Activity of Security Service of the People’s Republic of Poland Against the Polish Peasant Party in France in Years 1948-1966

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 211-238
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Indraszczyk

The article describes operations of the Poland security service against the Polish People’s Party (PSL) in France. The Poland authorities considered the political emigration to be a serious opponent and did its best to discredit this group in the eyes of the Polish society and to disintegrate its activity. The tools utilised by the security service included surveillance, acquisition of informal collaborators, escalation of personal conflicts between emigrants, disinformation concerning the attitudes of Poles in the country, persuading the key politicians in exile to return to the country. The intelligence has had many successes, including the return of important emigrants to Poland, winning many over as agents, and causing internal conflicts among the political emigration.

Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta

The case of East Germany raises the question of why religion and church, which had fallen to an unprecedentedly low level after four decades of suppression, have not recovered since 1989. The repressive church politics of the SED were undoubtedly the decisive factor in the unique process of minoritizing churches in the GDR. However, other external factors such as increasing prosperity, socio-structural transformation, and the expansion of the leisure and entertainment sector played an important role, too. In addition, church activity itself probably also helped to weaken the social position of churches. The absence of a church renaissance after 1990 can be explained by several factors, such as the long-term effects of the break with tradition caused by the GDR system, the political and moral discrediting of the church by the state security service, and people’s dwindling confidence in the church, which was suddenly seen as a non-representative Western institution.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-71
Author(s):  
Melissa Chakars

This article examines the All-Buryat Congress for the Spiritual Rebirth and Consolidation of the Nation that was held in the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in February 1991. The congress met to discuss the future of the Buryats, a Mongolian people who live in southeastern Siberia, and to decide on what actions should be taken for the revival, development, and maintenance of their culture. Widespread elections were carried out in the Buryat lands in advance of the congress and voters selected 592 delegates. Delegates also came from other parts of the Soviet Union, as well as from Mongolia and China. Government administrators, Communist Party officials, members of new political parties like the Buryat-Mongolian People’s Party, and non-affiliated individuals shared their ideas and political agendas. Although the congress came to some agreement on the general goals of promoting Buryat traditions, language, religions, and culture, there were disagreements about several of the political and territorial questions. For example, although some delegates hoped for the creation of a larger Buryat territory that would encompass all of Siberia’s Buryats within a future Russian state, others disagreed revealing the tension between the desire to promote ethnic identity and the practical need to consider economic and political issues.


2015 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 93-136
Author(s):  
Gökçen Başaran İnce

AbstractThe Free Republican Party (FRP; Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası), founded and dissolved in 1930, represented the second attempt to transition to a multi-party system in Turkey, following the formation of the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası) in 1924. In contrast to the oppositional establishment of the latter, the FRP seemed to be a state-originated project whose establishment was decided upon by the elites of the day, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Its representation in contemporary cartoons is deemed important today given the political cartoon’s ability to simplify complex political messages into understandable symbols and metaphors and to address or reach those who may not be literate. Taking into account the social structure of society during this period, this aspect of the reach of cartoons becomes particularly important. Political cartoons’ ability to both support the text in a newspaper and penetrate historical memory through stereotypes is also significant in terms of the representation of personalities and events. This article will attempt to analyze the formation of the FRP and the depiction of its elites through newspaper cartoons. Three prominent and pro-Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) newspapers of this period—namely Cumhuriyet, Milliyet, and Vakit—will provide the material for the content and thematic analysis of the study.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Tatiana Vagramenko

This article reconstructs the history of one KGB operation against the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Ukraine, launched by the Ukrainian security services in 1951. The operation aimed to infiltrate the Jehovah’s Witness underground organization in Ukraine and to organize a Witness country committee as a covert operation. The plan was designed such that the Soviet security service became the head of the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization, and the headquarters of the official Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society became a channel in their counter-intelligence operations. This article tells about the failures and unexpected side-effects of the secret operation caused by internal conflicts within the Soviet politics of religion. Paradoxically, in the context of a disintegrated Witness underground network, caused by the post-war deportations and mass arrests, severed communication channels with the Watch Tower Society and the absence of religious literature, the Soviet security service became an alternative communication channel between the faith communities and a source of religious reproduction (including the source of the production of Watch Tower literature). This study dwells upon historical materials from recently opened SBU (former KGB) archives in Ukraine.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Indra Fauzan ◽  
Nidzam Sulaiman

<em>Democratization in Indonesia is a political shift from non-democracy to democracy. This political shift affects political change in Indonesia. Many scholars see that this democratization is due to the factors of economic recession, internal internal conflicts and political parties of New Order advocates, Student Movements or opposition. The aim of this study is to see how the process of political culture in Indonesia has come to the democratization of many scholars who have overlooked this political culture. The method used is literature study in the context of collecting data through documents such as Books, Journals, Bachelor Theses and some other references, this method of inquiry is chosen to better understand the political condition of Indonesia textually. In this context, political culture has become a major factor in the catalysts of democratization because the political culture of a middle-class society is a result of a long process resulting in the formation of civil values that impede democratization. This article ultimately aims to contribute thought in the process of building democratic values during democratization.</em>


Author(s):  
I. V. Smirnova

Thanks to different mass media sources, members of any society are well aware of political developments and events and politicians. Every person has his or her own formed political beliefs and affirmations, interpreters other people's actions during political developments and evaluates events that take place. Political forces, in turn, see a person (a potential elector) as an object of external information influence. This lets them use political communication when competing for the power. In the modern democratic society this competition is carried out via parliamentarian debates, politicians' speeches, examining political parties' programs, political agitation and voting. General audience-oriented political discourse implements its function of political information influence. As the goal of any political party's program (as an independent form of text in the system of political discourse) is to win the elections and come to power, thus the audience influence function is one of the most fundamental and serve as the basis for the text. The text of a program itself is characterized by its persuasive orientation towards the audience, which reveal itself in such methods as convincing, argumentation, manipulation and evaluation. All the political programs pertain to parties which are at the power or which are in opposition. The main characteristic of oppositional programs is the criticism of the power, vice versa, the dominant party's programs confirm the correctness of their policy. All the political programs are multi-authored. The written form of any political program lets put into practice a detailed text analysis. This article presents the analysis of the texts of two leading Spanish political parties (the Spanish socialist worker's party and the people's party of Spain).


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Javier Olivas Osuna ◽  
José Rama

Spain has been one of the hardest hit countries by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this crisis presented a window of opportunity for VOX, as it has for other far right parties, to raise its visibility as opposition force. This paper investigates whether the discourse of VOX has evolved during the pandemic and affected the political dynamics in Spain. This article proposes a new multidimensional strategy to measure the degree of populism in political communications, via quantitative and qualitative content analysis. It dissects the parliamentary speeches of the leader of VOX, Santiago Abascal, in the debates for the approval and extension of the “state of alarm” to fight against COVID-19 between March and June 2020. In order to assess the changes and relative intensity of populist features in Abascal’s parliamentary speeches we compared them with his speech during Pedro Sánchez’s investiture session as the Spanish President of the Government, in January 2020, and VOX’s latest political manifestos—2019 European and Spanish General Elections—, as well as with speeches of the representatives of the five main parties and coalitions during the COVID-19 debates in the Spanish Congress.Our paper shows that populists’ discourses are context-dependent and that their performances are not only shaped by crisis but also constitutive of crisis. The density of populist references in Abascal’s speeches grew steadily during the period analysed. Morality and antagonism overshadowed sovereignty and society as key populist attributes, and the tone of the discourse became increasingly hyperbolic. Moreover, Abascal’s discursive performances had a sort of contagion effect in other parties in the parliamentary sessions studied. People’s Party (Partido Popular–PP) leader Pablo Casado chose to follow VOX and harshly criticized the government, meanwhile the discourses of the speakers of Together We Can (Unidas Podemos–UP) and Catalan Republican Left (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya–ERC), adopted a demonizing rhetoric against VOX and PP also grounded on a populist logic of articulation. This polarizing dynamic between competing Manichean discourses contributed to reinforce the sense of crisis by adding a political dimension to the already existing health and economic problems.


Author(s):  
Anatoly A. KONONENKO ◽  
Artem A. Kononenko

The political repressions of the 1930s in the USSR have repeatedly been the subject of interest of historians. Nevertheless, there are practically no studies of political repressions of the 1930s in relation to nomenklatura workers at the level of the provincial Siberian city of Tyumen. This article aims to reveal the cause-and-effect relationship in the issue of physical liquidation of the thinnest layer of the party-economic nomenklatura, using the case of the city party organization of the CPSU(b) of Tyumen in 1937-1938. We have restricted ourselves to one of the components of the “Great Terror”, namely to “purging the elite”. The research was conducted using the documents from two regional departments of the USSR Federal Security Service (FSB), former party archives of the Tyumen and Omsk regions, and periodicals. This required employing prosopographic, comparative-historical, problem-chronological, and system-structural methods. Such approach allowed clarifying the biographical data of the leaders of the city in 1936-1938 and classifying the criminal acts, incriminated to the accused. The results of a comprehensive analysis of the sources show that the cause of the personnel purge should be considered a violation of the imbalance between the limited collective leadership and the still limited one-man dictatorship of I. V. Stalin’s dictatorship. The limited collective leadership was no longer in line with the reality of one man’s increasing power. Rotation of undesirable workers as an alternative to personnel cleansing proved to be unsuccessful. The motive for repressions against workers who had never participated in the opposition was their casual contacts and acquaintances with former opposition figures described as “spies and terrorists” in 1937-1938. The party, Soviet, and Komsomol workers who had no such contacts, though subjected to repression, were rehabilitated. Finally, in terms of their educational and professional level, the new generation of city party workers did not differ from the previous one.


2021 ◽  
pp. 45-63
Author(s):  
Marin Pop ◽  

"This study aims to highlight the activity of the Cluj County Branch of the Romanian National Party (hereafter abbreviated as RNP) in the spring of 1920, covering the events from the fall of the government led by Alexandru Vaida–Voevod until the end of the parliamentary elections of May–June 1920. After the Great Union, the city of Cluj became the political capital of Transylvania, especially after the Ruling Council, which was the provisional executive body of Transylvania, moved its headquarters from Sibiu to Cluj. Iuliu Maniu, the President of the Ruling Council and of the R.N.P, who was elected at the Sibiu Conference of 9–10 August 1919, had settled in Cluj as well. Moreover, at the head of Cluj County Branch of the RNP were personalities with a rich history of struggle for the cause of National Liberation of the Romanians in Transylvania: Iuliu Coroianu, Emil Hațieganu, Aurel Socol, Sever Dan, Alexandru Rusu, Ioan Giurgiu, the Archpriest Ioan Pop of Morlaca, and the Priest‑Martyr Aurel Muntean from Huedin. After the dismissal of the Vaida government, the Central Executive Committee of the RNP convened a party congress for 24 April 1920, in Alba Iulia. Just before the congress, the Cluj County organization had started the election campaign. Meetings were organized in every town and village, aiming to elect representatives for the Congress in Alba Iulia. On 21 April 1920, a large assembly was held in Cluj, during which the deputies of Cluj presented their work in Parliament. Simultaneously, delegates were elected for the Congress of Alba Iulia. The RNP Congress adopted a draft resolution and the governing bodies were elected. Iuliu Maniu was re‑elected as President. Based on the decisions adopted at the Great National Assembly of Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918, he adopted a working program, which was summarized in thirteen chapters. During the electoral campaign of 1920 two major political groups became polar opposites: the one around the People’s Party, which was in power, and the parties that formed the Parliamentary Bloc and had governed before. On the list of candidates of the Cluj County Branch of the RNP we can mostly find the former MPs of the party, as well as those who had filled various leadership positions within the Ruling Council. Following the electoral process, despite all the efforts of the People’s Party, in power at that time – especially those of Octavian Goga – to dispel the propaganda conducted by the RNP, the latter party managed to obtain 27 seats in the House and 14 in the Senate. This placed the RNP in second place among Romania’s political parties. The Cluj County Branch of the RNP was able to win two of the five electoral districts in the Chamber, as well as two in the Senate, out of the three allocated to the county. Another conclusion would be that, starting from these parliamentary elections, more and more parties from the Old Kingdom penetrated into Transylvania and Banat. They would achieve some success with the voters only when they came to hold power in the state and organize elections. Still, the RNP remained the party with the largest grip on the electorate of Transylvania and Banat, and Cluj became the political capital of Transylvania."


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