Preliminary Programme

The aim of the paper is to discuss joke-telling and laughter in the Stalinist period through the conceptual prism of opposition and resistance. It is often taken for granted that cracking a joke about a dictator was a sign of one's political attitudes, and that critical jokes convey one's opinion about the Stalinist leader cult. However, the similarities of the themes such jokes evoke/recycle and the immense diffusion of joke-types across (closed) borders indicate that joke-telling (despite the critical content) remained an important part of popular communication strategies in the Soviet period. Whether joke-telling could be considered a part of popular resistance against the regime is questionable, although the regime often perceived critical jokes as manifestations of enemy activity. The paper will revolve around the question of whether jokes could be interpreted as forms of cultural opposition, and what is the heritage that they left behind. The discussion focuses on jokes about the Hungarian Stalinist leader, Matyas Rakosi in 1945-56, and analyses them in the context of totalitarian communication and the popular reception of the leader cult. While jokes are often considered as covert forms of resistance (“weapons of the weak”) towards a political system, the paper argues that the link between resistance and the telling of jokes was not as straightforward as it may seem. (Show less)

My paper concerns with the revival of the Hungarian Jewish community after the Holocaust via analyzing the phenomenon of
(re )marriages within the community. My research focuses on the marriage advertisements in Hungarian newspapers especially in Új Élet (New Life) that is yet an untapped source for reconstructing the life of the Jewish families and the community after the Holocaust. Almost two third of Hungarian Jewry had been killed during the Holocaust. Due to the significant territorial differences in the number of casualties massive demographic differences emerged within the community both in the sex and the age ratios. Despite of the tragic situation that was manifested in the loss of husbands, wives or any beloved persons a great number of marriage advertisements was published between 1945-1952 in Új Élet. In the same time the number of marriages was also significantly recovered which is a definite sign of the revival of the Jewish community.
Új Élet was launched in 1945 as the official newspaper of the National Office of Hungarian Israelities (Magyar Izraeliták Országos Irodája). It was the main platform for providing information to the remained Hungarian Jewry. Új Élet published lists on those survivors who recently returned from the concentration camps or from forced labour. It also reported on the current laws and regulations on the restitution process and the trials against war criminals. The newspaper also devoted special attention to the fate of the Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust (called in that time: „vészkorszak”), and it elaborated these very recent times through publishing many personal memories, documentations of the perpatrators, etc. From January 1946 a growing number of marriage advertisements was published in Új Élet.
First of all I would like to analyze the advertisements quantitatively reconstructing the social, educational and personal (age, sex) background of the advertisers by using parallel sources such as marriage statistics. Then I will analyze the language of these advertisements as a social discourse (categorizations, keywords) and a representation of the most important phenomena and events (e.g. traumatic experiences, founding of Israel) that shaped the life of the Jewish community after the Holocaust. In order to provide the wider context of the research I will also focus on the religious challenges of remarriages (e.g. agunas) that were the results of the uncertainties of these years. (e.g. absence or fragmented lists on the survivals, missings). (Show less)

Images—verbal and visual, static and moving—were a mighty tool for the legitimation of communism. Due to the power of images to transmit political- ideological messages, but also counter-messages, the arts were under strict scrutiny in totalitarian regimes.
Starting from the example of a specific film - Valtchitsata [The-She-Wolf], the paper will give insights into the functioning of the complicated process of film making in socialist Bulgaria in the 1960s. It will reflect both, the changing forms of surveillance and censorship in the socialist state, and the strategies which artists had to adopt in order to avoid it. Then, my paper will expand towards considering the interesting circumstances around the film and the further roads and works of the filmmakers – director, script writer, cameraman, and artist-painter/sculptor. Like that it will discuss the complex interconnections between various forms of cultural opposition in literature, cinema, and fine art from the 1960s through the 1980s in socialist Bulgaria. (Show less)

The Sixtiers Museum in Kyiv is part of a broader trend in Ukraine, whereby a variety of actors create new sites of memory that challenge or attempt to correct established narratives about the Soviet past. Their efforts are not always directed toward the same aims. For instance, the Lviv Centre for Urban History collects and digitizes materials that would not have been included in large state-run archives. The process of archiving thus becomes a form of resistance, by challenging dominant tropes about the relationship of citizens to the state and how to understand non-conformist behaviour alongside more conventional challenges to the status quo. The paper aims to offer new insights into the history and legacy of cultural opposition to Soviet rule in Ukraine, by examining the case of the Sixtiers Museum in Kyiv. It is an institution with a clear mission to capture the lives and struggles of a generation of human right activists, who openly challenged the Soviet state and its treatment of artists, writers, historians and non-conformist thinkers. Most of them were tried and sentenced to 5-10 years of hard labour in Mordovian camps in Siberia, or psychiatric clinics, and still refused to recant their positions when offered the opportunity to do so by the KGB.
As many Sixtiers were engaged in the creative arts—poetry, fine art, murals, and literature—the museum seems like a very natural fit for exploring “cultural opposition” in Soviet Ukraine. Yet, upon closer examination, the intractability of their convictions adds layers of complexity that do not figure as prominently in other cases. As a result of COURAGE’s methodological approach, which includes interviews with stakeholders and curators, it became clear that the Sixtiers engaged in more than “cultural opposition” to the Soviet regime. Though their methods were non-violent, some abandoned the idea of reforming the Soviet legal system from within. After repeated negative encounters with Soviet authority, some Sixtiers transitioned into open rebellion against the state, resisting the KGB’s efforts to force them to recant and even pushing for independence already in the very late 1950s. Most of the Sixtiers were model Soviet citizens prior to taking part in the resistance, suggesting that they were taking issue not with the ideas underpinning communism, but their implementation by morally compromised Soviet officials. This paper offers a new interpretation of cultural opposition through an analysis of the Sixtiers movement and the collection at the museum in Kyiv, which will challenge typologies of cultural opposition by highlighting that those involved in the dissident movement were, in fact, engaged in a range of diverse oppositionist activities informed by their particular backgrounds—in the arts, medicine, military service and other domains. (Show less)