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Articles published in Eurozine
Russia at the crossroads
Logic and the end of "imitation democracy"
The Belavezha Accords in 1991, which dissolved the USSR without a democratic mandate, condemned subsequent presidents to rule by "imitated democracy". Putin's decision to step down after two terms has given Russia a chance to depart from that path of development, argues Dmitri Furman. [more]
A state without society
On the technology of authoritarianism in Russia
Far from having "restored Russia's greatness", the Putin regime has ushered in a new stage of social decay. Elections in Russia have become an act of mass obedience on the part of a society unable to imagine anything better. [more]
"Heroes" and "the people" in eastern Europe
A rapprochement
"Heroes" are associated in national memory with freedom and hope. The idolization of Polish rebel leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746-1817) and Russian general Aleksandre Suvorov (1729-1800) demonstrates eastern Europe's predilection for longsuffering yet proud heroes. [more]
Pluralism by default
Communicating vessels in Ukraine
Like liquid in communicating vessels, the attitudes of government and people will remain level as long as they are connected by regular elections. Mykola Riabchuk on Ukraine's democratic development since the early 1990s and the future of the new coalition government. [more]
Renaissance by decree
Nation building in Central Asia
Unlike the European post-Soviet states, where popular movements struggled for national independence, nation building in Central Asia came from above. In order to glorify their own nation and to legitimize the regime's rule, those in power are neglecting the problems of the recent past. [more]
Archipelago Europe
Instead of two homogeneous European regions -- "the East" and "the West" -- there are now fragments, enclaves, and islands. From Baden-Baden to Bucharest, Majorca to Moscow, Karl Schlögel experiences Europe as a series of spaces both distinct and connected. [Hungarian version added] [more]
Origins and elements of imitated democracies
On political development in the post-Soviet space
Throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union, regimes have established themselves behind a democratic facade while concentrating power in the hands of a president. Contrary to their purported stability, all contain the seeds of their own downfall. [English version added] [more]
Expansion without enlargement
Europe's dynamism and the EU's neighbourhood policy
In order to protect its core, the EU is creating a buffer zone at its periphery. But these states are perceived as a source of problems as much as a solution. [English version added] [more]
Perpetrators, victims, and art
The National Socialists' campaign of pillage
The victims of Nazi pillaging included political opponents such as freemasons, priests, socialists, and union officials, but those most affected were the Jews. Regine Dehnel outlines the history of pillaging in Germany and Europe, the results of which continue to hinder the search for mutual understanding within Europe. [English version added] [more]
The fight for law and justice
On the political rhetoric of the Kaczynskis
The Kaczynski brothers style themselves as the protectors of the "common people" from an enemy both inside and outside Poland's borders. Ironically, their Manichaean rhetoric shares much with the communist tradition they reject. [more]
Russia's systemic crisis
Negative mobilization and collective cynicism
Russia is degenerating into a police state, society has descended into poverty, and the country is becoming increasingly isolated, writes Lev Gudkov. Worse still: the Russian public is united only in the view that talk of common goals is the empty rhetoric of demagogues. [more]
A critique of the criticism of Europe
The intellectual perspective on European integration
Although European integration determines everyday life in Europe, there is little intellectual criticism of it. The reason for this, writes sociologist Georg Vobruba, is that all the simple perspectives are already taken. [more]
Reason's cunning
Poland, populism, and involuntary modernization
Populism in Poland has the same paradoxical consequences as in other Europan countries: populists attack democracy, but make it more stable by expanding its ability to integrate; they make use of anti-modern rhetoric, but by polarizing, consolidate their opponents. [more]
Non-literature without morals
Why Varlam Shalamov is not read
Despite the moderate success of Varlam Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales", he was unable to follow in the slipstream of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago". The muted reception to Shalamov's writing about the gulag lies in its rejection of the slightest artificiality, says Ulrich Schmid. [more]
The East within the West
Importing popular culture
From Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" to Tetris and t.A.T.u., eastern European imports to Western pop culture have been camouflaged, adapted, or exoticized. [more]
Russia's will to world power
Autocracy, energy, ideology
Until now, Russia and the West have been imitating "strategic partnership". To create a genuinely stable partnership, however, the US must reverse its drive towards military hegemony. For its part, Russia must make the transition to fully democratic standards. [more]
News from the partisan forests
Artur Klinau on subversive culture and the culture of subversives
"It probably won't be possible to make Minsk as popular as Venice. But if it can reach even 10 or 15 per cent of Venice's popularity, that would mean billions of dollars." Artist, author, and editor Artur Klinau has a dream. [more]
Democracy or the street?
On the stability of the Hungarian political system
The demonstrations in Budapest in September 2006 marked the culmination of a conflict between Conservatives and the liberal Left. The rift is exacerbated by politicized disputes about the past, argues Thomas von Ahn. [more]
Awakening through music
The cultural anti-elite in Belarus
With the official opposition in Belarus increasingly divided, Europe must support the informal underground that will shape the Belarus of tomorrow. [more]
Revolutionary elites, pragmatic masses
The Polish Populists' pyrrhic victory
The new Polish elite feels it has no control over the processes for which it bears political responsibility. Only now is it understanding that European integration and globalization have put limits on its power. [Danish version added] [more]
The lost treasure of the revolution
Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism, and the revolutions in central Europe: 1956, 1968, 1989
Hannah Arendt wrote about the '56 revolution as if it had been successful. Nevertheless, her insights remain relevant to an understanding of '56 and the memory of it after 1989. [more]
Democracy promotion at a dead end
Europe is failing in Belarus
European charters for democratic reform have run aground in Belarus. Expressions of solidarity are not enough: Europe needs to adopt the US strategy of promoting the opposition directly. [Belarusian version added] [more]
The law of complementarity
Shostakovich and Prokofiev
Like Goethe and Schiller, Shostakovich and Prokofiev belong together like the material and the spiritual. Instead of discussing who is more important, the fact that two such talents existed should be celebrated. [more]
A nation's closing sale
Prostitution and chauvinism in Russia
The figure of the prostitute serves Russian literature and the media as a metaphor for national identity and as a vehicle for criticism of Russia's "sell out" to Western capitalism. [more]
Limited pluralism
Post-communist authoritarian systems
In the study of post-communist societies, the concept of authoritarianism is increasingly being used in connection with underdeveloped legal systems, the close alliance of politics and the economy, and lack of pluralism. [more]
Is it a sin to travel?
Itinerant women in post-Soviet narrative
Three contemporary Russian novels undermine the stigmatization of Russian women as prostitutes and destabilize the patriotic discourse that forbids women's travel. [more]
Men, middlemen, and migrants
The demand side of "sex trafficking"
The debate about prostitution is conducted between abolitionists, who would like to see pimps and customers prosecuted, and liberals, who call for the official regulation of prostitution. Both positions are simplifications. [more]
Nasi: the Putin youth
Soviet tradition and political conceptual art
The pro-Putin youth movement Nasi (Ours) is a hierarchical organization that combines structures of the Komsomol with activities inspired by the dissident conceptual art of the 1970s and 1980s. [more]
Gifts of millions
Oligarchs and football in Ukraine
By investing heavily in football clubs at home and abroad, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs hope to accumulate social capital, thereby stabilizing their precarious legal positions. [more]
Guaranteed without guarantees
Russia under Putin
Lilia Shevtsova on the paradox of Russia's political development: the ruling class can preserve the existing order only when it is in flux. [more]
Commemorating the Chernobyl disaster: Remembering the future
Have the lessons of Chernobyl been heeded? According to Guillaume Grandazzi, the Chernobyl commemorations will attempt to salvage the fiction of risk-free atomic power. [more]
The big lie
The secret Chernobyl documents
In 1990, journalist Alla Yaroshinskaya came across secret documents about the Chernobyl catastrophe that revealed a massive cover-up operation and a calculated policy of disinformation. It has taken twenty years for the truth of the Chernobyl disaster to come to light, and even now the full extent of the consequences remains uncertain. [more]
"The vodka was supposed to cleanse our thyroid glands"
Igor Kostin on his Chernobyl photos
Igor Kostin spent seventeen years photographing the visible and invisible consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Here he talks about his life work. [more]
Legal nihilism in action
The Yukos-Khodorkovsky trial in Moscow
A step-by-step account of the legal "farce" that led up to the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in which all principles of a fair trial were violated. [more]
(Co-)Operation rooms of art
A recommendation for a virtual museum of looted art
With no end in sight for the full restitution of art pillaged during wartime, art historian and curator Kristiane Janeke finds the Internet the perfect location for a museum of looted art. [more]
"Political views: Jew"
Wolfgang Johannes Leppmann (1902-1943)
After the Nazis seized power of the Weimar Republic, Slavicist and historian Wolfgang Leppmann found himself a target of Nazi racial policy. [more]
Blue giant
The view of eastern European space, 1951-1955
The Mercator projection of eastern Europe featured on the cover of Osteuropa from 1951 to 1955 had the drawback of faithfully reproducing surfaces only along the equator. On the cartographic and political distortion of eastern Europe. [more]
The futility of one professor's life
Otto Hoetzsch and German Russian studies
Otto Hoetzsch, eastern Europe scholar and founder of the journal Osteuropa, was defamed during WWII as a "parlour Bolshevik". His pan-European perspective suffered its final defeat with the division of Europe. [more]
Twins caught between Endecja and Sanacja
Poland's new centre-right government and its historical roots
The new Polish party of government, Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, is sympathetic to heroes of the national independence struggle of the first half of the twentieth century. It is one indication that traditionalist thinking will dominate Polish politics in the coming years; whether it will be suitable for solving contemporary problems remains to be seen. [more]
The phantasm of the overcoat
Gogol', Timm, Makanin
Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat" (1842), Vladimir Makanin's novel Underground, or A Hero of Our Times (1998), and Uwe Timm's short story "The Overcoat" (1999) have in common a psycho-poetic orientation towards the Other, based on the phantasm of the overcoat. [more]
Vilified, venerated, forbidden
Jazz during Stalinism: Between repression and freedom
The attitude of the Stalinist regime to jazz ranged from censorship to subsidization. Nevertheless, jazz remained a popular feature of cultural life throughout Stalinism. [more]
The cultural divide
Unpolitical confessions
Poland's recently elected Law and Justice Party is attempting to impose its prudish values on the rest of the society. For Left-leaning writers and artists, says one author, this augurs bad times ahead. [more]
At the tollgates of Europe and Asia
The poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz
The Polish poet wandered throughout his life between Kiev and St Petersburg. While for him Kiev was a portal to the East and place of poetic initiation, St Petersburg was a place of dark forces and fatalist history. Together, the cities symbolized the difficult unity of East and West. [more]
The school of life
On a German atonement project in St Petersburg
What the four elderly women from St Petersburg told the author about Stalinism and National Socialism while he worked as their carer in the early 1990s is today at the centre of the debate on national memory. [more]
The oligarch as public enemy
How the Khodorkovsky case benefits the Putin regime
Cynicism, argue Gudkov and Dubin, is eroding the foundations of the Putin regime and destabilizing its system of controlled democracy. [more]
The Yukos case
The Yukos case has been widely seen as another attempt by the Putin regime to intimidate its opponents; now the involvement of the European Court of Human Rights seems likely. Read articles dealing with the economic, legal, and societal implications of the case. [more]
Who are the true Europeans?
Central eastern Europe and the EU crisis
The current crisis of the EU represents a chance for the new member states. Central eastern Europe can start to act as a centre for reforms that will define the future form of the European Union. [more]
Buried feelings
German authors' handling of the Allied bombing in World War II
W.G. Sebald claimed that the Allied bombing was hushed up in postwar German literature. Not entirely true, responds Volker Hage: there are a number of novels outside the canon in which the experience of the bombing comes to light. [Hungarian version added] [more]
The regulation of pain
Coping with traumatic experiences in Soviet war literature
Soviet writers' expression of existential insecurity caused by their experiences in World War II signalled a liberation from the censorship of the 1930s. But the Brezhnev regime put an end to that. Only since the 1990s have Russian writers been able to explore openly the subject of war. [more]
State visits
Internationalized commemoration of WWII in Russia and Germany
European politicians attending the ceremonies in Moscow encountered a brand of patriotism unthinkable in western Europe. What does this say about the West's own traditions of commemoration? [more]
The fetters of victory
How the war provides Russia with its identity
On the symbolic role of the Great Patriotic War in propping up national confidence, and how the taboo on the underside of victory serves the interests of the post-Soviet social order. [more]
Ukraine at the crossroads
Can a state based on blackmail be reformed?
What will it take to really change the Ukrainian political system? [more]
Liberal tendencies in the Russian Orthodox Church
An introduction
Kyrlezhev searches for the liberal tendencies in the Orthodox church. He also shows where they are mere projections from outside. [more]
The reproducible city
Will mass tourism and the impacts of globalisation spin out cities that are increasingly similar? [more]
A world of science and art
Lviv's pubs in the 1930's
The lost world of Lviv's political, scientific and aesthetic discourse. [more]
The revolutions of 1989 revisited
The European Union should pay more attention to the legacy of the 1989 revolutions in Central Europe. [more]
Europe reaches its limits
From the dynamic of expansion to different degrees of integration
Squaring the circle between further enlargement and deeper integration. [more]
On the road to the IV Republic?
The Polish parliamentary elections of 25 September 2005
The conservative forces of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) and the Citizens Platform (PO) emerged as the clear winners of the recent Polish elections. However, tensions between the statist and Eurosceptic PiS and the bourgeois liberal PO are already showing. As a result, the PiS will be able to implement its project for a IV Republic only in weakened form. [more]
The need for differentiation
Political education and the restructuring of eastern Europe
Fifteen years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, political education lacks a strategy that accommodates a politically diverse eastern Europe. Organizations responsible for political education must forge links with partners in the economy and civil society. [more]