Blockchain Papers

Aleksandr P. Alekseenko

. 2018 . . , , . , . , . . , , . ,

Kristina E. Poznan

Jakub S. Beneš’s Workers and Nationalism seeks to explain “how the workers that made up one of Europe’s largest Social Democratic movements came to embrace nationalism” (2)—an answer to the enduring question of the paradoxical relationship between socialism and nationalism. The center of Beneš’s story is found not in parliamentary speeches or theoretical treatises or even on the factory floor, as in most works, but in the literary columns of Social Democratic newspapers and in orations on the streets. Indeed, Workers and Nationalism is “a much more cultural answer to the question of how workers in . . . [Habsburg Austria’s] Social Democratic movement became ethnic nationalists” (8). Beneš highlights the significance of print and oral culture, portraying workers as readers and as the authors of a tremendous body of poetry and prose. Their short stories spoke to class-based injustices, and their poems, songs, and orations marked May Day celebrations and other occasions; these provide the book’s main source base. The strong literary bent in Austrian Social Democracy allowed workers to meet in genuinely cultural associations, maintaining institutions and relationships even in the decades of the late nineteenth century when Social Democracy was politically repressed. Rather than fight workers’ growing national allegiances or many of their Catholic beliefs, Beneš explains, Austrian Social Democracy simply adopted them. Practices like these had the added benefit of shielding Social Democrats from some charges of national indifference or more subversive radicalism.The period from 1905 to 1907 saw “the active seizure of universal voting rights by the social working classes” in Austria (100), putting the critical years for the development of Austrian Social Democracy a full decade earlier than in several other countries. From a marginalized subculture in the 1890s facing explicit governmental suppression, the Austrian Social Democratic Party rather suddenly became the most popular voice for Austria’s democratization. In 1897, workers had gained limited voting rights in a small new curia (a division of the Austrian electorate) and sent over a dozen delegates to the Austrian parliament. They built on that political momentum, Beneš explains, to argue for more sweeping electoral reform. In the late fall of 1905, more and more Austrians flocked to the Social Democratic suffrage movement, not only previously apolitical workers but also state employees and some professionals. On November 28, 1905, Social Democrats held a coordinated peaceful general strike and mass demonstrations on Vienna’s main ring road, in Prague’s Old Town Square, and in several other industrial towns. Because of this widespread popular pressure, legislation for nearly universal male suffrage passed just over a year later, and Social Democrats won 23 percent of the popular vote and a sixth of the parliamentary seats in the subsequent election. “By 1905, workers saw parliamentary democracy as a panacea to cure all varieties of social exclusion,” Beneš concludes, and with their euphoric victories at the polls in 1907, “many appear to have thought that the revolution need go no further” (142).Despite these successes, national chauvinism, the logistical difficulties of coordinating across languages, and strong preferences for a decentralized party all worked against a unified Social Democratic movement going forward. Both Czech and German Social Democrats increasingly argued that “their movement constituted the only site of genuine national loyalty” (144), prompting an ethnonational split. But even as Czech-and German-speaking Social Democrats embraced nationalism, different class interests and middle-class snobbery still prevented workers’ political alliance with bourgeois nationalist parties. “Workers,” Beneš finds, “seemed to feel no heightened affinity with their co-nationals among the middle classes and even continued to regard workers of the other nationalities as natural allies, even if they proceeded separately,” or, as they styled it, “autonomously” (3). They embraced national heroes like Jan Hus and Richard Wagner, respectively, as socialist icons, and appropriated national high culture. “Nationally hued Social Democratic events” challenged bourgeois claims to nationalism as well as rigid socialist internationalism. Czech Social Democrats, in particular, sincerely considered autonomous Czech-language socialist organizations a “logical extension of proletarian internationalism” (175) rather than, as some previous scholarship has suggested, a straying from socialist principles by elites or, as Engels argued, a contradiction.The conflation of national and social aims was, Beneš admits, sometimes discomfiting. Both sides slipped into national insensitivity, evident in policy issues (like the battle for more Czech-language schools in Bohemia and the working-class suburbs of Vienna) and in popular literature. Significantly, Beneš finds that neither Czech nor German Social Democrats compromised working-class politics to ally with any of the empire’s bourgeois nationalist parties. German and Czech Social Democrats largely supported Austria-Hungary’s efforts in World War I, with party leaders encouraging a “hibernation” phase until after the war; contributing to, rather than subverting, the war effort, they reasoned, would do the most to assure the expansion of social democracy in the conflict’s aftermath. It was only in the very late stages of the war that Czech Social Democrats joined the Czech Socialist Party in a socialist council to strategize for a new post-imperial political landscape. Social Democrats had fought for change under the imperial Austrian parliament, which no longer existed in its prewar form. But their 1907 achievement of universal male suffrage, notably, carried over into Habsburg Austria’s successor states.Beneš’s cultural history of Austrian Social Democracy leaves various areas sparsely treated. Universal male suffrage was, needless to say, a monumental goal and achievement, but we learn almost nothing about the Social Democrats’ platform and political objectives beyond suffrage and an eight-hour workday. We learn almost nothing, either, about their lives as workers, what sorts of grievances compelled them to political action, and what they hoped to achieve.What readers do take away from Workers and Nationalism is that Austria and 1905 matter a great deal in considering the development of European Social Democracy comparatively and that workers rather easily reconciled socialism and nationalism. “Workers who embraced an uncompromising nationalism in the years after 1905 saw no contradiction between this and their allegiance to the internationalist socialist movement. Independently pursuing social justice as a bounded national collective while not denying parallel aspiration to other national groupings seemed natural and desirable. Democracy was the door to realizing a more just national community,” they believed, “and socialism held the key” (241).

David Ost

David Ost The Promises and Limits of Anti-Politics: Solidarity’s Democracy and Its Successors The first Solidarity period of 1980-81 galvanized world attention with its participatory model of democracy, which I and others have called “anti-politics.” Citizens became active in all rungs of life, started to govern themselves while the authorities looked on. To what extent did anti-politics constitute a workable model? Can there be a sphere of politics with extensive participation, free of coercion, yet able to make binding and enforceable decisions? This essay seeks to understand both the limitations and enduring promise of anti-politics. It argues that Solidarity’s participatory model ultimately failed because of an inability to engage the political, due both to state policy and to organizational aspects (a decentralized structure generating militant leaders) which made compromise difficult. Anti-politics can transform dictatorships through civic engagement, though cannot maintain high levels of active participation without a political solution. Subsequent developments in democratic theory and practice, however, have tried to build on Solidarity’s cultivation of widespread rational participation by seeking ways to maintain activism while accepting limits of the political. Deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting can thus be seen direct descendants of anti-politics, building on Solidarity’s legacy while keeping in mind Andre Gorz’s admonition that the key to a durable, radical, participatory democracy consists in expanding the realm of the “autonomous,” while recognizing that an oppressive sphere of the “heteronomous” will always to some extent remain necessary. Keywords: Solidarity, model of democracy, anti-politics, democratic theory, democratic practice.

Barbara Epstein

This chapter discusses the emergence of underground movements and groups in the ghettos. Within weeks of the establishment of the Minsk ghetto, secret groups were formed in the ghetto, consisting mostly of Communists and some non-Communists whom they trusted. While many Communists and Komsomol members never participated in the underground in hopes of surviving the war without coming to the attention of the Germans, by August and September 1941, there were four secret groups in the ghetto. These groups eventually became aware of the existence of other underground groups and established contact with each other. During the same period, a similar process was taking place outside the ghetto. And through the fall of 1941, people hoping to engage in resistance began to reach out to like-minded people within the ghetto, within the Russian district, between the two areas, and between each of these areas and forests around Minsk, where partisans were forming. Sometime in October 1941, a Minsk-wide underground organization was established. After this citywide underground was formed, the formerly autonomous secret groups outside and inside the ghettos became part of the defined hierarchical structure. However, at the same time the Minsk underground retained much of its earlier spontaneous and decentralized character. The members of the secret groups who took the opportunities for sabotage, circulating propaganda, and saving the lives of Jews in the ghettos, initiated many of the projects that were sponsored and promoted by the underground leadership. These efforts involved underground members of various groups as well as non-members such as Byelorussians. This support and direction that the underground leadership provided made underground activity more extensive and effective. However, due to the quick growth of the underground group into a mass movement it became vulnerable to German attention and arrests. These arrests severely affected the Russian district but not the ghetto movement due to their rules of conspiracy. In the wake of the large-scale arrests of leading activists, the rank-and-file underground members played a crucial role in sustaining underground activity outside the ghettos and in maintaining connections between the ghetto and the Russian district.

Giovanna Brogi Bercoff

It could be argued that enough has already been written about the book edited by S. Franklin and E. Widdis, which has become the object of a lively discussion, a discussion where emotional reactions seem occasionally to dominate, even though the questions at stake deserve to be treated in a scholarly and dispassionate way. Understandably, these questions are not just scholarly; they are at the same time the depository of proofs, arguments or counter-arguments for sought after, imagined or historically real self-identities. Ironically, the discussion is about a book that is neither among the most important nor the best in the last years. A reader will find interesting pages and information here, but the authors often offer several different interpretations of the same fact, failing to provide proofs for the correct one. Let me mention the in the lands in the film Aleksandr Nevskij, which has nothing to do with the betrayal of Christ (p. 113): the Judas par excellence in Russia was (is?) Mazepa, who also passed to the German (Swedish) camp. The allusion to mazepynstvo is quite obvious in the film. As to the bank notes of the 1990s, I do not think that they lend themselves to a double interpretation, namely, as either overlapping Soviet images or being a challenge to them (pp. 24-28): in my opinion, by 1996, they were already a symbol of of the new state and challenged the Soviet/Russian interpretation of the Kyivan past. Incidentally, the notes were considered state symbols already by Andrew Wilson in his book The Ukrainians: Unexpected nation (2001; cf. pp. 227-228). The Greek ruins on the same notes do suggest the 2000 year old history of the Ukrainian lands: this may be considered a manifestation of silly nationalism, but let us recall that the first person who stated the same idea for Russia was V. Tatishchev. Thus, today myths of antiquity are as silly as the ones-although that is not often appreciated nor recognized as dangerous.Although the book contains only minor errors,2 I am skeptical about its usefulness. It is a hybrid product of post-modernist and late-structuralist criticism, trying to unite various specialties, ranging from philology and language to history (spanning a time-frame from the early-medieval to the present), from modern cultural studies to questions of nation-building, not to mention issues of identity of the self and/or the other. As a result, the first surprise is that the book is 'only' 244-pages long. Brevity is often a virtue, but it can become a handicap when one tries to include everything just to suggest the endless contradictions and fluidity (as the editors say in the Preface) of all the parameters that make up National Identity and Russian Culture. It is hard to find a more difficult and broader subject in all of the human sciences, and to distil them into a short book requires enormous skill and clarity of vision. Unfortunately, the current book is a hybrid product designed for only a vaguely identified audience. Scholars will find it more or less useless because of the oversimplifications-and will treat the book as redundant. On the other hand, it is hard to recommend the book to non-specialists or students (the intended audience), since it lacks basic historical, cultural and linguistic data that might allow that type of reader to follow the culturological discourse that the editors tried to initiate. To give one example: B. Gasparov's analysis of the linguistic situation in Old-Rus', in Muscovy, and then in the empire, the USSR and even in contemporary Russia is hardly profitable for a student that has not taken courses in the history of the language and medieval literature, or digested books and articles by people like B. Uspenskii and V. Zhivov. On the other hand, for a specialist, Gasparov's short overview of such radically different works (both in terms of language and socio-cultural background) as Monomakh, Epifanii the Wise, Avvakum, and Zyzanii only provides evidence of the superficiality of his approach. …

Frances Millard

REVIEWS 78I Kirchner, Emil J. (ed.). Decentralization and Transition in the Visegrad. Poland, Hungagy, theCzechRepublic andSlovakia. Macmillan, Basingstoke, and St Martin's Press, New York, I 999. XViii + 237 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?47.50. LOCAL governmentreformin CentralEuropewas one ofthe earliestinitiatives in the process of institutional change characteristic of post-communist democratization.Decentralization was an importantelement of the platforms of Solidarityin Poland and Civic Forum/Public againstViolence in Czechoslovakia , not least to counter the oppressive, unresponsive bureaucratic centralismof the old regime. At the same time, completing the reformprocess proved difficultand halting, with both structuresand proceduresemerging as areas of technical and political controversythroughout the course of the first decade of transformation. Despite the book's title, the examination of this disjuncture provides the stuff of four solid empirical chapters by local specialistson the Visegrad Four, about half the book. In general the regional similarities are more striking than the differences, though the precise time periods underdiscussionare not alwaysclear, nor are they uniform. In I990 all three Visegrad governments enacted legislation to break the links between local government and the state administration by restoring genuine autonomy to communes (Poland) and municipalities (the Czech Republic, Slovakia,and Hungary),alongwith some reinstatementofproperty. The opportunities and obstacles for local democracy are effectively charted here, and three areas will serve to illustratesome of the common difficulties. First,there was a range of size, expertise and resourcesacrossthe local units, raisingseriousproblems of inequality.At the same time there was a growthin particularism, with few developed mechanisms for horizontal coordination and cooperation. In Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakiathere was a tendency for still furtherfragmentation into smaller units, though territorial settlementwas alreadyfragmentaryand dispersed. Secondly, the Centre gladly transferredextensive responsibilities to this lowest tier of government, but failed to secure the funds to ensure that they could fulfil them. This was especially acute in Slovakia from I994-98 when all spheres of social life based upon the principle of self-government came under attack'(Flatanand Krivy,p. Io8). Thirdly, decentralizationwas limited by the failureto addressintermediate levelsof government,the natureand cope ofwhich remainedhighlycontested. The Centre was anxious to retain control by direct as well as by financial means, despite the rhetoric of local democracy. In Poland and the Czech Republic this issue was still unresolved at the time the chapterswere written. In Poland resistance by the Polish Peasant Party, in coalition with the social democrats from 1993-97, meant that only a change of government could achieve the controversial restructuringof the provinces (wojewodztwa) from forty-nine to sixteen and the (re-)introductionof the county in I999. In the Czech Republic the provinceswere strippedof theirpolitical and administrative functions in I990, leaving seventy-eightdistrictsoperating as 'uncomfortably strongarmsof the centralgovernment and vehicles of centralism'(Illner, p. 9I). Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus was no friend of decentralization (nor 782 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 indeed of civil society), seeing it as a potential threat to a unified economic reform process. It was not until late I997 that the territorialdivision of the country into fourteen (small)provinces was resolved, but with their functions and finance still undefined. In both Hungary and the Czech Republic a 'politicalvacuum' emerged because of the weaknessof the intermediatelevel. In Slovakia the 1996 restructuringof the country's regions and districtswas certainly not final either: it was not only politically controversial but representeda clear attemptboth at partisangerrymanderingand to dilute the strengthof the Hungarian minority. Aside from the core studies a number of chapters cast differentangles on questions of decentralization. Issues of inequality surface in Andrzej Kowalczyk 's discussion of the development of Polish-German Euroregions, which notes the problems arising from economic differences between Poland and Germany. Successful cooperation can bring enormous benefits, as with the cooperation between Frankfurt-on-Oderand Stubice within the ProEuropa Viadrina Euroregion. Stubice became one of the wealthiest towns in Poland, thus magnifyinginternalinequalitieson the Polishside, while also castinginto starkreliefthe lack of comparablemotors of development on Poland'seastern borders. In other respects, however, this is a disparatecollection. It seems unlikely thatreaderswould expect to locate studiesof EU-Polish trade(Zielinska-Glebocka ) or European security and Polish debt finance (Sperling)in a study of decentralization;and these two sit especiallyuneasilyin thisvolume. They do not support or indeed refer to the questionable thesis...

Jonathan Harris

In the winter of 1989-90 the unintended consequences of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's program of political and economic refonn had become obvious to all but his most optimistic spokesmen. The General Secretary's attempt to create a new ideology of perestroika by grafting "bourgeois" and "social democratic" concepts onto the conventional ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had divided the party, created immense ideological confusion, and led to the formation of non-Communist and anti-Communist political organizations. The attempt to shift authority from party officials to elected soviets on the union and republican levels had led to the emergence of separatist and nationalist movements in many of the USSR's republics, including the RSFSR. The decentralization of the state's administration of the economy and the encouragement of both private and cooperative economic activity had failed to reverse the deterioration of economic conditions. As anxiety swept through the CPSU, orthodox party leaders called for the establishment of an autonomous Communist Party for the RSFSR to counter Gorbachev's policies and to "save Soviet Russia" from destruction.