While president of the Czech Republic between 2003 and 2013, Václav Klaus, an outspoken critic of the European Union, employed speeches, interviews, and writings in his efforts to discredit the EU in the eyes of Czech citizens. Miller used opinion polls from Eurobarometer and the Public Opinion Research Center (CVVM), of the Czech Academy of Sciences, to establish a correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Euroskepticism. In the early years of Klaus’s presidency, skepticism about the EU among Czechs grew, and between 2006 and 2010, there was a strong correlation between Klaus’s popularity and Czech Euroskepticism. As Klaus’s popularity waned, during his last years in office, Czech confidence in the EU began to rise. This study not only helps to explain some bases of Czech Euroskepticism, but it also addresses the influence Czech presidents have in shaping public opinion in their country.

This paper focuses on the effects of political-culture in shaping the lack of political-economic liberalization in Belarus since 1991. Specifically, this paper will elucidate the intricate interplay between historically rooted cultural worldviews, ways of life and historical memories, to explain how the historical roots of Orthodox Christianity had a central influence on the patterns of political-economic development chosen by Belarus, even long after these religious-cultural values had been secularized and taken for granted. In doing so, this paper will help understand why Belarus chose to pursue such an illiberal and authoritarian orientation, and help explain the longevity of President Lukashenko.

This is a micro-history of a restaurant in post- World War II Lviv, the largest city of Western Ukraine. Offering a case study of one public dining enterprise this paper explores changes in the post-war Soviet public dining; demonstrates how that enterprise’s institutional structure mediated economic demands, ideological directives, and social conflicts. It argues that the Soviet enterprise should be seen as a nexus between economic system, organization structure of the Soviet state, and everyday lives of Soviet people. The article helps to understand Soviet consumerist practices I the sphere of public dining by looking into complex, hierarchical organizations enabling them.

This paper narrates the story of Red Orient (Rus. Krasnyi Vostok; Uz. Qizil Sharq) textile trust (trest). This trust was initially owned by the Bukharan People’s Republic, then, after the national delimitation of Central Asia, by the Uzbek SSR. Its activity included all the steps of the added-value chain of industrial transformation of ginned cotton (spinning, twisting, dyeing, finishing, weaving, and printing). Its factories and mills, initially all located in Russia, served as a training ground for the first generation of native Uzbek textile workers while its management participated in the planning and construction of the first cotton textile plant in Fergana towards the end of the decade.

On the morning of July 13, 1943, a German anti-partisan formation surrounded the small village of Malyn and its Czech and Ukrainian inhabitants. The soldiers gathered the entire village population in the town square and, after a document check, proceeded to lock them inside the town church, school and their homes. The soldiers then set fire to these buildings and shot them with machine guns. By the end of the day, Malyn ceased to exist. On the surface, the Malyn Massacre appears as just another ghastly crime committed by a brutal occupying force. Yet, a closer look at archival sources, popular discourse, and scholarly literature on Malyn reveals a much different picture – and a murkier one. In total, there are over fifteen different versions of what happened in Malyn that day. The ethnic identities of the units that accompanied the Germans vary from account to account, as do the details of the crime, the justification for the reprisal, and even the ethnicity of the victims. In analyzing materials from over ten archives in six countries and four historiographical-linguistic narratives, in addition to field research in Ukraine and the Czech Republic, this article explains why so many disparate claims about the Malyn massacre exist. I specify four discursive landscapes about Malyn (Soviet, Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech) and detail how and why each of these has come to construct their own version(s) of Malyn in relation to larger grand narratives about the war in the East. This microhistory also underscores how the trauma and legacy of wartime inter-ethnic violence casts a long shadow over the current understanding of the war and highlights the daunting task scholars face writing the history of this region and time period.

This article investigates the confluence of personal interests and official policy on collective farms in the mid-1930s, a period that has received far less scholarly attention than the collectivization drive.  The current historiography on collective farmers’ relationship with the state is one-sided, presenting peasants either as passive victims of or idealized resistors to state policies.  Both views minimize the complex realities that governed the everyday lives of collective farmers for whom state policies often were secondary to local concerns. This paper, which draws upon rich archival materials in Kirov Krai, employs a micro-historical approach to study the struggle to remove the chairman of the “Red Column” collective farm in Kirov Krai in 193536.  It demonstrates that local and personal issues (family ties, grudges, and personality traits) had more influence on how collective farmers reacted to state campaigns and investigations than did official state policy and rhetoric. The chairman’s rude and arrogant behavior, mistreatment of the collective farmers, and flaunting of material goods led to his downfall.  But to strengthen their arguments, his opponents accused him of associating with kulaks and white guardists. The chairman and his supporters struck back, alleging that his detractors were themselves white guardists and kulaks, who sought revenge for having been expelled from the collective farm.

Such a micro-historical approach reveals the importance of popular opinion, attitudes, and behavior on collective farms and the level of control that collective farmers had over shaping the implementation of state policies. This paper enables one to appreciate that peasants knew well how to manipulate official labels, such as kulak or class enemy, as weapons to achieve goals of local and personal importance.  It enriches the historiography by offering a different way to appreciate peasant attitudes and behavior, and collective farm life in the mid-1930s.