East Central Europe and Communism

Politics, Culture, and Society, 1943-1991
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-032-31818-9
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 358 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 680 g

Reihe: Routledge Open History

The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949.

Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ramet, Sabrina P

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Communism’s Unintended Consequences: An Introduction. 2. The Soviet bloc, 1944-1956. 3. The Soviet bloc, 1956-1980 4. The Soviet bloc, 1980-1989/90. 5. Socialist Mavericks: Yugoslavia and Albania, 1943-1991. 6. Epitaph.

Über Autor(innen)

Sabrina P. Ramet is a Professor Emerita at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU). She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at UCLA in 1981. She is the author of 15 previous scholarly books, including Alternatives to Democracy in Twentieth-Century Europe: Collectivist Visions of Modernity (Central European University Press, 2019).