Uses and Abuses of the Past. The Politics of History and Cultures of Remembrance in East-Central and Southeastern Europe (1791 to 1989) The ‘long’ 19th century and the wars of the ‘short’ 20th century decisively shaped the cultures of remembrance of the national societies and nation-states of East-Central and Southeastern Europe. The national liberation movements, the wars of 1912/14–1918, the founding of new states in 1918–19, the turn to authoritarian rule in the late 1920s and the war years of 1939/41–1944/45 continue to shape – together with the legacy of communism and medieval myths – the collective memory of contemporary Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbs, Macedonians, Croats and others. If Oskar Halecki and Jenő Szűcs have identified a historical meso-region of a ‘wider’ East-Central Europe characterized by common structural features, one can also identify a post-imperial and post-communist ‘community of memory’ between Plžen and Poltava, Tallinn and Thessaloniki. This shaping of the past in people’ s minds has taken place in a threefold manner. First, the individual memory of quite a number of people who had experienced World War II, the interwar period and even the ‘three’ Balkans Wars is still alive. These memories differ substantially depending on ethnicity, political affiliation back then, and on present-day political needs. Those hunted during the Second World War record rather different memories than those who participated in ethnic cleansing, for example. There have been floods of memoirs written about the recent past throughout the region. Second, in these until rather recently non-literate but ‘oral’ societies family memory continues to play an important role – a role that was strengthened considerably under the decades of communism when memories not compatible with the official master narrative were suppressed. And third – and perhaps most importantly – the post-1989/91 governments’ uses and abuses of the past are primarily an iteration of the ‘politics of history’ propagated by governments of the interwar period and earlier.

World War II – a Thirty Years War or a War of Three Generations The chronology of historical events may appear to be simple. There is a specific event and there is a date on which it occurred. However, an essential problem remains: what is the event and what terms shall we use to describe it? Will these terms be unambiguous? We ask: when did the Second World War begin and end? However, perhaps one should ask: why is it recognized as a world war? In Poland, it is assumed that the war began on 1 September 1939. However, for the first two days it was a conflict between two states only – Germany and Poland. Other participants of the events in Europe would join in later. Why do we call it a ‘world war’ then? Because there was another area of great struggle: the Far East, extended around the Pacific, Oceania, as far as the coasts of Australia. There is a problem here, however. The war in Asia began with Japan’ s attack on China on 7 July 1937. If we are of the opinion that the beginning of the world war is the German-Polish conflict, there are, in fact, no arguments for not moving the initial date more than two years earlier. The world war, which began with the Asian events of 1937, moved to Europe in 1939. And when did World War II end? However, the direct chronology of the conflict is only one part of the problem. To what extent was the war a separate chapter in history? Perhaps it was one of the processes which began much earlier and ended much later? There are supporters of the view of a certain thirty years war, from 1914 to 1945. Others are convinced of a war of a period of three generations, from 1914 to 1989 or 1990. Aspects under discussion involve the development of science and technology serving conflicts, a questioning of euro-centrism and the determination of the United States’ leadership in the Western block, as well as decolonization. History may be approached in various ways. The outcomes will depend on the assumptions made. This makes finding unambiguous answers difficult, but it also makes historical inquiries attractive.

The Road to Nuremberg. The Genesis of Judiciary Settling Accounts with Crimes of the Third Reich The first reported court trials for war crimes concerned offenses committed during the American Civil War (1861–1865). After World War I, the victorious nations of the Entente attempted to put the former German Emperor Wilhelm II and other German military leaders responsible for particularly drastic crimes. The former ruler took refuge in the Netherlands, which refused to extradite him, and the Reich Tribunal in Leipzig held a number of trials under heavy pressure from the victorious coalition. The majority of them led to acquittals or exceptionally short sentences, which resulted in the Leipzig process being labelled a travesty of justice; during World War II the allies regarded it as a negative experience which they should avoid repeating at all costs. During the period 1919–1920 several dozen trials concerning the slaughter of Armenians were held in Turkey by Turkish and British authorities, but they were equally inadequate for the scale of the crimes committed involving the murder of almost a million people. The anti-Hitler coalition thus could not draw on any real examples from the past when seeking to account for the crimes of the Third Reich and its allies, nor were there any international legal regulations or institutional solutions that they could look to. The first action taken to document the crimes committed in occupied countries were undertaken by governments-in-exile in London, primarily that of the Republic of Poland. It was pressure from that as well as other governments as well as others which led to the formation of the War Crimes Commission in October 1943, which developed a new legal concept and category: crimes against humanity. It turned out to be key in enforcing liability for crimes against civilians; it was invoked during the Nuremberg trials, and is also applied in many contemporary criminal proceedings. The first joint Allied commitment to prosecuting war crimes was the Moscow Declaration of 1 November 1943, but even after its adoption there were serious disagreements among the allies as to how this should be done. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was opposed to the creation of an international tribunal, citing the different legal systems of the Allies and the fiasco of the Leipzig trials following World War I; he was a supporter of summarily executing the leaders of the Third Reich and fascist Italy. The legal framework of the post-war trials was only developed during the closing months of the war, with American politicians and lawyers playing a key role. Their contribution was to base the most important post-war trials on three pillars: the categories of crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and the charge of conspiracy to commit crimes (a direct transplant from the American legal system). The trials held before the International Military Tribunal, held in Nuremberg from 20 November to 1 October 1946, were an attempt, unprecedented in the history of civilization, by the international community to bring to justice the leaders of a defeated state to justice for their crimes. In spite of the numerous criticism levelled against various aspects of the Nuremberg trials, it ultimately became a point of reference and an example for later attempts at placing political and military leaders on trial for their crimes.

The United States and Metamorphoses of the Power The century that has passed since the European outbreak of the first world-wide conflict also witnessed the most radical changes in the nature of power, its manifestations and its effects. Power was aligned in accordance with the political and legal order developed by the United States, as manifested in the Charter of the United Nations. Power evolved also in terms of form together with the emergence of a new European model and as a result of the ‘digital revolution’, which enabled groups or even individuals to challenge the state in areas which had previously seemed restricted to the government. However, the fundamental forces that drive power still shape the world order.

The Bumpy Road to Independence – Vietnam in 1940–1945 The purpose of the article is the presentation of the most important facts concerning the situation in Vietnam in 1940–1945 with particular focus on the independence efforts of the population of that country ended in a partial success in the form of proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in September 1945. The text includes, among others, the geopolitical importance of the French Indochina in the context of the War on the Pacific, the policies of the colonial administration, Japan’ s activities aimed at taking the control over Vietnam, the activity of the local communist movement and the role of the United States in setting in motion the process of decolonisation of the Indochinese Peninsula.

Anti-liberalism and Collectivism. The Politics and Economy from World War II to 1970s, based on Example of Polish Reconstruction Plans written during the War The article is an attempt at reconstructing the views and motivations of statism, nationalization and the planned economy – dominant in the world economy (including in the so-called capitalist world) from the 1930s, and particularly after World War II. The author invokes one little-known example of particular interest to the Polish reader, that of the manifestoes of underground political parties written during World War II, both under occupation and in emigration. They all envisions fundamental changes in Poland’ s economic structure after the war: both the left and the right (while differing significantly) assumed a greater role for economic planning and nationalization of key industries (including banking, transport, energy and large industrial enterprises). Authors from the left to the right side of the spectrum associated the free market with irrationality, ineffeciency and chaos. Without an understanding of this state of mind, it is impossible to understand economic policy from the end of World War II until at least the 1970s.

The Ministry of Motorization or the Central Office for Motor Vehicles? – Polish motorization at a crossroads. Plans, opportunities, institutions (1944–1948) The end of World War II meant the beginning of a new chapter in nearly all areas of life. One of them was motorization which, as a result of the unfavourable policy of the authorities of the Second Polish Republic and the war damage inflicted by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in fact ceased to exist. In that situation, the years 1945–1949 were the period in history in which many concepts of its development originated. People connected with the prewar Polish Automobile Club became eagerly involved in this; after the end of World War II, they played an active role in the process of restoration of Polish motorization. During the five years mentioned, several institutions were founded whose objective was to develop a national plan for the development of motorization, which would take advantage of the potential of the automobile industry. Such documents were prepared by: the State Motor Vehicle Office, the Committee for National Motorization or the Motorization Sub-Committee. Nearly all the plans being discussed had one point in common – the establishment of an institution at the central level (perhaps a ministry), which would control all decisions connected with widely understood motorization. Before that, the competencies of individual offices had overlapped in many cases, resulting in disputes. Unfortunately, nearly all of these plans remained ‘on paper’ only, as they were not approved by decision-makers.

Postwar Cultures: Art and Communism in Krakow and Leipzig On the morning of January 19, 1945, Dr. Bolesław Drobner arrived as the first representative of Poland’ s postwar government, charged with a special mission: to resurrect the city’ s arts scene and build a new, democratic culture. Six months later a music teacher named Rudolf Hartig took up his new post in Leipzig’ s bullet-riddled City Hall. Hartig was a lifelong communist who took over the city’ s Culture Department after the Nazi collapse. Drobner and Hartig became local agents in a transnational project that spanned Eastern Europe: the search for a distinctive socialist culture. This paper investigates what they did at the city level in the first half-decade after World War II. For the East European regimes that came to power after WWII, culture was not a form of entertainment but a tool of governance. Both Drobner and Hartig viewed art as a foundation of the postwar order, capable of bridging social divisions, eradicating fascist residues, and promoting a Marxist worldview. At the same time, the two officials could not simply impose their vision from above: they also had to contend with Soviet advisors and local artists, two groups that had their own notions of what art should look like. The struggle for socialist culture thus reflected broader struggles over political and social control in Eastern Europe. This paper compares cultural reconstruction in Krakow and Leipzig, two of EasternEurope’s major cities. Looking at them side by side allows us to assess the role Soviet officials played in local affairs and to refine our notion of Sovietization. The postwar program of socialist culture was not just a Soviet imposition but rather had deep native roots. Lacking concrete models or instructions, both Drobner and Hartig relied on prewar conventions, national traditions, and even fascist practice. They pursued policies that seemed to uphold the status quo and therefore provoked little opposition – even from those who opposed leftist parties. Yet these policies also expanded the authority of the state, paving the way for a radical restructuring of the cultural sphere in the years 1949/50. It was widely accepted principles like democratization that enabled the Stalinization of Polish and German culture. The policies that Drobner and Hartig developed proved to have a lasting impact on the Soviet Bloc: they prepared the ground for the Stalinist system, but also preserved local traditions that reemerged when that system collapsed.

The Alternatives to the Political Catholicism in Hungary after 1945 on the Example of József Mindszenty and Gyula Szekfű 1945 was a watershed year for Hungary and Hungarian Catholicism alike. The Ancient Regime of the interwar period has totally collapsed in the wake of the crushing defeat that the humiliated country the shameful last ally of the Nazi Reich suffered from the ‘liberating’ Soviet troops. The Liberation soon to be proved nothing else but a ruthless and full scale occupation and Soviets’ proxies, the Communists gradually took control over the whole political and social system of the country. The Catholic Churches lost not just her centuries old privileged status but also her entire wealth in the wake of the 1945 land reform initiated by the Communist Party. But it remained a powerful social force capable to articulate the voice of millions of faithful for the years to come. Amidst the epochal changes two different strategies were articulated by Catholic clery and the laymen intelligentsia: 1) that of the resistance moral and uncompromising standoff represented by the newly appointed Cardinal József Mindszenty (1892–1975), Archbishop of Esztergom and most of the clergy and 2) that of a rather hopeless ralliement with Christian Democratic overtones which was expressed by the first ambassador of Hungary to the Soviet Union the Catholic historian and influential public intellectual of the interwar period Gyula Szekfű (1883–1955). The historical controverse over the oeuvre of Mindszenty reaches back to his time as active head of the Hungarian Catholics in the late 1940s, continued to be unabatted throughout of the Détente and Ostpolitik years in the 1960s and 1970s, and revived vigourously after 1990 when Mindszenty’ s name and fate ceased to be an untouchable political taboo. Mindszenty undertook a very active public life right from the beginning of his carrier and his arrest at Christmas 1948 followed by an internationally echoed show trial that ended with a life sentence made him once for all an emblematic and at the same time a highly controversial figure of the Hungarian Catholic Church. His memory is still bears this original divide. His partisans praise Mindszenty because of infatigable his brave and uncompromising anti-communism and his passionate vision of Catholicism blended with Hungarian national identity, and since his tragic fate symbolises with strength the sufferings of the ‘silent church’ beyond the Iron Curtain. But he is vehemently contested because of his political ambitions, because of his his well–known royalist symphaties and Habsburg affinities even after 1945, because of his emphasis on Hungary as Regnum Marianum implies an exclusivist catholic nationalism and last but not least since his intrasignance did not take account of the needs of the ordinary and feeble beliver not ready for martyrdom. This was indeed the forceful argument for the persons of the compromise like Gyula Szekfű who feared a large scale secularization of the masses under duress lest the Church accepts the new status quo dictated by the Communist régime. The paper explores these alternatives and try to asses the inherent contradictions in both with a view of the symbolical importance of the oppression of the Church for future generations.

‘Professors Who do Not Shape Marxist Ideology but Long For Old Times’. The Episode in the History of Polish Higher Education in the Stalinist Period on the Example of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin

Yesterday Today: Memory of the War in Polish Contemporary Art after 1989 The purpose of this text is to attempt a synthetic portrayal of the issue of memory of the Second World War as a source of inspiration in Polish contemporary art since 1989. The year 1989, which marked the beginning of systemic transformation in Poland, was also the beginning of the process of transformation of the paradigm of collective memory of World War II. The appearance of issues omitted in the institutionalized discourse of the period of the Polish People’ s Republic contributed to an increase in artists’ interest in the mechanisms of constructing the collective image of the past. The particular ‘memory boom,’ which involved a sharp increase in the number of publications on so-called ‘white spots’ in the history of Poland, also manifested itself in the visual arts, among others, in the works of Mirosław Bałka, Zbigniew Libera, Wilhelm Sasnal, Piotr Uklański and Artur Żmijewski. Most of the works created in the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century concerned the memory of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation. In many cases, the means of artistic expression employed by their creators evoked controversy and objections by those who found them inappropriate. The basic objections raised against artists referring to ‘war issues’ were: the instrumental references to the issue of the Holocaust, dictated by trends, and the lack of deep reflection on the attitudes of perpetrators, victims and witnesses of the events at that time. The fact that artists drew from collective images brought with it other effects also. Many works created in this period served the following functions: c a t h a r t i c – involving the purification through art of the recipient’ s feelings and emotions, h e u r i s t i c – resulting from treating creation and its outcomes as a research process whose important elements include the posing of hypotheses and their verification, m n e m o t e c h n i c a l – being an exercise in memory through the medium of art and, finally – c o m m e m o r at i v e, embedded – following Pierre Nora – in the era of commemoration and the call to remembrance. The manners of portraying themes of memory of the war in Polish contemporary art since 1989 seem to have confirmed the social aspect of artistic creation, involving – in the case being discussed – the exposing of, but also the formation of collective images of the past.

The Life and Death of Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921–1945 This article presents the characteristics of the Jewish population living in Western Volhynia in the times of the Second Republic of Poland and during the Second World War. Polish interwar authorities enabled the Jewish communities to follow their traditional pattern of life. With time, however, Zionism and especially communism were becoming increasingly popular among the Volhynian Jews. In 1937, the Jewish community accounted for about 10 percent of the region’ s inhabitants and was outnumbered by the Ukrainian minority. Jews dominated in trade and skilled crafts and constituted half of the urban population. After 17 September 1939, Volhynia found itself under Soviet occupation. Initially, the Red Army was welcome, as the Soviet terror was mostly directed against the Polish population. Due to aggressive sovietisation, however, the Jews of Volhynia lost any illusions as to the possibility of achieving autonomy, realizing that they had simply become citizens of a totalitarian state. Their situation deteriorated dramatically in June 1941 following the German invasion of Russia. In accordance with Nazi ideology, the local Jews were to be exterminated in the Holocaust. In June and July 1941 alone, approximately 12 000 Jews were murdered by the Germans on the front lines of the war, in the autumn – 20 000 more. The collaborating Ukrainian police forces helped the German occupiers in inflicting terror. The Germans began to set up ghettos at the end of 1941, only to start their liquidation several months later. Jews were murdered on a massive scale in the so-called death pits near their homes. Most of the Volhynian Jews lost their lives during the war. Only a few managed to escape or found shelter among Poles or Ukrainians. Some decided to join partisan groups (mostly communist), who conducted their operations in the extremely difficult conditions of German occupation, Soviet counter-offensive and ethnic civil war in Volhynia.

The Soviet Judiciary in the Volhynia and in East Galicia in 1939–1941 The article reviews the formation and development of Soviet justice in Volyn and Eastern Galicia in 1939–1941. It reveals the notion of ‘political justice’ and significance of punitive and repressive authorities in Soviet totalitarian system. The paper shows the main trends of judicial and extrajudicial executions of Stalinist regime against the public of Volyn and Eastern Galicia, which was treated as socially alien and politically hostile. Following the Red Army entry in Polish eastern provinces, there were numerous instances where Red Army soldiers and KGB servicemen organized lynching against Polish law enforcement officers, gendarmes, officers, village policemen and other ‘counter-revolutionary elements.’ At the beginning of the Soviet rule Western Ukraine experienced systematic political repressions carried out almost exclusively by direct orders of the Interior Commissar of the USSR L. Beria and military tribunals. Later, all parts of the Soviet judiciary were formed in the territories annexed to the USSR: local prosecutors, court presidents were appointed. Department of Justice and the Bar Association were created. In this respect, a significant share of cases on counter-revolutionary crimes was conducted by regional courts who applied various penalties against defendants. The article analyzes the individual stages of the criminal process and presents typical examples of execution of Soviet justice in Volyn and Eastern Galicia. Based on the records of the Soviet Union Supreme Court, People’ s Commissariat of Justice and the Prosecuto’ s Office, the second half of 1940 was marked by substantial consolidation of punitive policy of the authorities in cases on counterrevolutionary crimes. The operating principle of Special Council of the Soviet Union People’ s Commissariat for Internal Affairs as the main instrument of extrajudicial repressions is revealed based on materials of Branch State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine.

The Deportation of the Polish Population in the Light of the NKVD Directives and Testimonies of the Displaced Families. The Attempt at Comparative Analysis. The article was a result of belief in the need of detailed description of the deportation of the families whose relatives had been murdered by the troops of the Soviet security apparatus in Katyn and other places of the former USSR. The article is an attempt at the comparative analysis of the NKVD directives with the reports of the exiled. The author carried out multiple-hour interviews with the Katyn families and Siberian exiles who were deported to Kazakhstan in April 1940. Moreover, the author used the expansive literature of memoirs and diaries of those times. The text includes the aspect of displacement and journey of the families to the remote steppes of Kazakhstan. The author aimed at confronting official directives for the operational units of the NKVD carrying out displacements with the reality maintained in the memories of the exiled, and pointing to similarities and differences between the first and the second deportations. The author described in detail the act of the NKVD barging into the houses of the families subject to deportation, indicated the directives concerning the deportation which were frequently ignored by the functionaries of the Soviet security apparatus, presented the house searches and pointed to these NKVD behaviours which were unusual and beyond the routine procedures. The article also describes the transportation to railway stations and the detailed journey in freight cars. It also includes the aspects of meals, executing physiological needs, intimate hygiene and death during the long journey. In the closing part of the text, the author referred to the ongoing dispute between historians and the Siberian exiles concerning the numbers of people deported in 1940-1941. He shortly characterised the major publications on that topic and referred to the important studies of the ‘Karta’ Centre and the Institute of National Remembrance in the series of ‘The Index of the Repressed’ which aim, among others, at specifying the list of names of all Poles deported during the four great Soviet displacement actions.