Suchergebnisse

The article examines the Soviet nationality policy in Belarus in 1944–1947 during the population exchange between the Soviet Union and Poland. Unlike in Lithuania and Ukraine, the authorities in Belarus prioritized keeping the labor force over national homogenization, determined nationality by territory of birth, and attempted to keep the people by designating them as Belarusians irrespective of their self-identification. The article argues that in Belarus, the population transfer was a combination of an exodus of refugees with the expulsion of Poles by the state. Although the declarations about the voluntary character of the resettlement were false, the direction of the compulsion varied, and this ambivalence opened up a space of limited autonomy in which the people could exercise agency. The Soviet ethnic cleansing remained incomplete in Soviet Belarus because of the competing urge to keep the labor force. Paradoxically, much of the demographic de-Polonization of new western territories of Soviet Belarus was achieved without the state's commitment to ethnic cleansing and without the involvement of Belarusian nationalism.

Abstract
The article examines the population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1944–1947, its role in the shaping of modern Ukraine, and its place in the evolution of the Soviet nationality policy. It investigates the factors involved in the decision-making of individuals and state officials and then assesses how people on the ground made sense of the Soviet population politics. While the earlier scholarship saw the transfer as punitive national deportation, the article argues that it was neither punitive nor purely national nor was it a deportation. The article shows that the party-state was ambivalent about the Polish minority and was not committed to total national homogenization of Western Ukraine. Instead, the people themselves were often eager to leave the USSR because of the poor living conditions, fear of Sovietization, and ethnic conflict. Paradoxically, one of the largest Soviet nation-building projects was not the product of coherent nationality policy.

The 500th anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia has directed attention toward the importance of utopianism. This book investigates the possibilities of cooperation between the humanities and the social sciences in the analysis of 20th century and contemporary utopian phenomena. The papers deal with major problems of interpreting utopias, the relationship of utopia and ideology, and the highly problematic issue as to whether utopia necessarily leads to dystopia. Besides reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary utopian investigations, the eleven essays effectively represent the constructive attitudes of utopian thought, a feature that not only defines late 20th- and 21st-century utopianism, but is one of the primary reasons behind the rising importance of the topic. The volume's originality and value lies not only in the innovative theoretical approaches proposed, but also in the practical application of the concept of utopia to a variety of phenomena which have been neglected in the utopian studies paradigm, especially to the rarely discussed Central European texts and ideologies