This paper presents the process of creation and modification of specific Polish characteristics and moral virtues which were reflected in Russian descriptions and representations of Poland and the Polish nobles in 16th-18th centuries. The images of Poles in the Russian consciousness were changing as a result of cultural, religious, political and military interactions. But those most enduring ones deal with confessional difference between the Orthodox Russians and the Catholic Poles.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the non-fiction prose of Svetlana Alexievich about the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, the Perestroika and the Soviet-Afghan War as books woven from oral history stories. The authoress compares Alexievich books with ther similar projects with the aim of defining the Alexievich genre and placing her works in the oral history in East-Central Europe. In the end, she draws some conclusions about the place of oral history in the contemporary historical knowledge in East-Central Europe.
The aim of this article is to look at the films by Andrzej Wajda as historical narratives and at the director himself as a historian who provides deep reflections about the past in his work. This article consists of three parts. The first part focuses on answering when a film director may be regarded as a historian. In the second part, I address the issue of various audio-visual strategies of constructing possible historical worlds; these strategies, used to create onscreen narratives about the past, include: visualisation of history, defiance of history, re-visualization of history, affirmation of history, modelling, accumulation, disregarding and symbolizing. In the third part, I use the aforementioned categories to discuss selected films by Wajda as historical works presenting various versions of possible historical worlds which balance between affirmation and defiance of history.
Historians from Kielce, affiliated with the Institute of History of the Jan Kochanowski University, started their research on Polish–Russian relations in the 19th century in the 1990s. They focused on three key issues: the first concerns the fate of the Poles in the Russian Empire, including their service in the Russian army and their exiles to Siberia. The second issue concerns the history of the Russian administration, political police and the Polish society in the Polish Kingdom and in so-called 9 western provinces of the Russian Empire (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine). The third issue concerns the problem of russification of the Polish educational system. The initiator of the first topic is Wieslaw Caban. The second research, on the history of the society and the Russian administration in the Polish Kingdom and western provinces, was initiated and carried out by Stanislaw Wiech. And the problem of russification of the educational system is the domain of Adam Massalski. The researches on Polish–Russian relations in the 19th century, carried out at the Institute of History of Jan Kochanowski University, were conducted in a close cooperation with Russian historians. The results of these studies were presented at several international conferences organized in Poland (Warsaw, Kielce, Krakow) and Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov Veliky Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan, Krasnodar, Omsk, Tomsk, Barnaul). Overall, the historians from Kielce devoted dozens of monographs, several compact source publications and more than one hundred treatises and articles to the problems of the Russian topics.
Studies of the Russian history were initiated by Genowefa Kurpisowa at the Higher Pedagogical School and later at the University of Gdansk in the 1960s. Genowefa Kurpisowa also contributed with supervising a number of diploma theses. The historians from the Gdansk scientific community still continue and develop this field of research. Their achievements include dozens of monographs and collective works as well as a significant number of articles on various aspects of the Russian history and the Polish–Russian relations in the 19th and early years of the 20th century.
This article presents some conclusions and reflections on teaching the history of Poland at Russian universities. The main information base (knowledge about Poland’s history, Polish geography, politics and national identification), as well as the image of Poles and Russian ethnical stereotypes were analyzed.
Recognizing the important role of the President in shaping of the concept of security policy and defence, an attempt was made to investigate the political attitudes of the two candidates for the office – Andrzej Duda and Bronislaw Komorowski – towards the key problems of national security. The aim of the analysis was to answer the question about the future direction of national security policy proposed by the candidates.
The Romanian Revolution of December 1989, resulting in the fact that Nicolae Ceauşescu, who ruled the country since 1960s was removed from power, initiated a series of political, social and economic changes. Romania as a non-heterogeneous state in terms of ethnicity was forced under the emerging democratic system to develop legal solutions governing relations between the state and the minorities. Developing concepts that would be satisfactory to the State and the Romanian elites as well as the minority circles was a lengthy and very complex process. The path to the emergence of compromise legislation, including in the field of language and education, required many years of work and overcoming mutual prejudices and mistrust. Finally, after over two decades since the revolution, Romanian political elites and the representatives of several national minorities living in Romania created a system that is seen in the eyes of European decision-makers as an example worthy of following. At a closer inspection, it turns out that the adopted legal solutions are not free from defects. An example of this is the phenomenon of an “ethno-business” as well as the fact that so far the Romanian legislation could not clearly define the category of a “national minority”. Undoubtedly, a sign of the fact that Romania as a country and its citizens have coped with their ethnic heritage is the outcome of the last presidential election of December 2014, which, dominated by ethnic Romanians, introduced Klaus Iohannis, who is a representative of the German minority, to the Palace Cotroceni in Bucharest – the seat of the presidents of Romania.
