Abstract: The Slánský trial which took place in Prague in November 1952 was the most notorious post-war show trial in the former Eastern bloc. This article for the first time brings to light the experiences of Communist women who were imprisoned and condemned in the closely-related trials which accompanied it. Drawing on Czechoslovak prison and secret police records, private memoirs, correspondence and trial records, the article uncovers and analyses interrogation techniques applied to female comrades and the gender assumptions behind them. Unacknowledged sexism within the Czechoslovak Communist Party undermined the women's relationship with their Party and helps to explain the silence surrounding Communist women prisoners in Czechoslovakia.
Abstract: This article examines the Russian and Soviet avant-garde's engagement with China across the visual arts, literature, cinema and theatre from the 1900s to the 1930s. It argues that two forces shaped that engagement: a fascination with the East rooted in wider European trends but inflected in the Russian case by Eurasianism and its intellectual predecessors, and socialism notably as articulated by the futurists. Such figurings of China consistently produced creative misreadings, which the article interprets not as distortions but as the characteristic outcomes of cultural transfer. The article concludes with a glance at how the avant-garde was received in China through an analogous dynamic of misreading.
Abstract: Advocates of pan-Scandinavianism in the mid nineteenth century hoped to establish a union between Denmark and Sweden-Norway, strong enough to counter potential external aggression. By 1864, as the Second Schleswig War unfolded, the possibility of a Scandinavian union became a conceivable outcome of the conflict. The Russian Emperor Alexander II and his foreign minister Aleksandr Gorchakov chose not to intervene. They even recognized the possibility of a Scandinavian union emerging. This study argues that this tolerant stance was influenced by expectations of the union as a federal, weak and market-related nuisance that posed no real threat to the Russian Empire.
Abstract: This article interprets Nikolai Gogol´'s Taras Bulba (1835, 1842) and Aleksandr Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter (1836), two works that engage with the histories of the Zaporizhzhian and Iaik Cossacks respectively, through the visual and affective lens of Il´ia Repin's painting, Zaporizhzhian Cossacks are Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91). In both texts, humour and clothing function as narrative and visual strategies that reconfigure social hierarchies and modes of perception. Comic effects arise from episodes of travesty — where serious subjects are rendered ludicrous — and from the topos of mundus inversus , in which hierarchies and expectations are inverted. These effects emerge when clothing and identity fall out of alignment, transforming sartorial incongruity into a vehicle of humour and critique. By examining dress as a visual and ideological code, and sartorial and comic practices as defamiliarizing strategies, the article shows how Gogol´ and Pushkin negotiate power, identity, and political as well as interpersonal allegiances while reshaping narrative perspective. It further considers their appropriation of ethnographic and folkloric material alongside Romantic and dandiacal sartorial conventions.
Abstract: The shift towards authoritarian practices in the 2010s provoked a revival of academic interest in the long-term legacies of socialism and the transition in Central and Eastern Europe. The legacies of intellectual dissent and its implications for the transformation of political structures and notions of citizenship attracted significant attention, yet the endurance and apparent revival of cultural forms of opposition remains underexplored, despite the crucial role of the (alternative) cultural sphere in engendering oppositionist ideas and values in the period of late-socialism. This special issue makes the case for revisiting the legacies of cultural opposition across 1989 and beyond, with a particular emphasis on the increasing significance of cultural expressions of defiance in recent years and their relationship to patterns of resistance under Communist rule. The introductory article outlines the rationale for a more pronounced focus on culture, introduces the conceptual framework for the special issue and presents the main themes discussed in each chapter.
Abstract: This article revisits the argument, made popular by scholars such as Zeynep Tufekci and Vincent Bevins, that the networked form and horizontalism were the reasons for the underperformance of the protest movements of the 2010s. Networked protest cultures were not born with the internet. When we examine Polish samizdat, in the overall context of the Solidarity movement, as a historical instance of social media activism, we discover that, for a protest movement, de-centred and non-hierarchical forms of organization, and the leaderless and prefigurative philosophies of political action were important if not necessary conditions for achieving resilience and impact, even at the expense of some inertia in the long run.
Abstract: This article traces the transformation of joke culture in Budapest between 1988 and 1994 by exploring the continuities and discontinuities surrounding the regime change within the wider framework of dissent. Even though political jokes could function as a means of cultural resistance under socialism, humour rather created trust and solidarity between joke-tellers and their audiences. The study demonstrates that humour did not disappear from Hungarian society after 1989/90. By highlighting the social and psychological complexities of humour in ethnographer Imre Katona's collection of political jokes, this study provides insights into what political jokes could reveal about trust and the perceived legitimacy of political actors across the 1989 divide.
Abstract: In light of rising authoritarianism and neo-conservatism in Russia since the 2010s, street art has become one of the most iconic forms of cultural protest. While contemporary Russian street art embodies the subversive character of the global street art movement, its uniqueness, this article argues, lies in the legacies of the late Soviet artistic underground that inform its subversiveness. Based on works by selected street artists, including the art group Iav´ and the individual artists Misha Marker and Ffchw , this article demonstrates how such street artworks recycle the aesthetics of late Soviet works by Moscow-based Conceptualist artists. The presence of Moscow Conceptualist aesthetics in contemporary Russian street art, this article further argues, is due to a condition that some street artists perceive as common to both their current historical moment and late socialism: a lack of outlook on the future and a perceived sense of stuckedness in an eternal present — a theme which Moscow Conceptualist works, especially from the Brezhnev era, explore extensively. Through such a cultural recycling the street artists expose what they see as a return to the stagnation that characterized late socialism. Yet their works differ from Moscow Conceptualist ones in their aim: where Moscow Conceptualists aimed at exposing the workings of and provoking laughter at the Soviet realities among audiences who, especially during the late 1970s and 1980s, were limited to trusted participants of the underground circles, contemporary street artists actively seek to engage wide audiences across social strata and borders in critical reflection on Russia's socio-political landscape. Thus, contemporary Russian street art re-imagines Moscow Conceptualist aesthetics as a force of resistance — a resistance which does not necessarily aim at the radicality of political confrontation, but at the slow yet foundational change in peoples' minds and bodies through sustained exposure to street art.
Abstract: This article explores the role of punk subculture and the independent punk press in shaping democratic transformation in post-1989 Czechoslovakia. By examining the role of punk and the independent press, the article highlights their significance as agents of democratic transformation following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The work argues that punk produced alternative discourses and visions that contributed to the emergence of civil society in the early post-Communist era. In the pre-1989 period, punks faced severe repression from state authorities, a fact which stands in stark contrast to the post-revolution era, when they became prominent voices in advocating for political change. The analysis explores the emergence of anarcho-punk movements and their independent publishing efforts, revealing a complex legacy of dissent and cultural opposition while addressing how these movements confronted the challenges of post-socialist political and economic changes.
Abstract: This article examines Russian music practitioners who relocated to Tbilisi, Georgia, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing parallels with late Soviet-era resistance, the study focuses on the participants' efforts to navigate personal, professional and cultural dislocation, highlighting the condition of in-betweenness of Russian music relocants in relation to their experiences of migration, perceived colonial legacies of Russian culture, politicization, host reception and integration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that this diasporic music community, particularly through encounters with the local do-it-yourself scene, became a site for decolonial reflection, transcultural solidarity and vernacular cosmopolitanism away from the authoritarian homeland.
Abstract: This article takes its cue from the way East Germany was remembered during and after the Wende of 1989–90. In particular, it analyses the way the Berlin Republic is haunted by the unacknowledged legacies of the Communist state: its unrealized ambitions as well as its catastrophic failures. The focus is on the possibilities for resistance offered by poetry, using a case study of the work of Volker Braun, a writer who published critical work in the socialist state and continues to do so in the Berlin Republic. It shifts attention from sites or agents of resistance, however, to forms of resistance. It asks how Braun's aesthetic strategies enact resistance: offering a criticism of contemporary reality, keeping multiple possibilities in play and resisting the status quo. And, in particular, it focuses on the forms which allow this to happen. This is explored under the sign of what could be called a 'spectral aesthetic' that resists reality but also allows the energies of the past to be mobilized in the service of alternative futures. This has a special significance in the current political climate in the Eastern Länder of the former GDR. The success of the far right is caused in part by the suppression of the East German past. It also ties in with the fierce debates about the legacy of the GDR past being waged by historians.
'We didn't think we could say "fuck the system", that we were saying "fuck you" with our little activities. But we were sure that it had to change, that it needed to change. That it wasn't fair. That's what drove us forward. "It's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair." And when you wanted something: "Why is it forbidden? Why is it forbidden? Why is it forbidden?"' Boris Mikhailov, interview with David Taboul (2011)
