International Conference “Twenty Years After: Central and Eastern European Communist Regimes as a Shared Legacy”

20 Years After Conference Concludes

Prague, October 8, 2009 – The two-day international scientific conference “20 Years After: Central and Eastern European Communist Regimes as a Shared Legacy,” organized by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and financially supported by the European Union’s Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) concluded yesterday afternoon with a final panel in Prague's Nostitz Palace summarizing the contributions of historians, political scientists and other experts.

A range of provocative papers were presented at the conference, evaluating the process of coming to terms with the past in individual post-communist countries. Animated debates, not only after the individual panels, but also during the social gathering on the conference’s first evening and intermissions between panels, testified to the fact that a range of opinions and points of view exist on progress realized to date. The case of Slovenia demonstrates that not even representatives from one country agree on which regime was responsible for victims found concealed in mass graves, and how many of them exist.

Marius Oprea, director of the Romanian Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, surprised listeners with a 15-minute film revealing his and his colleagues‘ work in the exhumation of mass graves in Romania. He also spoke about his experiences on Czech Television on Tuesday morning. According to estimates, as many as 10,000 victims were buried in mass graves in Romania. Bulgarian historian and filmmaker Liliana Topouzova, of Canada’s University of Toronto, spoke about the fact that after the fall of the Bulgarian communist regime, it was discovered that an entire penal network of so-called Gulags had existed in Bulgaria.

Published: 08.10.2009

20 Years After Conference Continues

Prague, October 7, 2009 – The international scientific conference “20 Years After: Central and Eastern European Communist Regimes as a Shared Legacy,” organized by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and financially supported by the European Union’s Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) continued this morning for its second day in Prague's Nostitz Palace.

Martina Klicperová-Baker from the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Ivo Feierabend of San Diego State University opened the first panel, addressing lifestyles and the culture of every-day life under late communism, with a paper addressing what they have found to be the widespread phenomenon of post-communist syndrome in the Eastern European region. Klicperová-Baker stressed that the greatest threat increasingly appears to be indifference and ignorance among the young, concluding that the best investment in democracy will be in civic education. The further contribution of Professor Paulina Bren, of Vassar College in the USA, sparked a heated debate on post-communist memory in the Czech Republic related to the contemporary re-broadcast of the television program “Thirty Cases of Major Zeman,“ a mid-70s serial popularizing the activities of the then Secret Police.

The conference‘s second panel focused on the conceptualization of history in primary, secondary, and tertiary education during the (post-) totalitarian period, with contributions from Czech, Serbian, Slovenian, and Romanian participants.

Audiorecording

Published: 07.10.2009

20 Years After Conference Has Commenced

Prague, October 6, 2009 - The international scientific conference “20 Years After: Central and Eastern European Communist Regimes as a Shared Legacy,” organized by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and financially supported by the European Union’s Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) commenced this morning in Prague's Nostitz Palace.

Participants were welcomed by Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes Director Pavel Žáček. The conference was then inaugurated by Mirek Topolánek, who in his opening remarks emphasized the need to acknowledge history and the mechanisms of totalitarian regimes, in order to avoid repeating the atrocities committed by totalitarian regimes across Europe.

Audiorecording

Published: 06.10.2009

Invitation to the International Conference “Twenty Years After: Central and Eastern European Communist Regimes as a Shared Legacy”

  • Date: October 6-7, 2009
  • Venue: Nostic Palace, Prague, Czech Republic
  • Conference languages: Czech, English

Academic partners:

  • Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Czech Republic
  • Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Hungary
  • Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, Romania
  • Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia
  • Hannah Arendt Center in Sofia, Bulgaria

The conference focuses on the legacy of the non-democratic past of Central European countries. Unlike the more common approaches stressing the radical nature of ruptures accompanying the demise of communist regimes in the region, twenty years after the fall, both the scientific community and Central and Eastern European societies are probably ready to accept a more detailed account of prevailing – but also of transformed – social and political practices.

The conference is based on an interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary approach towards the late communist period of the 1980s and its legacy to the present day. It will offer uncommon methods and topics to the wider academic community as well as to the interested public. An institutionalized coming to terms with the past, as the key panel of the conference, will be presented through the comparative prism of transitional justice, a field well known in Western social sciences but less known terrain in the East.

The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes of the Czech Republic is organizing the conference in association with partner institutions in other countries.

Panels of the conference:

  1. Transitional Justice
    Dealing with the non-democratic past from criminal prosecution through public discussion and symbolic acts – vetting, truth commissions, institutionalization of memory
  2. “Old” Networks in Post-Communist Settings
    Social networks after decades of systematic attempts at social engineering (politics and the public sphere, family networks, clientelism)
  3. Transformation of the Security Forces
    Transformative process of one of the key pillars of the (post-) totalitarian order to supporting the democratic rule of law
  4. Conceptualization of History in Primary and Secondary Education during the (Post-) Totalitarian Period
    History as a tool of official governmental policies, political education, education in history and literature serving as indoctrination
  5. Lifestyle(s) and Culture of Everyday Life Under Late Communism
    Pop-culture, advertisement, gastronomy, fashion and art in the late communist period and its recent reflections
  6. Roots of the fall of communism (poster section)

Light refreshments and lunch will be provided.

For further questions contact please: katka.volna@ustrcr.cz