Central-European Studies is an interdisciplinary yearbook devoted to Central Europe and neighbouring regions viewed from a comparative perspective. Olga V. Khavanova is the editor-in-chief. The Central-European Studies series was founded in 1999 at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences by Tofik. M. Ismailov and Aleksandr S. Stykalin. The early issues of the series contained the proceedings of conferences devoted to Central-European history and culture from the Middle Ages to the present day or were festschrifts in honour of Russian historians who had made a significant contribution to the research of the region. In total, 9 issues were published between 1999 and 2017. In 2018, the publication was transformed into a yearbook intended to publish both the proceedings of conferences held under the auspices of the Interdisciplinary Central-European Seminar and articles complying with the scope of the yearbook. Founder and publisher — Institute of Slavic Studies RAS, Leninskii Prospekt, 32A, Moscow, Russia, 119334
To Overcome All the Obstacles and Fulfil the Mission
The work by the Hungarian historian Béla Vilmos Mihalik The Ever-Reviving Phoenix. The Jesuits in Hungary is dedicated to the history of the Society of Jesus in Hungary — from the first appearance of the Jesuits here in 1561 to the present day. The author examines the numerous difficulties that they had to overcome throughout the period under study. They were associated with the struggle against representatives of Protestant movements, with various prohibitions from secular (in 1620–1622, 1950) and even church authorities (dissolution of the order in 1773). The work convincingly shows that despite all the obstacles, the Jesuits continued to persistently carry out the tasks that were formulated in the initial period of the order’s creation — they were actively involved in missionary work, pedagogical and social activities, and participated in the signing of the church union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe. Thanks to their efforts, the Hungarian Independent Province was established in 1909, but it did not last long — it suffered a serious blow in 1950, when the Society, under the conditions of socialist Hungary, found itself in metaphorical catacombs. The work is complemented by an extensive list of studies by Hungarian Jesuits and document publications.
Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus
Copyright (c) 2025 Central-European Studies
Central European History Convention, 17–19 July 2025
The article is dedicated to the Central European History Convention, held on 17–19 July 2025, at the University of Vienna. The program included one roundtable, two keynotes, nine research labs, twenty-five poster presentations, and fifty-five panels. The objective of the Convention was to provide a platform for emerging scholars and topics, as well as to highlight the influence of Pieter Judson’s work on contemporary historiography. The keynote lecture by Peter Haslinger focused on the applicability of Jan Křen’s concept of the “community of conflict” to Austro-Hungarian relations between 1867 and 1914. Tara Zahra, meanwhile, addressed the significance and historical context of Pieter Judson’s monographs Exclusive Revolutionaries… (1996), Guardians of the Nation… (2006), and The Habsburg Empire: A New History (2016), along with his upcoming publications. Topics from the research labs included the international series The Habsburg Monarchy 1848–1918, the Austrian television documentary Austria — A Full History, and various historical sources. Several papers focusing on Czech history are also presented in the article. Regarding the late Habsburg period, these papers explore topics such as dog-keeping practices in Prague, Karel Klostermann’s writings on the Šumava Mountains in connection with a bark beetle outbreak in the 1870s, the evolution of forms and messages of public festivities, and a comparative context encompassing both the dissemination of information about the “discovery” of the forged Dvůr Králové Manuscript and the activities of the “Protective associations” of Bohemian Germans. The interwar period was covered in papers on the involvement of Sudeten Germans in building fortifications on the Czechoslovak-German border and on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and Kemalist Turkey in the works of Eurasianist thinkers from the Russian émigré community. Both periods were addressed in presentations on the image of Tahiti in Czech and Slovak cultures and on the Czech (later Czechoslovak) convalescent “children’s colony” in Crikvenica.
Vsevolod Vasilievich Saсhanev as a Representative of the “Young Historians” in Exile
The text presents a study of the biography of the Russian archaeologist, historian, ethnographer, and émigré Vsevolod Vasilyevich Saсhanev (1885–1940). The main focus lies on his scientific and public activities, as well as his challenging life during emigration. The author notes that Saсhanev’s contributions to science have not yet been fully appreciated, despite his significant achievements. The study is based on the recently discovered personal archive of Saсhanev in the State Regional Archive of Prague, which contains material covering the period from 1919 to 1940. Saсhanev’s biography is divided into two main periods: before emigration (1885–1920) and during emigration (1920–1940). Before emigration, he had been an active scholar involved in archaeological excavations, had taught at St. Petersburg University, and participated in the First World War. Saсhanev spent 20 years in emigration, first in Bulgaria and then in Czechoslovakia, where he continued his scientific work. His research focused on the folk culture of Eastern Slovakia and Carpathian Rus. Particular attention is paid to the description of Saсhanev’s personal archive, which includes a variety of documents, correspondence with notable émigrés, working material, and drafts. This archive provides a deeper understanding of his personality, scientific interests, and his life path. In conclusion, the author emphasises the importance of preserving the archives of Russian émigré scholars for future generations of researchers.
The City in the Political Discourse of Warsaw’s Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski
Since 2023, Poland’s political calendar has been marked by a succession of electoral campaigns — one closely following another: starting with the Sejm and Senate elections, moving swiftly to local government polls, then the European Parliament vote, and culminating in the presidential election. Despite attempts by various political actors to alter the established balance of power, the Polish political scene remains largely controlled by two parties: Law and Justice and Civic Platform, which have consistently received the support of more than half of the voters over the past two decades. Academic literature suggests that this persistent societal division is largely maintained through political discourse, as political actors use appeals to deeply rooted social tensions to mobilise and retain their supporters. Within this context, the discourse of Warsaw’s mayor and prominent Civic Platform leader, Rafał Trzaskowski, during the local government election campaign (February–April 2024) provides a valuable case study. Particular attention is given to the ways political opponents and their electorates are represented, as well as to strategies for constructing the image of the city and its inhabitants. The analysis reveals a distinct duality in Trzaskowski’s discourse: on the one hand, it appeals to humanistic and inclusive values; on the other, it is firmly rooted in the logic of the so-called “Polish-Polish war,” structured around a dichotomy of “us” versus “them”. The Law and Justice party is depicted not as an equal participant in the political process but as an existential threat to democratic governance and social cohesion. At the same time, utterances concerning the urban agenda sound noticeably softer, with an emphasis on shared values and positive initiatives. It is plausible that, within this context—aimed at a supportive audience—aggressive confrontation is seen as excessive, and political mobilisation is instead achieved by affirming the city as a space of freedom and dialogue.
Town As a Space of Ideological Projections
The Cult of the Leader in Newspaper Articles, Speeches and Letters: The Naming of Lenin Boulevard in Budapest and the Functioning of Political Propaganda
In the late 1940s, the Communists seized power in Hungary and soon established a Stalinist-type dictatorship. One of the most important figures in the pantheon of the new regime was Vladimir Lenin, but until the autumn of 1950, the authorities did not name any public space in Budapest’s central districts after him, whose symbolic significance would speak of the greatness of the leader of the world proletariat. This was all the more surprising to contemporaries because by then many streets and squares in the heart of the city bore the names of Soviet politicians and military officers. Because of the importance attached to the cult of Lenin in the propaganda of the dictatorial regime and the absence of the leader’s name on the map of the centre of the capital, individuals and groups of citizens alike began to approach the competent authorities with proposals to name a place in Budapest in honour of the revolutionary that corresponded to his greatness. The authors of the letters tried their best to adapt their arguments to the real or perceived expectations of the authorities. In this context, it is reasonable to ask: how did individual citizens and entire social groups begin to express the opinions and assessments broadcast by the ideologists of the communist regime? How were the architects of public opinion able to use the initiatives addressed to the competent authorities for propaganda aimed at strengthening the legitimisation of existing social relations? This phenomenon can be observed in the example of the naming of Lenin Boulevard in Budapest in 1950, one of the capital’s central streets, in honour of the founder of the system. In this case, a two-way relationship was formed between the architects of public opinion and other groups of society, and their individual members, which, like the symbolic appropriation of space by the naming, was designed to reinforce the political and ideological legitimacy of the dictatorship. Describing and analysing this specific process can contribute not only to an understanding of the functioning of political propaganda, but also to an understanding of the functioning of various cults.
Celebrating the Decennial Anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow Through the Eyes of Serbian Leftist Intellectuals. 1927–1928
In the autumn of 1927, the USSR celebrated the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. The celebration turned into a propaganda campaign, the aim of which was to demonstrate the “achievements of the proletariat” and to improve the international reputation of Soviet Russia. For this purpose, foreign political and cultural figures, mainly of leftist views, were invited. They were expected to present to their compatriots what they had experienced in a positive light. The novelist Dragiša Vasić, the sculptor Sreten Stojanović and the editor-inchief of the Belgrade newspaper Politika, Vladislav Ribnikar, represented the Serbian Civic Left in Moscow. This article places their travel notes in the broader context of the perception of Soviet Russia by Western leftist intellectuals. Serbian travelogues also shed light on the bizarre transformation of traditional Serbian Russophilia, predetermined by the role that St. Petersburg (Petrograd) had played in the national emancipation of the Serbs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least in the minds of the interwar leftists. Critical of Tsarism, as well as of their own political establishment, Serbian leftists projected their idealised visions of Russia onto the first socialist state. Impressed by the scale of the Soviet experiment, the representatives of the Civic Left did not fall completely under the spell of the socialist myth embodied in the USSR. This confirms the hypothesis that among the general mass of European leftist intellectuals who sympathised with the Soviets, there were different groups — from 100% “believers” to sympathetic “fellow travellers”, to which the Serbian authors belonged.
Revising the National Narrative: History of the Town of Prague of Václav Vladivoj Tomek
The article is devoted to V. V. Tomek’s opus vitae: his twelve-volume “History of the town of Prague”, which was published between 1855 and 1901. In this rather unfinished work, V. V. Tomek tried to revise—at least, partially—the narrative of Czech medieval history as created by František Palacký in his monumental work “History of the Czech nation”. Paradoxically, Tomek decided to do that as Palacký’s former disciple. However, the paths of the two historians diverged during the 1850’s era of “Bach’s absolutism”, and their later reconciliation did not lead to the restoration of V. V. Tomek’s rank as a disciple. Nevertheless, Tomek mostly agreed with Palacký’s view of Early and High Medieval Czech history. It was the Hussite era that contributed to the main discrepancy between these two historians. The Hussite movement in fifteenth century Czech territories was actually the main topic of interest for both Palacký and Tomek. From Palacký’s liberal and Protestant perspective, the Hussitism constituted the “zenith of the Czech history”. The view of Tomek was far more nuanced: Tomek considered the Hussite era as one of the most important periods in Czech history, though, while his sympathies were on the Hussite side, however, as a Catholic and conversative, Tomek harshly condemned the revolutionary radicalism of the Hussite era. Topographic studies by Tomek, to which he dedicated about two decades of his life, were also an important element, leading him to the conclusion that fifteen years of the Hussite wars deprived Prague of a century of development. Tomek became the first author to provide a centrist narrative of the Hussite era, but he was not able to cement his view in the mind of the public, probably because of his lack of a wider historical vision, which in turn was prevalent in Palacký’s work.
Capital and Life Around: Specific Features of the Greek State’s Development in the First Third of the Twentieth Century
Since the time of its liberation in the mid-nineteenth century, the Greek state has sought to downplay the importance of Eastern culture in the life of the country. This was facilitated by the hardships of life under the Ottomans, the longing for the historical heritage of antiquity, and, most importantly, the influence of the great powers on modern life in Greece. By the early twentieth century, the previously emerging orientation toward the European model of development was clearly evident in all areas of life: politics, culture, and the spiritual sphere. Reformation tendencies were also observed during the emergence of cities. First of all, they were visibly manifested in Athens and in the second factual capital — Thessaloniki. Athens was changing, modernising itself according to the model of modern European centres, attracting the Greek elite, as well as the poetic and creative bohemia. In Thessaloniki, after the terrible fire of 1917, which destroyed most of its historical buildings, the Greek authorities received a unique chance to modernise the northern capital, taking into account the urban planning practices of European cities. However, most of Greece remained neutral to the new Western European trends, because of the financial problems of the authorities, the lack of an extensive road network—the main channel of communication with the capital and its newfangled trends—an acute migration problem, accompanied by the strengthening of the original element in the life of small towns, commitment to Eastern traditions, and a high degree of religiosity. The article attempts to identify modernisation trends that manifested themselves in the appearance of Greek cities, and partly recreate a visualisation of their existence and the atmosphere of urban life through the prism of the opposition “modernisation — traditionalism”. The sources used by the author are the testimonies of contemporaries — travellers, journalists, writers, politicians, diplomats, cultural figures, and publications in the media.
To Be a Frontier — To Be a Town — To Be a Capital
The Activities of the Orthodox Community of Mostar under the Ottoman Rule (Based on Materials from Russian Sources)
One of the forms of self-organization of the Orthodox population in the Ottoman Empire were church/church-school communities, which had fairly broad autonomous rights, which was additionally confirmed by the provisions of the Sultan's decree of 1856 on reforms in the Empire. A strong and influential Orthodox community has been functioning in the main city of Herzegovina,´Mostar, since 1835. A special agreement was concluded between the community and the Metropolitan of Herzegovina, which gave the Orthodox Mostarians the right to solve important problems themselves and significantly limited the “power” of the Metropolitan. There is quite a lot of information about the Mostar Orthodox community in the writings of contemporaries: natives of Mostar Prokopii Čokorilo, Joanikije Pamučina, Jovan Pičeta, as well as the Russian diplomat and traveler Aleksander Hilferding. A lot of information about the situation in the community and its numerous projects is contained in the archival heritage of the Russian diplomatic mission in Mostar and other Russian archives, not all of these materials have been introduced into scientific circulation. The Orthodox community of Mostar had a great influence on the life and appearance of the city: the majestic Orthodox holy Trinity cathedral was erected, men's and women's schools were opened, and a seminary was planned to open. The documents revealed in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire allow us to study in more detail the history of the implementation of the above-mentioned projects, the problems they faced, financial and diplomatic support provided by Russia to Orthodox Mostarians.
The Role of Pilgrimage in Granting of MarketTown Status to the Village of Máriapócs
The icon of the Mother of God in the Greek Catholic wooden church in the village of Pócs in northeastern Hungary was seen weeping in November 1696. News of the miracle spread quickly, and the icon was transported to Vienna the following year at the request of Emperor King Leopold I (the icon is now located in St. Stephen's Cathedral). Nonetheless, Pócs also became a pilgrimage site (now Máriapócs), as confirmed by the fact that a copy of the icon sent here around 1707 also wept in the summer of 1715. Between 1731 and 1757, a spacious Baroque pilgrimage church was built on the site of the former wooden church; the Greek Catholic Bishop of Munkács founded a monastery in 1749 and entrusted the care of the shrine to monks of the Order of St. Basil the Great. From the 1720s onwards, the Roman popes authorised various pilgrimages, mostly linked to the feast of the Virgin Mary, for both Roman and Greek Catholic worshippers. These indulgencies increased the intensity of pilgrimages. Fairs were also held in connection with the pilgrimages, and in 1816 the village was granted the privileged status of a market town by the emperor-king. As there were several towns in the vicinity of Máriapócs, the village clearly owed this urban privilege to its status as a site for the shrine and the economic potential of the pilgrimages. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the monastery was also an important centre of Greek Catholic education. Although Máriapócs lost its urban status in 1872, it regained it in 1993 thanks to its status as a shrine, and for many years it was the smallest town in Hungary.
Zaporozhian Sech in the Second Half of 1680: From the Death of Koshevoi Ataman Ivan Serkoto the Treaty of Bakhchysarai of 1681
The military and political position of the Zaporozhian Sech — the centre of lands which were controlled and exploited by the local Cossack community on the Low Dnepr — in the second half of the 1670s still remains unstudied despite the fact that this period played a key-role in the history of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Three powers of Eastern Europe — the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia and the Ottoman Empire — had been clashing over the protection of Sech at the time. While Poland was keeping personal ties with Koshevoy Ataman Ivan Serko and the Ottoman Empire and its vassal state, the Crimean Khanate was building fortresses on the Low Dnepr that completely blocked the entry to the Black Sea for the Cossacks’ boats, so the relationship between the Russian government and Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Samoylovich, protected by Moscow, was impaired. The main reason for that was the independence policy of Ivan Serko, who kept relations with Poland and Crimea and hated Samoylovich. His death opened some new possibilities for the Sech to stabilise its relations with the Tsar and the Hetman under conditions of limited military potential due to new Ottoman fortifications. Zaporozhian Cossacks sent envoys to Moscow, who were received with generosity and friendliness. Using an aspiration of the Sech to rebuild relations and to get the Thar’s zhalovanje (emolument), the Russian government and Hetman Samoylovich tried to strengthen their control over the Sech by forcing Zaporozhian Cossacks to take an oath of allegiance. It was a very important task on the eve of the final stage of the Russian-Crimean peaceful negotiations in Bakhchysarai.
Deferred Love: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s Naples
The article analyses the role of Naples in the work of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000), one of the most eminent Polish emigrant writers of the twentieth century. Herling spent here almost half a century (1955–2000) and his prose reflects a complex path from confrontation to acceptance of the city. The analysis is primarily based on the writer’s diary (Diary Written at Night), published between 1971 and 2000. The article also considers biographical facts (Gulag, Anders’ army, emigration) that are significant for understanding the formation of Herling's worldview and perspective. Herling's diary, which includes essays and stories, is a striking example of the interpenetration of the documentary and the artistic, the progressive and the retrospective, the experience of creating a single field of reference, always unfinished and open. The mentality of the Neapolitans was in tune with the vector of the writer's artistic reflection; the structure of Naples (a city open to the underworld and communicating with it; a labyrinthine city; a city standing at the foot of a volcano) is closely resemblant to Herling's narrative strategy. Naples (everyday observations, architecture, paintings, sculptures, city chronicles, legends, rumours, etc.) is above all a source of inspiration and reflection for Herling, on the basis of which, manipulating the boundary between fiction and documentary, he creates allegoric stories about human passions and destinies, as well as historical similes. Turning to the city’s past was also a way of adaptation for the emigrant writer. From the point of view of artistic and psychological mechanisms of inhabiting a foreign space, two functions seem to be the most significant ones in the dialogue between the writer and the city: Naples plays the role of an intermediary space, which allows us to experience in the text the impossible (meeting with the dead wife) or the silenced (Jewish origin), as well as a doppelganger space, which comforts and reconciles us with our own dramatic fate, which thus appears not as an exception, but as a variant of the universal.
Town in Letters, Memoires, and Literary Texts
“Red Moscow is the Heart of the Proletarian World Revolution”: Political Emigrants in the Capital of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s
In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet Russia became one of the world’s centres of political emigration. Many of those who took part in the failed revolutionary uprisings in Europe after World War One found refuge in the first socialist state. Having arrived in the USSR and having overcome the initial shock of immersion in an unfamiliar environment, foreign communists formed a privileged and largely isolated social group. Within itself, it was divided into closed national-party “communities”, in which the daily life of German, Polish, Chinese, Bulgarian, and other “revolutionary fighters” and their families took place. Indifferent during their stay in Moscow to what was happening outside their “ghetto”, years later, political emigrants in their recollections would express a whole range of feelings and assessments regarding Soviet society, the ruling regime, and, in general, the environment they had lived in. Unflattering descriptions of Moscow and Muscovites, everyday scenes, complaints about the injustice of the state system of distribution of goods and privileges — all this serves as a valuable addition to prevalent ideas about the era and the people who lived in it. The Great Terror of the second half of the 1930s put an end to political emigration into the USSR as a social group. In the end, foreign communists had to share with the entire Soviet society the terrible trials of the second half of the 1930s and early 1950s. If it had not been for this involvement in the fate of the country, its images, left by the few who survived, would not have been so sincere and, therefore, historically valuable.
Russian Cities and Towns as Perceivedby Czechoslovak Legionnaires (1914–1920)
On the eve of the First World War, about one hundred thousand Czechs and Slovaks lived and worked in Russia. With the outbreak of the war, some of them came out in support of Russia and expressed their willingness to fight on its side. Soon the formation of the Czech Druzhina began in Kiev. Later it became replenished with captured soldiers and officers, and by the fall of 1917, Czechoslovak units counted about 30 thousand men. But the process of replenishment of the corps continued, and by the time of evacuation of the Czechoslovak army from Russia in 1920, its number exceeded 60 thousand people. Legionnaires spent several years in Russia, moving across its vast expanses, first as part of the Russian army to the Carpathian ranges, and then after the revolution and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks from Ukraine to Vladivostok. At the same time, they visited different cities, gathered first-hand experience of city life, got acquainted with the local population, and noticed the peculiarities of the urban environment everywhere. The purpose of the article is to depict the perception of the Russian reality by foreigners, which adds colour and unexpected details to the Russian history of the eve and period of the First World War and the Civil War. Recently, imagology (the science of the laws of creating and interpreting images of the “alien” and “strangers”) has been actively developing. The history of cities and their perception — part of local history, which combines elements of natural history, geography, culture, architecture, population and urban economy — is also at the centre of attention of both historians and literary critics. The memoirs, diaries and military journalism of Czechoslovak legionnaires reflect different periods and aspects of life in Russian cities: from the peaceful picture of a seaside resort town to Siberian large and small centres under the conditions of the revolution and the Civil War. From these sources it is possible to trace both the history of the corps itself and the history of Russia of the period in question. A whole kaleidoscope of cities and towns passes before the readers’ eyes, allowing them to trace the dynamics of the rapidly changing situation on the ground, to compare and classify cities, revealing the typology and specificity of each. The legionnaires did not forget to portray themselves as well, without hiding the truth about the changing attitudes of the local population towards them. Comparing these descriptions, one can conclude that their authors were sufficiently objective, although, of course, the difficult military situation, especially under the conditions of violent civil confrontation, would inevitably affect their narratives. The article uses material from different genres: diaries, memoirs, opinion journalism and autobiographical documentary prose.
“Capua” and “European Kostroma”. Warsaw from 1813 to the 1820sthrough the eyes of Russians
The subject of research in the article are the characteristic features of the Russian vision of Warsaw, associated with the era of the Russian army's foreign campaigns of 1813–1814 and the establishment of the Polish state under the aegis of Russia in 1815. The bulk of the material consists of ego-documents. Diaries, travel notes, and memoirs of military men who passed through the Polish lands in 1813–1815, as well as those who stayed in the Kingdom of Poland or arrived there to serve after 1815, are examined. Among the latter are officers from the Russian Guards regiments stationed in Warsaw, who, like the Polish army, were under the command of Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, and civilians (primarily Prince Petr A. Viazemsky, who served in the chancellery of Nikolai N. Novosiltsev, the Emperor’s personal representative in the administration of the Kingdom of Poland). The picture is completed by the guidebooks published in Russian in 1818–1822, which reflected the official image of a prosperous Warsaw. The focus lies on descriptions of Warsaw, its comparison with other Polish cities, and the correlation of impressions of the Polish capital with general perceptions of Poland. Most notable are the historical precepts about Poland’s past and Russian-Polish relations to Warsaw. There is a connection between the images of Warsaw’s transformation and the later established judgments about the prosperity of Poles under the sceptre of Alexander I. Assessments of the city through the prism of personal experience and the author’s own biography also prove to be revealing. The topics of the enlightenment role of the capital as well as Warsaw as a centre of entertainment and pleasant pastime are most clearly visible in this connection. Warsaw both attracted and repelled Russians, depending on the degree of their incorporation into local life. For example, Petr A. Viazemsky, who at first disparagingly called Warsaw the “European Kostroma”, began to regard it more highly as he became closer to the educated Polish society.
Russian-Polish relations in the nineteenth century
Exploitation of Social Dispersion: The Socio-Political Experience of Post-War Poland
The monograph by Piotr Borowiec provides a comprehensive view of the social and political dynamics that shaped the post-war history of Poland. Carefully examining class, religious and regional divisions, the author resumes that the political leaders of both post-war and democratic Poland used existing social differences to consolidate their power and mobilize public support. The book highlights the negative consequences of exploiting social divisions for ideological advantage. The author offers a blueprint for understanding current political challenges, based on historical facts and parallels, as well as on empirical and theoretical achievements of scholars dealing with the structure of Polish society, which allows the reader to take a fresh look at the features of the contemporary political landscape in Poland.
Copyright (c) 2024 Central-European Studies
Shared Sufferings, Shared Interests, One Hope for Freedom
The article critically reviews the collection of articles with the title “Nations and Borders. The Emergence of New States in Central and Eastern Europe after World War I”. The collection was published in 2022 as part of the series “History from the Central European Perspective”, a platform welcoming academic discussion centred around the medieval, modern, and contemporary history of Poland and so-called Central and Eastern Europe. The articles were written by historians from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania. They focus on the “emancipation” of the peoples of the region during and after World War I, when the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, and Poland began restoring its statehood. The authors look closely into the formation of statehood and the steps associated with it, that is establishing territories and borders, defining the population and its status / status hierarchy, creating power structures and organisations, and singling out the executive branch and the armed forces. The collection research also delves into national sovereignty and its domestic and external sources. For example, the authors analyse the impact Great Britain, the US, France, Germany, and Russia had on the formation of Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Latvian statehood, with the restored Polish state acting both as a participant and as a factor of national and state creation. The author of the review praises the contribution of the collection creators to contemporary Eastern and Central European studies, listing historiographical value as its strength, as it shows that big imperial narratives are being reinterpreted from a national perspective.
National and European Components in the Concept of Sovereignty in the EU Countries:
The two-hundred-year long history of the independent Greek is intrinsically connected to the history of Europe as a whole. Contemporary Greek national identity has a pronounced European element. On the other hand, independent Greece has, throughout its history, been consistently influenced by the great powers (both European powers and the USA), which to some extent determined the course of its foreign and domestic policies. Membership in the EU does require a country to transfer part of its sovereignty to the transnational organisation. This issue has been drawing the attention of both politicians and researchers since the beginning of European integration. In Greece it became an especially prominent part of the political discourse in 2010, with the advent of the financial and economic crisis. For several years, the Greek economy and financial policies were put under control of the “troika” of external creditors — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, severely limiting national sovereignty and leading to a rise in popular scepticism towards the idea of European integration. The Greek crisis revealed an imbalance within the Eurozone, with economically more powerful countries easily influencing less powerful ones by using the political tools of the EU, despite nominally being equal partners within the Union. This core-periphery asymmetry made the European integration a tool, and the EU itself an arena, for expanding the influence of economically powerful states (for example, Germany). The sovereignty of more and less powerful countries was not treated in the same way, which by itself made the integration process more difficult. The situation led to, among other consequences, a re-examination of Greek relations with the EU and the limits it had put on the country’s sovereignty in Greek political discourse, including the emerging notion of Greece becoming a “debt colony” of Europe. The tension between Greece and Turkey, as well as the Balkan vector of Greek foreign policy, can be productively examined through the lens of Greek participation in the European integration project, which can reveal the interrelation of the national and European components in the Greek concept of sovereignty.
Economisc and Liberty: The Past and the Present
The Concept of Economic Freedom in Czechoslovak Emigrant and Samizdat Magazines (1985-1989)
The analysis of the publications of émigré and samizdat journals reveals the essence of the concept of “economic freedom” as interpreted by Czech dissidents. The author emphasises that it became a central element of the transformation of the country’s economic system in the 1990s. It is stressed that perestroika in the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev himself became a powerful external factor that intensified the process of its conceptualisation. The content of the concept was analysed through the prism of such aspects of economic development as state regulation, the phenomenon of private property, the tax system, the principle of the rule of law, and the existence of free access to all sectors of the economy. The author concludes that the Czech dissidents’ vision of economic freedom was in many ways consistent with both prevailing and later developed ideas about economic freedom and its place in society and the state. The article also shows the diversity of attitudes and perceptions about the future of Czechoslovakia in the “window of opportunity” that opened for it, without losing sight of the central role of economic freedom in achieving a free society. In addition, the study of Czech dissidents’ views on perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev’ role in it made it possible to trace the development of their attitude to the processes both in the Soviet Union and in their own country. The analysis of this position is also valuable because it allows us not only to show what image of the USSR and of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee himself was created on the pages of illegally published magazines, but also to determine the degree of development of economic thought in Czechoslovakia, which evolved under difficult conditions after the suppression of the Prague Spring, but was nevertheless able to absorb and generate advanced ideas.
French Legislation of the Napoleonic Era in the Kingdom of Poland:
According to the decision by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Austria, Prussia and Russia, which included parts of the territory of the Duchy of Warsaw, assumed mutual obligations to ensure the rights of the Polish population. In the Kingdom of Poland, established on Polish lands within the Russian Empire, which was granted a constitution, preserved state institutions and some political and civil liberties, the French Civil Code (Code Napoleon) and the French Commercial Code continued to apply. Thus, the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland were involved in the process of systematising state and civil law, which took place in many European countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the same time, from the end of the 1820s onwards, the legislation of the Kingdom of Poland was brought closer to that of the Empire. This process, especially after the suppression of the Polish Uprising of 1830-1831, accompanied by the restriction of political and civil liberties granted by the Constitution of 1815, favoured the incorporation of the Polish lands into the Russian state. At the same time, the 1809 incorporation of the French Commercial Code into the national legal system of the Duchy of Warsaw, which was also in force in the Kingdom of Poland, even after the creation of the independent Polish state in 1918, contributed to the creation of legal and economic unity, which was perceived as a manifestation of economic and political freedom under conditions of a significant restriction of national rights. The implementation of French legislation in the early ninettenth century had a significant impact on the systematisation of state and civil law in the Kingdom of Poland.
French Civil Code (Napoleon Code) and the French Commercial Code in the Polish lands
the constitutional period of the history of the Kingdom of Poland
the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century
systematisation of the legislation of the Russian Empire
Ethics and Pragmatics of Freedom: Author, Hero, Reader (Olga Tokarczuk and Janina Duszejko)
The article is devoted to Olga Tokarczuk’s “moral thriller” Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, introducing a heroine who is endowed with a demonstratively morally controversial freedom of action: by sharpening the ideas of critical posthumanism, the author describes a collision with the unpunished killing of hunters by an eccentric defender of animal rights. The organisation of textual space and its perception are analysed from the perspective of ethics and pragmatics of freedom as understood by the author, the hero, and the reader, from the perspective of interaction between the reader's and the author's vision of fiction’s ethical limits, as well as the functions and possibilities of literature. The conflict in the novel, which — from a socio-psychological and discursive point of view — represents a conflict of individual and conventional behaviour, is embodied at the level of eventuality through the diverse use of the sphere of unpredictability, which affects the semantic structure of the text and the horizon of the reader's expectation. The article analyses the interaction of the logic of genre settings, the narrative logic of plot and fabula, both from a fictional, autobiographical and extra-textual stance. Tokarczuk’s novel is an (accomplished) artistic provocation, understood as the organisation of a dialogue with the reader in such a paradoxical way as to inevitably induce meaning-generating reflections by the latter. The main mechanism employed by the text is the absence of the expected plot element in the finale (punishment / conviction / repentance of the heroine). Manipulating the boundaries of the heroine's freedom of behaviour, undermining the oppositions characteristic of the detective, the author challenges not only specific stereotypes of the worldview, but also the very principle of binary closure. Tokarczuk’s understanding of the ideas of integral and “sensitive” narrative about the world, meliorist ethical and psychological functions and possibilities of literature (in particular, the literature of the “in-between”, combining ludic and intellectual elements) is close to the concepts of pragmatic aesthetics: fiction is a specific way of transmitting and acquiring experience, it is performative knowledge, involving imagination and mechanisms of identification and empathy, constituting an element of social communication.
Choosing Unfreedom: the Anschluss of 1938 as Depicted in the Austrian Press
With the establishment of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime in Austria in the 1930s, the Austrian press came under strict state control, which, to a certain extent, led to its unification and high controllability by public opinion. These trends manifested themselves most clearly during the preparation and implementation of the Anschluss in 1938. Despite the differing political orientation of the newspapers that were formally representing the entire spectrum of social thought, every issue would broadcast identical patterns, whose content depended on the government’s position at any given moment. Throughout January and February, every newspaper actively made patriotic statements justifying the viability of an independent Austrian state and defending the government’s policy of maintaining close ties between the First Austrian Republic and the Third Reich. However, as the government of Kurt Schuschnigg showed more and more compliance with the demands of the German Führer for the reunification of the two German-seaking states, the tone in the Austrian press moved towards increasing approval of the idea of the Anschluss and justifying the need to hold a referendum on the fate of Austria. As a result, after the occupation of Austrian lands by German troops, the local press quickly reoriented itself towards supporting the Nazification of Austria and called for voting for the inclusion of the state in the German Reich in the plebiscite on 10 April. Such adaptability of the Austrian press was to a large extent impelled by the authoritarian regime of Dollfuss/Schuschnigg and reflected the disappointment in the viability of one’s own state that had taken shape among the Austrian population by the end of the 1930s.
Opinion Journalism, Periodicals, Propaganda
Historical Narratives in Burgenland Local History Journals Between the Two World Wars
Border regions of nation states have always played an important role in the process of national identity construction. The region of Burgenland was transferred to Austria in 1921. After the First World War, the country was compensated with a territory that had previously been a part of Hungary. Since the “birth” of the region, it has been heavily contested, mostly by Hungarian historians. Of course, the Austrian historical writing was eager to integrate Burgenland into its national histories. The aim of my study is to show how local history journals participated in creating a new regional identity in Burgenland. Three journals will be at the centre of my attention: Burgenland, Mitteilungen des Burgenländischen Heimatschutzvereins, and the fusion of these two: the Burgenländische Heimatblätter. I demonstrate the differences and debates between these journals, as they often polemicised against each other to determine who should dominate the discourse about the history of Burgenland. The journal Burgenland had close ties to the regional government and was oriented towards German nationalism. In contrast to the Burgenland, the Mitteilungen was published by the Burgenländisches Heimatschutzverein, an organisation of civil society. In the volumes of Mitteilungen nationalism was less present, rather, we can observe criticism against industrialism and a strong romanticisation of nature. Burgenland was financed by the regional authorities, whereas Mitteilungen relied mainly on donations and membership fees. I also introduce debates between Hungarian and Austrian authors (Otto Aull and Gyula Gáyer) about this region to present a nuanced and balanced picture about the Burgenland-debate in the interwar period. The article shows that the historical narratives of these journals were shaped by encounters with rival interpretations of the past, and as a result, the dominant völkisch interpretation emerged, and Mitteilungen, as a journal with a more conservative agenda, was defeated.
Some Aspects of Soviet-German Economic Relations and David Kandelaki’s Mission (1935-1937):
In the middle of the 1930s, Stalin decided to intensify trade and economic relations with Germany in order to obtain long-term loans to finance mainly supplies of military and dual-use products. At the same time, the Nazi regime, despite its anti-Soviet foreign policy, was interested in establishing stable economic ties with Moscow, as it was experiencing an increasing dependence of the German economy on supplies of strategic raw materials from the USSR. The combination of these factors predetermined the Kremlin’s decision to entrust the Trade Representative in Germany David V. Kandelaki with a special mission, which was not limited to solving economic problems, but also included the creation of an atmosphere of trust, which is so crucial for negotiations on the supply of sensitive military products. At the same time, long-term loans would be a significant guarantee of the sustainability of such relations. According to Stalin's plan, all this was to be a preparatory stage for political negotiations with the German leadership. Actively contributing to the implementation of the five-year loan granted to the USSR in 1935, Kandelaki achieved serious concessions from the German side, including the agreement to supply some military products previously prohibited to export to the USSR. However, all the attempts by the Trade Representative to ensure the solution of the political problem, conditioning further expansion of economic relations with Berlin’s consent to negotiations on a political settlement, led to nothing. The reason for this was the unrealistic tasks set by Stalin, ignoring the “Hitler factor” and his political and ideological attitudes that determined the nature of German-Soviet relations.
Central Europe Between the Two World Wars
The Croatian Issue in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. 1918-1929
Russian historians, as well as Serbian and Croatian authors, when speaking about the Croatian question in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, refer to the activities of the Croatian (Republican) Peasant Party, often awarded the epithet “national movement”. No distinction is made between Serbian-Croatian relations, the “Serbian-Croatian conflict” and its interaction with Serbian parties and, above all, with the People’s Radical Party, which is also called the representative of the entire Serbian people. One cannot help but see the vulnerability of such generalisations. If parties are “national movements,” how should we evaluate their ideological inconsistency and tendency to form unexpected alliances? Did these qualities correspond to a similar inconstancy of the masses, or did the party leaders sometimes not pursue the popular aspirations, which were more or less stable, but their personal motives instead? The vulnerability of identifying party conflicts with interethnic contradictions prompts us to narrow the angle of consideration of the Croatian issue to a phenomenon of political life. This does not mean that it is impossible to trace the connection between what was happening in the political arena and interethnic relations. Politics served as a reflection of the mood of the masses. Unfortunately, our understanding of them is limited by the lack of sociological data, so inter-party struggle can be considered the main indicator of the severity of Serbian-Croatian contradictions, but not the only one. The activities of “people’s” organisations were another influence.
“I Did not Aspire and Do not Aspire to Become a Diplomatic Representative…” Solomon I. Gillerson and the Soviet Red Cross Mission in Czechoslovakia (July 1920 — June 1921)
This article examines the main areas of activity of the first Soviet mission in the Czechoslovak Republic — the mission of the Red Cross of the RSFSR. The author provides extensive evidence that the mission performed functions that went far beyond its official task: providing assistance to former Russian prisoners of war and their repatriation. Considerable attention is paid to the diplomatic activities of the mission: establishing and maintaining contacts with Czechoslovakian officials, negotiations on the neutrality of Prague in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 and on the recognition of the Soviet state. For Moscow, the Soviet Red Cross mission was an important source of information about the internal political and economic situation in Czechoslovakia, its foreign policy, and international relations in Central and South-Eastern Europe. The article demonstrates the conspiratorial activities of the mission, its support for the revolutionary movement in Czechoslovakia and neighboring countries, its mediating role between the Comintern and left-wing radical organisations in the region, and its work among former legionnaires in the ranks of Russian and Ukrainian emigrants. The author focuses on the personality of the head of the mission, Solomon I. Gillerson, his attitude towards some problems of the domestic and foreign policy of Soviet Russia, towards the communist movement in Czechoslovakia, and towards the directives he received from Moscow. The conflict between Gillerson and the Comintern agent V. Vishnevsky is examined in more detail. The article is based on the study of the funds of Russian and Czech archives, which contain documents of the mission itself (telegrams, letters, reports, and reviews sent to Moscow, and dispatches and instructions by the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR addressed to the mission), as well as materials relating to its position in Prague (diplomatic and other official and personal correspondence, reports from Czechoslovak police agents).
revolutionary movement in Czechoslovakia
Attempts to Restore the Power of Charles Habsburg in Hungary in 1921: The Position of French Diplomacy
Contemporaries have expressed contradictory opinions about the line of behaviour taken by Paris during the two attempts at Habsburg restoration in Hungary in 1921 (especially the first one), and the historians’ interpretations were not unified, either. This article aims to analyse the position of French diplomacy during the attempted restoration of Charles I Habsburg’s power, and to identify the key influential factors. The article is based on a corpus of published and archival documents characterising the activities of the central apparatus of the Foreign Ministry of the Third Republic, the French High Commissioner in Budapest, Maurice Fouchet, and a number of diplomatic missions. The author concludes that the stance of French diplomacy was ambiguous. On the one hand, there was a “hard core” which defined the “red lines” regarding Hungary. Paris did not want to radically worsen its relations with partners from the Big and the Little Entente because of the “Hungarian question”; the latter was not supposed to provoke a wide scale instability in East-Central Europe, and the basic parameters of the Versailles regulation had to be preserved. The potential benefits of the Habsburg restoration did not outweigh the foreign policy costs, and, most importantly, putting these benefits into practice could only take place in the case of Charles' successful actions. On the other hand, French diplomats did not rule out that the return of the Habsburgs to power could have some favourable consequences for France, including reducing the risks of Hungary's gravitation towards Germany and creating a possible ground for Austro-Hungarian rapprochement as an alternative to an Anschluss. Finally, the government of Aristide Briand added some volatility to Paris’ position, which, however, remained far from offering any really serious support to Charles’ endeavours.
Henry Moser — Benjamin Kallay’s Man in Paris: To the History of Alfons Mucha’s Participation in the Design of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion at the 1900 World Exhibition
This article is devoted to a hitherto unexplored aspect of the work of Benjamin Kállay, who was Minister of the joint Ministry of Finance of Austria-Hungary from 1882 to 1903 and in this capacity supervised the transformation of the province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He succeeded in creating an administrative framework for the formation of an independent Bosnian nation, based on the principle of equality between Muslim and Christian communities, and successfully integrated the province into the liberal constitutional organisation of the dual monarchy. To promote the successes of Bosnian modernisation, Kállay established non-governmental representation in France in 1895, promoting—through various medial strategies—a positive image of the country in the eyes of the international community that would dispel the bloody memories of the religious conflicts. In the course of archival research in the Historical Museum of Bern, Switzerland, the author of this article discovered the personal archive of Heinrich (Henri) Moser, a merchant and orientalist, a connoisseur of the Muslim world of Central Asia and a confidant of Kállay, who for about 10 years successfully interacted with the world press, attracted foreign investment to Bosnia, promoted Bosnian goods on world markets, and turned Bosnia into a popular tourist destination with an oriental flavour. Moser’s correspondence and other documents from the Swiss museum made it possible to reconstruct in detail the history of the creation of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion at the World Exhibition in 1900 and the involvement of the Czech painter Alfons Mucha, who lived in Paris, in the creation of the innovative art nouveau style circle depicting the country’s history, which became the main artistic attraction of the world exhibition.
Austria-Hungary and the Discourse of Freedom
Anti-German Protests in Ljubljana in September 1908 — an Episode of the Slovenes’ Struggle for National Freedom
This article examines the specifics of the anti-German riot of the Slovenes on 18-20 September 1908 in Ljubljana, which took place in the context of a general tightening of Slovenian-German confrontation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also analyses their results and significance for the further development of the national struggle of the Slovenian people. In response to the anti-Slovenian protests by the Germans in Ptuj on 13 September 1908, Slovene liberals held a protest rally in Ljubljana on 18 September, which escalated into street riots where Germans were attacked by Slovenes. These were the most powerful incidences of public unrest in the city since the revolution of 1848. As late as 20 September, they were suppressed by government troops, while several Slovenians were injured and two were killed. The shooting of Slovene protesters had serious consequences. Anti-German and anti-Slovenian protest rallies and demonstrations pervaded the empire, the Germans were outraged by the actions of the Slovenian nationalists, and the majority of the Austrian Slavs expressed their solidarity with them. One of the consequences of the September protests in Ljubljana was a boycott against the Germans initiated by Slovenian politicians, which not only infringed on their national dignity, but also incurred serious economic damage to them. Previously, Slovenian historians assessed the September events in Ljubljana as a milestone in the development of the national self-awareness of the Slovenes; modern researchers believe that they should not be considered to be of so much importance. In any case, anti-German unrest in Ljubljana caused a rise in nationalism among the Slovenes, dissatisfaction with the actions of the army and the government, and sharply worsened Slovene-German relations. In addition to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary a few days later, the riots gave impetus to the intensified development of the Slovenes’ own version of the trialism programme, which was already adopted in January 1909 by both Catholics and liberals at a meeting of the Carniola provincial assembly.
The Discourse of Freedom in the Austrian Pedagogical Press of 1867–1914 as a Tool of Protest Against Public Control
Ever since their emergence, state systems of secular schooling have been regularly influenced not only by pedagogical theories, but also by socio-political movements and official ideologies. After the dualist monarchy of Austria-Hungary was established, the school and its issues turned into an arena of nationalist and political struggle and it also became an object of increased state control. All stakeholders considered schools and teachers as an effective tool for enhancing their influence. As schools felt growing pressure from the state, political parties, and national organisations, the word “freedom” sounded increasingly loud in public speeches during meetings of teachers’ associations and appeared more frequently in the pedagogical periodicals. The article analyses teachers’ journals and newspapers, which were the press organs of teachers’ associations of different political background, where Austrian schoolteachers used the discourse of “freedom” to express their views on their profession, their identity, and their role in society. The author identifies the following main meanings of freedom in the Austrian teachers' polemic: personal freedom and civil liberties, professional freedom, freedom in fulfilling one's national mission, and freedom from political engagement. At the same time, special attention is paid to the policies of the Viennese Ministry of Culture and Education and the actions of the Habsburg bureaucracy, which triggered the teachers’ demand for freedom for schools. This allows for a correction of the findings in the historiography, which previously ignored the role of state officials in the development of Austrian schooling. The author questions the thesis about the passivity of Habsburg officials in the face of the nationalist onslaught and argues that teachers’ protests against the restriction of their freedom were caused by the bureaucracy’s desire to improve the quality of teaching in schools and to provide civic and patriotic education for pupils that was aimed at developing a sense of “Austrianness”, love for the “great Fatherland” and loyalty to the ruling dynasty.