"In September 1991 a Swedish-Russian Working Group was appointed in order to try to establish joint efforts what actually happened after the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat in January 1945. In connection with the collapse of the Soviet Union many doors were opened, and previously inconceivable investigations became possible. With the aim of 'leaving no stone unturned' the Working Group was given access to the former Soviet archive systems and had the opportunity to talk to former members of the Soviet security organs. The working group presented its findings at a press conference in Stockholm on 12 January, 2001"--From the web site.

This book on the relationship between communications and nonviolent resistance captures a new understanding of the events that led ultimately to the fall of the authoritarian system in communist Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. In particular, it analyzes history-making acts of resistance and the movements that propelled them in Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, Gdansk in 1980 and East Berlin in 1989, in their own historical continuum. As we evaluate each crisis in relation to the others, we find that beyond cultural and national differences among the countries of the Soviet sphere, the knowledge of how to develop resistance was built up in a little over three generations -- a know-how that tied together means of opposition with means of media and communication. Non-provocative, nonviolent methods of action came to supersede uncontrolled forms of violence, and even the mere temptation of armed struggle. From 1968 to 1989, the empowerment of civil resistance movements in Central Europe was witnessed--a phenomenon that strengthened the re-emergence and rebuilding of "civil society." In a new Afterword penned for the English translation, Howard Barrell extends this evaluation to encompass the role of social media and digital technology in more recent and potential resistance struggles. This preeminent study offers a rare addition to understanding the transformation of half a continent.

A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence’s forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe’s, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism—and did just that as US ambassador in 1989. Weaving in the life of Eisen’s own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.

This revealing autobiography of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács is centered on a series of interviews that he gave in 1969 and 1971, shortly before his death on 4 June 1971. Stimulated by the sympathetic yet incisive questioning of the interviewer, the Hungarian essayist István Eörsi, Lukács discusses at length the course of his life, his years of political struggle, and his formation and role as a Marxist intellectual. From a highly evocative account of his childhood and school years, Lukács proceeds to discuss his political awakening; the debates within the socialist movement over the First World War form the prelude to an assessment of Tactics and Ethics, written in 1919; from there the discussion turns to Lukács’s early major contribution to Marxist philosophy, History and Class Consciousness. After considering at length the years of emigration in Vienna and the Soviet Union, Lukács finally recalls his return to Hungary after the Second World War, and his new position as a revolutionary left critic of actually existing socialism. “By socialist democracy,” he wrote in 1970, “I understand democracy in ordinary life, as it appears in the Workers’ Soviets of 1871, 1905 and 1917, as it once existed in the socialist countries, and in which form it must be re-animated.” This Record of a Life, which includes an introduction by István Eörsi, furnishes a compelling tribute to a remarkable man.