..., and the group Synthesis, a more coherent formation that had a longer and more turbulent history. I explore the uniqueness of Bulgarian late Communist culture that, unlike its Soviet bloc counterparts, was never truly dissident in character. I seek to reveal why Bulgarian intelligentsia proved incapable...

...Peter Steiner One of the most unique phenomena of the Stalinist political culture was the political trials of leading Communist functionaries that took place in the Soviet Union and the people's democracies from the 1930s to the 1950s, usually culminating with the defendants' executions...

...Peter Steiner This article deals with the proceedings against the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, and thirteen other high officials. The most striking feature of confessional trials such as his is the lack of any manifest culpability for gross miscarriages...

... share of samizdat documents were smuggled out of the communist countries to the West, ending up in numerous organizations and private collections abroad. The dispersed character of samizdat archival sources has a negative effect on the quality of research in this area. One of the main objectives...

... of December 1970. It was a memo addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reporting on the status of samizdat in the country and suggesting some practical steps that would diminish the spread and impact of uncontrolled publications in the USSR. The second document, dated...

...Joseph Benatov Shortly after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his 1956 “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the text of the report reached the United States by way of Poland and was published in the New York Times . The first secretary's denunciation of Stalinism thus...

... Žižek, and Etienne Balibar, have taken up some of the conceptual difficulties in play in Lenin's ideas (and in Mao's) with a view to recasting communism in the present (I take my title, for instance, from Badiou's Communist Hypothesis ). This essay addresses both key elements in this rethinking...

..., Gil, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley 1998 Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe (London: Verso). Fedrigo, Claudio, and Jacek Sygnarski, eds. 1992 Papierowa rewolucja, 1976–1990: Les éditions clandestines en Pologne...

.... Manuel Fritzie P. 1979 Utopian Thought in the Western World ( Oxford : Blackwell ). Marx Karl 1977 [1871] The Civil War in France ( Beijing : Foreign Languages ). Negri Antonio 2010 “Is It Possible to Be Communist without Marx?,” Critical Horizons 12 ( 1 ): 5...

... York: Praeger). Halfin, Igal 2003 Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hayman, Ronald 1983 Brecht: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hilden, Leonard 2001 [1958] “Conditioned Reflex, Drugs, and Hypnosis...

...) manuscript and from a fake? Yet another difficulty seems to arise in the consideration of samizdat: which are “totalitarian regimes”? Are they only to be identified with the various Communist, mostly Stalinist, systems in their rich variety? Prob- ably not. And if not, could we find samizdat...

... led by Dennis O'Keeffe and Helen Szamuely (London: Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies). Open Society Archives 1956 –94 “ Archival History .” Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (RFE/RL RI), HU OSA 300–85, Samizdat Archives, Open Society Archives at Central...

... their interlocutors unless they attach them to a category which is social, ethnic, political, or the like. The conception that a speaker forms of the audience, whether correct or erroneous, regu- lates his or her endeavor to adapt to them. An orator would be unlikely to make the same speech in front of Communist...

... writers like Alfred Döblin, typically condemned by the Comintern in the name of socialist realism in the 1930s. This condemnation reveals an ambiguity of mod- ernism itself: in Morel’s view, communist writers and critics, from the late 1920s, associated the avant-gardes exclusively...

... first Kolyma tales, and 1961, the year of the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, during which the de-Stalinization initiated by Khru- shchev’s secret speech of 1956 was conducted openly. Sadly, this reversal was a prelude to the resurfacing of his camp...

... analyzes the prototypical Communist Manifesto and studies the way the manifesto rhetoric has infiltrated into modernist aesthetics—collages, plays, poems, and theatrical performances—or what he calls “manifesto art.” Those works are not based “on the doctrines and theories proclaimed in manifesto...

... and nonintentionality in art, the art work as a dynamic whole of interacting values, aesthetic norms, and the potential universality of aesthetic value. The editors of the volume focus on the golden years of the Prague school prior to the communist era, and although this is natural, it reveals a certain prejudice...

... (ibid.: In other words, at the height of the Cold War, the work of such left-wing opponents of the Nazi regime as Communist inmates, were not acceptable in this West German publication. Significantly, those remarks about...

... be eliminated and capitalism itself can be superseded by communism. This is the theory, as it is generally expressed, that capitalism is its own grave dig- ger. Benjamin takes this commonplace of communist thought a stage fur- ther...

...” (not describing rupture but actively creating it), which 304 Poetics Today 30:2 are alleged to be involved in all manifestos, whether political or artistic. Theatricality can be identified even in the most classical and most political specimen, the Communist Manifesto, where the drama of history...