eastern Europe by reference to identity is insufficient in the case of these two regions. In contemporary Donbass and in Pridnestrovie both, identity is constructed on the basis of a war narrative but has become a foundation for effective separatism only in connection with the interests of the local elites and/or external political and cultural factors.