East Central Europe and Communism
Year: 2023
Type: book
Abstract: The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.
Source: Routledge eBooks
Author: Sabrina P. Ramet
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: U.S. Department of State, Ohio State University Press, Yale University, Princeton University, Ohio State University, Harvard University, University of Minnesota, University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, Fordham University, Central European History Society, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Central European University, Soochow University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
OpenAlex ID: W4324045402