The Hungarian Historical Review The Hungarian Historical Review The Hungarian Historical Review

Login

  • HOME
  • Journal Info
    • Journal Description
    • Editors & Boards
    • Publication ethics statement
    • Open access policy
    • For Publishers
    • Copyright
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Subscribe
    • Recommend to Library
    • Contact
  • Current Issue
  • All Issues
  • Call for Articles
  • Submissions
  • For Authors
  • Facebook
Published by: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

2024_1_Mihaljevic

Jakša Kušan’s Forgotten Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Croatia

Josip Mihaljević

Croatian Institute of History

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):107-132 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.107

Croatian journalist and writer Jakša Kušan (1931–2019) was one of the most prominent Croatian émigré dissidents. By editing and publishing the non-partisan magazine Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia), he tried to inform the global public about the suppression of human rights and civil liberties in socialist Yugoslavia, even under constant threat of being attacked by the Yugoslav secret police. After the fall of communism, he returned to Croatia and continued his work in the media and the civil sector for a brief time. In this article, I offer an overview of the most relevant of Kušan’s oppositional activities during the period of communist rule in Croatia and Yugoslavia and consider the roles and impact of his activities. I also venture some explanation as to why his life and work have mostly been forgotten in today’s Croatia. One possible answer to this question could be his complex relationships with the Croatian dissidents who won the first multiparty elections in Croatia in 1990. My discussion is based on the findings of the COURAGE project (Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries), oral history sources, and archival documents of the Yugoslav secret police.

Keywords: Jakša Kušan, Croatian émigré, dissent, socialist Yugoslavia, Croatia, democracy, COURAGE project, Yugoslav secret service

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

 

2024_1_Buijnink

Smokescreens and Smear Campaigns: The Dutch Communist Party in Times of Crisis

Thomas Buijnink

Doctoral School of Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):80-106 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.80

This article seeks to establish how different crises in the Eastern Bloc affected the political standpoints of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, Communistische Partij Nederland (CPN), through an analysis of publications in affiliated party magazines between 1953 and 1981. This analysis is conducted within a framework consisting of party change theories and the literature about Eurocommunism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. The analysis indicates that the CPN went from supporting military interventions in Germany, Poznan, and Hungary to condemning them in Czechoslovakia, initially while maintaining ideological distance from political opponents in the Netherlands. This changed in 1981, when the CPN seemingly without restraint joined the mainstream political parties in condemning the introduction of martial law in Poland and the Socialistische Partij (SP), the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, took over the CPN’s position as a political outsider. This indicated a shift in the party’s stance from a niche to a mainstream positioning against Moscow.

Keywords: Communist Parties, Eastern Bloc, Eurocommunism, Netherlands

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

2024_1_Liu

The First Generation of Architectural Historians in Modern China: Their Studies and Struggles

Shanshan Liu

Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 1  (2024):59-79 DOI 10.38145/2024.1.59

This paper examines the intellectual history of the first generation of architectural historians in China, with a focus on the activities of Liang Sicheng and his colleagues from the 1920s to the 1950s. It analyzes the various oppressive forces they encountered during this period. Initially, they challenged Western and Japanese hegemonies in Chinese architecture research. Following World War II, they faced off against Soviet Union experts to safeguard China’s architectural heritage. The paper evaluates their successes and failures in achieving academic and social goals, their impact on the preservation of Chinese heritage, and their ongoing influence in academic and societal spheres. Additionally, it explores how professional ethics were utilized to dismantle colonial narratives and perceptions in China, suggesting that professionalism can serve as a mode of intellectual opposition.

Keywords: Modern China, intellectual history, architectural historian, Liang Sicheng

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

 

2023_3_Bokor

 

“Separation is Required in Our Special Situation”:
Minority Public Health Programs in Interwar Transylvania

Zsuzsa Bokor
Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):395–432 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.395

This paper presents the distinctive manner in which the Hungarian public health system in Transylvania was built up, parallel to the state structures in the interwar period. In several policies and public health projects, the young medical generation of the 1930s formed the basis of the biologically based ethnic community of Hungarians in Transylvania. This process was presented by them as part of ethnic survival and made the presence of the doctor necessary. The paper discusses the foundation of minority health institutes and also the discourses around the formation of these.

Keywords: public health, interwar, Transylvania, Hungarian doctors, minority health protection, maternal and infant protection

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

2023_3_Sándor–Lászlófi

 

Women Facing the Committee: Decision-Making on Abortion in Postwar Hungary

Judit Sándor
Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine, Central European University
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Viola Lászlófi
Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine, Central European University
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):493–523 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.493

In this article, we examine the medical, legal, social, and political context of abortion in Hungary after the Second World War, with special attention to the decision-making process of the so-called abortion committees. These committees collected data on the social and medical status of women to support their decision on whether to permit the operation or not. In the first half of the 1950s and after 1973, the committees were given a relatively free hand in making their decision on whether to allow an abortion. Women had to appear in front of these committees in person, and the process was a performance of demonstrating compliance with the law by stating a legally acceptable reason to terminate the pregnancy. In our article we analyze how the hierarchical-paternalistic structures of healthcare were reproduced and operated in the frequently changing abortion regimes within a state socialist legal and political framework. We also explore how these phenomena affected women’s requests and the options available to doctors at the micro level of decision-making on abortion. The study shows how women and doctors were forced to make efforts to comply with the changing normative framework and how different forms of paternalism (e.g., institutional, medical) shaped this process. The main purpose of the various laws was to regulate abortion and population policy by monitoring the measurable circumstances of pregnancy. In the early 1950s, the focus was on the health of the mother, whereas in the 1970s it was more on the living conditions necessary to raise a child. Despite the detailed regulations based on the paternalist structure of the healthcare system, it was left to doctors and other members of abortion committees to implement the norms at the local level. In some cases, doctors utilized this paternalist framework and patriarchal techniques characteristic of the healthcare system to circumvent the intentions of population policy. The article demonstrates these phenomena by analyzing the medical records of Pesterzsébeti Szülő- és Nőbeteg Otthon (Gynecological and Maternity Hospital of Pesterzsébet) and the documents of the abortion committee of Pécs.

Keywords: Abortion, abortion committee, population policy, legal and medical paternalism

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

2023_3_Gagyiova

 

Every Child According to Its Pace: School Maturity between Expertise, State Policies, and Parental Eigensinn in Socialist Hungary

Annina Gagyiova
Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):461–492 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.461

It is widely known that socialist states such as Hungary attempted to increase social mobility through a compulsory elementary school system. While the research on socialist education is vast, the relevance of school maturity to an egalitarian education system is still understudied. By the end of the 1950s, lack of preparedness for school among children had captured the attention of Hungarian experts in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy, who were hoping to ensure that first-year students would begin their schooling under roughly the same conditions. In response, in 1965, local initiatives started experimenting with corrective (remedial) classes. The aim of these initiatives was to overcome class differences by offering targeted support and helping children who were less prepared for institutional schooling catch up and transfer into the standard school system later. During the first half of the 1970s, the Hungarian Ministry of Education adopted this pedagogical experiment on a national level. In this article, I put two distinct methodological approaches into dialogue, the sociology of expertise on the one hand and Eigensinn on the other. By doing so, I shed light on the complex interplay of state policies, concepts of expertise, and parental agency. As I show, corrective classes reflected persisting social inequalities, thus children from the lower middle classes and the Roma minority were overrepresented in these classes. Ultimately, I explore how bottom-up initiatives had unintended consequences that were often disadvantageous for the children who were in principle the intended beneficiaries. These initiatives thus worked against rather than for the quest for social equality. In the discussion below, I show how pediatricians, psychologists, pedagogues, and parents shaped the school system, working within, taking advantage of, and thus limiting efforts for social transformation despite asymmetrical power relations.

Keywords: state socialism, socialist education, school maturity, remedial class, equality

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

2023_3_Rábová

 

Between Public Health and Propaganda: Tuberculosis in Czechoslovakia in the First Decades of the Communist Regime

Šárka Caitlín Rábová
University of Pardubice
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):433–460 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.433

In early postwar Czechoslovakia, medical doctors identified the fight against tuberculosis as one of their fundamental tasks, since mortality and morbidity rates from this dreaded and hardly curable disease were still high. However, the country initially struggled with a lack of special institutions and trained staff. The situation became even more complicated in 1948, when the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia and transformed the organization and practice of healthcare. Focusing on the first two decades of the postwar period, this article presents the strategies used by the socialist country against tuberculosis, stressing especially the importance placed, in the development of these strategies, on having a mass impact. The most significant shifts, which concerned not only tuberculosis but healthcare in general, involved changes to the legislation. The responsibility for the health of the population was transferred to the state, which declared that it would provide free treatment and care for all citizens, regardless of their social background. During this period, the first law to prevent and control the disease was passed, and mandatory vaccination and tuberculosis treatment were introduced. As was often the case, advances in medicine were used for political propaganda, and so, in the period after 1948, tuberculosis was labelled a “capitalist disease.” This label implied that the fault for the continued presence of the disease lay at the feet of the prewar capital system. Yet as I show in the discussion below, many of these basic pillars of the fight against tuberculosis had already been established in the interwar period, and it was first and foremost the growing availability of antibiotics that helped bring this disease under control in the 1960s.

Keywords: tuberculosis, vaccination, antibiotics, communist regime, Czechoslovakia, public healthcare

Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

More Articles ...

  1. 2023_3_Rambousková–Martykánová
  2. 2023_4_Żaliński
  3. 2024_2_Adde
  4. 2023_4_Kuźma–Praszałowicz
  5. 2024_2_Schneidmüller
  6. 2023_4_Coudenys
Page 4 of 48
  • Start
  • Prev
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • Next
  • End
  1. You are here:  
  2. Home
  3. Abstract

IH | RCH | HAS

Copyright © 2013–2025.
All Rights Reserved.

Bootstrap is a front-end framework of Twitter, Inc. Code licensed under Apache License v2.0. Font Awesome font licensed under SIL OFL 1.1.