Post-Communism

This paper examines determinants of persistent regional political cleavages in post-communist Ukraine. The question is as to how significant the role of culture is compared to ethnic, economic and religious factors in the regional divisions. This study employs regression analysis of regional support for the Communist/pro-Russian parties and presidential candidates and nationalist/pro-independence parties and candidates in all national elections held since 1991, the vote for the preservation of the Soviet Union in the March 1991 referendum and the vote for the independence of Ukraine in the December 1991 referendum. This study shows that the historical experience has major effect on regional electoral behavior in post-communist Ukraine. The legacy of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian and Czechoslovak rule is positively associated with the pro-nationalist and pro-independence vote, and this historical legacy has a negative effect on support of pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and presidential candidates and preservation of the Soviet Union.

The author’s research concerns the government's modernisation policies, created and/or implemented between 1918-2004. The adopted research goal is to analyse the concepts which were requested or implemented by the authorities in the period between gaining independence in 1918 to the Polish accession to the EU. It is a special form of reconstruction of the Polish paths of modernisation, carried out by analysing the plans and actions of Polish governments. The analysis is accompanied by a hypothesis about the centrally stimulated intervention and mimetic nature of Polish modernisation. The author focuses on the factors which are determined by the theory of neomodernisation as the modernisation impulse caused by the elites (a study of government projects and policies of modernisation is based on this thesis on the case study method).
The book is divided into four broad sections and a brief summary. The first chapter provides a comprehensive theoretical introduction to the work, while in the three consecutive chapters there is an analysis of the policies of modernisation in the periods: 1) the statist modernisation (the interwar period), 2) the Communist modernisation (1945-1989), 3) the post-communist modernisation/"modernisation through integration" (1989-2004).
The first chapter contains a very careful discussion about the paradigm of modernisation within which a range of modernisation theories can be found together with theories supporting and criticising their assumptions and explanations generated by them. As a result of a thorough analysis of the theories, the author decided to apply its last incarnation which is called the theory of neomodernisation - the theoretical response to the collapse of communism and the attempts to conceptualise the processes taking place in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc.
Chapters two, three and four contain an appropriate analysis of the designed and/or implemented plans of modernisation (with an emphasis on the implemented plans). For analytical reasons their structure is quite similar. Each is preceded by a preface presenting the specifics of a given period (a kind of "opening balance" and links the stages of change in Poland with the theories of modernisation). In subsequent parts the analysis is structured in the scheme which takes into account the political, social and economic dimensions of modernisation.

This paper analyzes the mass-murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict. In contrast, in Poland, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized as genocide. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish conflict, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It offers an estimate of Polish casualties derived from analysis of OUN-UPA, Polish, and Soviet, and sources and demographic data. This study concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.

Although there are numerous contributions on ethnic electoral politics, relatively little research has been devoted to explain the scope of success of ethnic minority parties. This article addresses the issue within the bounds of post-communist Europe. It was found, first of all, that ethnic parties are likely to emerge only if their titular minority has a number of voters larger than what is necessary to obtain parliamentary representation. Otherwise, the most successful were the ethnic parties representing the minorities characterized by legacy of regional domination, that is, those whose members had once enjoyed a dominant position as a ruling nationality on a given territory (e.g. Hungarians in Slovakia). The second-successful were the parties representing homeland minorities, that is, those which have resided on a given area for more than two centuries, but have never been members of a ruling nation. The parties representing diaspora or immigrant minorities were the least successful. Further research could assess the importance of these factors in other regions of the world.

Thanks largely to the Kremlin’s information war, Ukraine’s ultranationalists have become global media stars of a sort, depicted in Western and other reports as key players in Ukraine’s third major political upheaval in less than a quarter-century. How do we explain the paradox of ultranationalist parties becoming involved in a protest movement whose thrust is toward greater integration between Ukraine and the European Union? And are the fears that swirl around these parties justified?

Contrary to popular beliefs, the movement for the reconstruction of socialism in Eastern Europe is not a new phenomenon. As early as the 1960s, faithful socialists, particularly in Hungary, were looking towards the revision of Marxism, and some were waiting for the Marxist renaissance. Part of this vision was the reform of the Eastern European system. Realizing the futility of working within "dogmas" and "orthodoxy," these intellectuals started to explore other paths in reforming the socialist system.

The article will discuss the variety of African migrants’ pathways toward social recognition and success in a Russian megacity by describing and analyzing the experiences of the Ethio-pian owners of two establishments in Moscow: a lavish downtown restaurant, and a small café on an international university campus on the city’s outskirts. These cases display various points of both similarity and divergence, but are here regarded as examples of successful Af-rican entrepreneurship, each in its own way, contrasting with the usual representation of Afri-cans as passive victims in the receiving society. As background for the analysis we provide information on the changes that have occurred since the breakup of the USSR, and which have impacted on the migrants’ social composition, on their strategies of integration, and on the modes of their acceptance by the new sociocultural milieu. The research is based mainly on in-depth and semi-structured interviews with the two establishment owners, their employees, and guests conducted in May to June 2012. It reveals the factors that have pro-moted their successful establishment in the Russian capital as well as their own perceptions of the position of migrants within it.