The book analyses the processes of whiteness, racialisation and nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe in relation to the global history of colonialism, offering a perspective that questions the region’s claim to racial innocence. The authors bring together a wide range of case studies to question the widespread belief that Central and Eastern Europe was excluded from global racial dynamics because of its limited direct interaction with colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade. ‘Off White’ demolishes the myth of ‘racial innocence’ that Central and Eastern Europe is outside the global history of race, arguing that this region is at very centre of practices of whiteness and racialization, from nation building processes to the socialist era, from populism to contemporary migration policies. Each
This chapter synthesizes the volume’s key themes and findings, exploring the entanglement of religion and nationalism through symbols. It discusses how religious symbols have been repurposed for national narra-tives and sacralized within religious contexts. It emphasizes the importance of distinguishing „sacredness“ as a socially constructed reverence from religious holiness, illustrating how figures and events have been elevated to untouchable status. It highlights the pivotal role of the Middle Ages and WWII in shaping collective memories and identities and questions how the relationship between nationalism and religion might evolve amid secularization and demographic shifts in the region. Finally, it suggests that broadening the geographic framework and incorporating perspectives from religious minorities and non-Christian groups within Eastern Europe could deepen our understanding of these evolving dynamics.
The introduction contextualizes case studies presented in the chapters by providing conceptual reflections on the importance of sacralizing history in modern East European societies. It defines key terms such as “securitization,” “sacralization,” “secularism,” and “post-secularism.” Ultimately, it concludes that the sacralization of history tends to occur predominantly in regions where there is a fundamental social consensus, be it positive or negative, regarding the past, particularly during times of crisis. Conversely, this phenomenon can also manifest in countries where intense political controversies surround the interpretation of history. Central to this process is the societal sense of insecurity and the active involvement of mnemonic actors in propagating religious imagery.
General Lucjan Żeligowski’s dilemmas regarding his national identity reflect the difficult choices faced by millions of people living in the borderlands between Russia and various East-Central European nations over the past several centuries. Born and raised in a Polish-patriotic family in 1865 in the heart of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was controlled by Tsarist Russia, he joined the Russian Army out of poverty and became almost entirely Russified. Seeking a compromise between his Polish and Russian identities, he became interested in Slavophile ideology. By the end of World War I, his Polish identity had prevailed over his Lithuanian and Russian sentiments, and he contributed to the rebirth of Poland. However, he noticed a distinction between Poles from central Poland and himself, a “Polish” or “Slavic Lithuanian”. He was very critical of Warsaw’s policies towards the regions of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and endeavoured to preserve their separate character. In 1939, he escaped from Poland and joined the Polish émigré authorities. In the West, he returned to Pan-Slavic ideology, hoping it would help bridge the Polish-Soviet chasm. Also, his political views shifted. In interwar Poland, he became an agrarian, but he was moving to the left, dreaming of a “People’s Poland”. This allowed him to stay connected with the Soviets during World War II and later to decide on his return to communist-controlled Poland. He had never found peace of mind and paid a steep price for his numerous identity crises. He was not alone; millions traversed similar mental paths, impacting the entire history of Eastern and East Central Europe.
History of Eastern Europe, Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology
Infinitesimals have seen ups and downs in their tumultuous history. In the 18th century, d'Alembert set the tone by describing infinitesimals as chimeras. Some adversaries of infinitesimals, including Moigno and Connes, picked up on the term. We highlight the work of Cauchy, Noël, Poisson and Riemann. We also chronicle reactions by Moigno, Lamarle and Cantor, and signal the start of a revival with Peano.
The semiconductor industry is pivotal to Europe's economy, especially within the industrial and automotive sectors. However, Europe faces a significant shortfall in chip design capabilities, marked by a severe skilled labor shortage and lagging contributions in the design value chain segment. This paper explores the role of European universities and academic initiatives in enhancing chip design education and research to address these deficits. We provide a comprehensive overview of current European chip design initiatives, analyze major challenges in recruitment, productivity, technology access, and design enablement, and identify strategic opportunities to strengthen chip design capabilities within academic institutions. Our analysis leads to a series of recommendations that highlight the need for coordinated efforts and strategic investments to overcome these challenges.
Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a key technique for improving conditional generation in diffusion models, enabling more accurate control while enhancing sample quality. It is natural to extend this technique to video diffusion, which generates video conditioned on a variable number of context frames, collectively referred to as history. However, we find two key challenges to guiding with variable-length history: architectures that only support fixed-size conditioning, and the empirical observation that CFG-style history dropout performs poorly. To address this, we propose the Diffusion Forcing Transformer (DFoT), a video diffusion architecture and theoretically grounded training objective that jointly enable conditioning on a flexible number of history frames. We then introduce History Guidance, a family of guidance methods uniquely enabled by DFoT. We show that its simplest form, vanilla history guidance, already significantly improves video generation quality and temporal consistency. A more advanced method, history guidance across time and frequency further enhances motion dynamics, enables compositional generalization to out-of-distribution history, and can stably roll out extremely long videos. Project website: https://boyuan.space/history-guidance
In this article, the focus is on the memory of repressions in the Kazakhstan Lithuanian diaspora, a large part of which consists of the descendants of Lithuanians who were subject to repression. Based on data from a survey of semi-structured interviews, the interpretations, evaluations, and practices for the memorialisation and commemoration of the memory of the repressions among the representatives of the diaspora are analysed. The connections of this memory with Kazakhstan’s dominant collective memory discourses and the Lithuanian narrative of the memory of repressions are discussed. The analysis reveals how discourses of the memory of the repressions in the country impact the memory of the descendant of the migrants.
У статті піддаються розгляду процеси генези феномену колективного самоусвідомлення предків сучасних українців на етапі переходу від тотемного до антропоморфічного типів світогляду в текстах українського фольклору. При цьому основна увага переноситься на дослідження метафізичного виміру цього процесу. Підкреслено, що особливо рельєфно виділяються фази переходу від одного типу світогляду до іншого на прикладах порівняння текстів первісних міфів і народної казки. В українській народній казці, на відміну від первісного міфу, на просценіум виходять мотиви, моральна позиція персонажів. У казках людина перебуває в напружених рефлексіях про суперечності між загальноприйнятим і особистісним, а вже пізніші міфологічні тексти «заземлюють» просторові і часові горизонти діяльності героя, поміщуючи їх у контекст співвіднесення правового й морального, світського й релігійного. В горизонті генези форм колективної самосвідомості казка виявляє свою історично зумовлену амбівалентність: у ній фігурують герої давніх міфів, в сюжети казок вживлені лінії і структурна будова первісних міфів, окрушини тотемного світогляду. Однак приявність у казках моральних регулятивів, зародків свободи особистості виказує на прорив духовності людини за межі тотемізму й зоолатрії первісного міфу на простір антропоморфізму. На цьому новому етапі розвитку колективної свідомості істотною ознакою самосвідомості постає поєднання свободи і моральності, особливо рельєфно це проступає в сюжетах казок, у яких йдеться про стосунки між людиною і смертю.
Is it possible to bring into conversation two different traumatic legacies that occurred in the twentieth century in Europe? How can we engage in productive conversation about two totalitarian systems that repressed, incarcerated, dehumanized, and murdered people deemed enemies of the state or unworthy of living? These were some of the challenging questions addressed in the roundtable symposium “Holocaust***Gulag: Repressing, Rescuing, and Regulating Recalcitrant Legacies.” The symposium aimed at addressing specific aspects of the difficult and painful histories of the Holocaust and the Gulag, and to probe how these long-lasting legacies intrude into contemporary society, culture, religion, and politics.
The paper deals with the publishing history in the post-Soviet era of three very prominent works in Gulag literature in Italian translation – Life and Fate by Vasilij Grossman, Kolyma Tales by Varlam Šalamov and The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solženicyn – in order to reconstruct their Italian reception in the years 1991-2022. The controversies surrounding the publication of these works in Italy are also discussed, and it is noted how the Italian press has paid particular attention to them, with major Italian writers reviewing the editions and contributing to their Italian reception. Finally, the lack of critical reflection by Italian Russianists on Gulag literature is discussed.
History of Eastern Europe, Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Strictly confidential reports from the Albanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs add a new dimension to events in Serbia and Yugoslavia in the second half of the 1960s. According to their content, the strengthening of the autonomy of Kosovo and Metohija was the result of a change in the balance of power at the top of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia after the Brioni Plenum in 1966. Leading Croatian and Slovenian officials held the majority of the party’s control. According to the reports, party leaders Vladimir Bakarić and Edvard Kardelj intended to disintegrate Yugoslavia and allow Croatia and Slovenia to gain independence, and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia’s Kosovo policy was a key component of that strategy. Leader of Kosovo Albanians Fadilj Hoxha gained complete control of the province’s party, judicial, and security apparatuses thanks to the political support he received from Broz, Kardelj, and Bakarić. Reports also confirm the emergence of mass emigration of Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija, owing to threatened security and ethnically motivated persecution from the province’s companies and institutions. The Albanian population in Kosovo and Metohija developed national euphoria as a result of the new circumstances, which was reflected in public demands for the province’s separation from Serbia, the use of the Albanian flag in state institutions, and the establishment of a special official status for the Albanian language in the province. According to the report, the German intelligence service aimed at the secession of Kosovo and Metohija from Serbia and Yugoslavia and the establishment of another Albanian state in the Balkans.
Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry is a radio astronomy technique distinguished by a record-high angular resolution reaching single-digit microseconds of arc. The paper provides a brief account of the history of developments of this technique over the period 1960s-2020s.
The formulation of a measurement theory for relativistic quantum field theory (QFT) has recently been an active area of research. In contrast to the asymptotic measurement framework that was enshrined in QED, the new proposals aim to supply a measurement framework for measurements in local spacetime regions. This paper surveys episodes in the history of quantum theory that contemporary researchers have identified as precursors to their own work and discusses how they laid the groundwork for current approaches to local measurement theory for QFT.
ABSTRACT This article compares the politics of history and positions in the EU of six ruling populist leaders and their parties (Fidesz, PiS, SDS, GERB, ANO and OĽaNO) from Central and Eastern European (CEE) EU member states. Through the comparison of leaders’ biographies and longitudinal analysis of party electoral manifestos an overlap between two types of CEE populism and two types of mnemonic actors in the region is found. Radical right-wing populist parties (Fidesz, PiS and SDS) are more oriented towards national histories, memory wars against ex-communists and critical events for losing or gaining their national sovereignty (mnemonic warriors). Centrist populist parties (GERB, ANO and OĽaNO) largely ignore that kind of narrative and focus on anti-corruption or promises of managing the state more effectively (mnemonic abnegators). Radical right-wing populist parties are also more likely to challenge the Brussels elites by using examples from their national histories. Emphasis on national traumas, anti-communism and their leaders’ vision of politics labelled here as combat tasks politics seems to be contributing to their Euroscepticism. Combat tasks politics, i.e. seeing politics as a constant battle against political enemies, underpins the Eurosceptic narratives of Kaczyński, Orbán and Janša-former dissidents who were politically socialised while challenging militarised communist regimes.
This is a review of the first Russian-language summary of the dissident movement in Eastern Europe and its role in the final collapse of the totalitarian system. The study covers eight countries of the region: Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia in the period from 1956 to 1989. Accordingly, the entire work is divided into eight essays. Each essay provides a brief historical overview and list of references, a chronicle of events, which reflects the facts related to the dissident movement. Finally, biographical articles about significant figures in the dissident movement in each of the countries mentioned are listed in alphabetical order. The definition of the term “dissident” remains debatable. The compilers of the Encyclopedia interpret it broadly. On the whole, the work fills in a noticeable gap that existed in historiography.
Specific developments in reproductive health occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. During state socialism, it was experts, not social movements, who furthered the agenda of women’s health and sexuality. New analyses from the region and written mostly by authors who speak the local languages attest to the wealth of histories, highlighting different timelines of reproductive health developments, the unexpected causes behind them, and the social actors and institutions which played decisive roles.