Slovo vol. 21.2 by SLOVO Journal

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SLOVO

SLOVO VOLUME 21

NUMBER 2

AUTUMN 2009

Contents

Vol. 21, No. 2, Autumn 2009

ISSN 0954–6839

slovo

PAGE

EDITORIAL

An Inter-disciplinary Journal of Russian, East-Central European and Eurasian Affairs

ARTICLES

Uneasy Twins? The Entangled Histories of Jewish Emancipation and Anti-Semitism in Romania and Hungary, 1866–1913 RAUL CARSTOCEA Mail-Order Brides: Content Analysis of Eastern European Internet Marriage Agencies YULIA ZABYELINA Reconciling Family and Work in Central and Eastern European Countries GIOVANNA ROSSI AND SARA MAZZUCCHELLI Transitions in School Funding: The Case of Estonia ROSALIND LEVACIC´

50–63

beseda peJ

64–85

– sanavards szó slova zvop slovo

86–100 101–112 113–126

BOOK REVIEWS

127–131

FILM REVIEW

132–133

POETRY

134–142

Vol. 21, No. 2, Autumn 2009

A Selection of Poems MARK LEY

slovo ^

Polish Contact Zones: Silesia in the Works of Adam Zagajewski and . Tomasz Róz ycki EWA STAN´ CZYK

zodis wort CLOBO rijec ^

ANNA REBMANN

fjalë slowo l e´ j g

sõna

www.maney.co.uk

Maney Publishing for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

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SLOVO EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Anna Rebmann MANAGING EDITOR: Mark Griffiths For editorial addresses and submissions, see inside back cover. BOOK & FILM REVIEW EDITOR: Masha Volynsky PUBLIC RELATIONS EDITOR: Lauren Angius GENERAL EDITORS: Jakup Azemi Katya Balan Oliwia Berdak Claudia Ciobanu Andreea Gavriliu Clare Jackman Nicole Kunzik Briane Stone Anna Szasz Filip Tarlea ACADEMIC ADVISOR Prof. Alena Ledeneva MANEY PUBLISHING: Lisa Johnstone, Managing Editor Sabrina Barrows, Production Editor Slovo discusses and interprets Russian, Eastern and Central European, and Eurasian affairs from a number of different perspectives including, but not limited to, anthropology, art, economics, film, history, international studies, linguistics, literature, media, philosophy, politics, and sociology. Slovo is a fully refereed journal, edited and managed by postgraduates of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Each year a new Editorial Board is selected from the postgraduate community to produce two volumes of academic depth and rigour, considering articles, book, and film review submissions from both established and emerging academics. Indexing and Abstracting Slovo is indexed in MLA International Bibliography and the Directory of Periodicals. Slovo (ISSN 0954–6839) is published for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, twice yearly, in the spring and autumn. Subscriptions are entered by the volume and include postage (air-speeded outside the UK). Subscriptions must

be pre-paid at the rate appropriate to the location of the subscriber. Volume 21, 2009 (2 issues) Institutional rate: £108.00; North America: US$207.00 Individual rate*: £30.00; North America: US$54.00 *Subscriptions are welcomed from individuals if prepaid by personal cheque or credit card and if the journal is to be sent to a private address. All orders must be sent to Publication Sales, Maney Publishing, Suite 1C, Joseph’s Well, Hanover Walk, Leeds LS3 1AB, UK (fax: +44 (0)113 386 8178; email: subscriptions@maney.co.uk). Maney Publishing North America, 875 Massachusetts Avenue, 7th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Tel (toll-free): 866 297 5154; Fax: 617 354 6875; email: maney@maneyusa.com. All cheques must be payable to Maney Publishing. Advertising and general enquiries should be sent to Maney Publishing. Copyright © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for such permission must be addressed to permissions@maney.co.uk or Permissions Section, Maney Publishing, 1 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AF, UK. Disclaimer Statements in the journal reflect the views of the authors, and not necessarily those of the University, editors, or publisher. Photocopying For users in North America, permission is granted by the copyright owner for libraries and others registered with the Copyright Clearance Centre (CCC) to make copies of any article herein. Requests should be sent directly to Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In the UK, the Copyright Licensing Agency, cla@cla.co.uk is mandated to grant permission to make copies. Maney Publishing is the trading name of W. S. Maney & Son Ltd, Suite 1C, Joseph’s Well, Hanover Walk, Leeds LS3 1AB, UK.

Instructions for Authors Slovo welcomes original contributions that match the aims and scope of the journal (as described on the inside front cover) on the understanding that their contents have not previously been published or are currently submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be sent to independent referees. It is a condition of publication that papers become the copyright of the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London. All editorial correspondence should be sent to the Executive Editor, Slovo, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT. Email: slovo@ssees.ac.uk Deadlines Deadlines are normally September for the spring issue and March for the autumn issue. Presentation and Style Two complete copies should be submitted printed double-spaced with ample margins and not normally exceeding 6–8000 words. All pages should be numbered: the first page should state only the title of the paper, name(s) of the author(s) and, for each author, a short institutional affiliation, and an abbreviated title (for running headlines within the article). At the bottom of the page give the full name, address and e-mail address to which all correspondence, including proofs, should be sent. The second page should contain an abstract in English of not more than 200 words. Contributions should follow the MHRA Style Guide (2008) and the house-style of the journal. Words should not be hyphenated at the end of a line. Use single inverted commas for short quotations (double for quotations within quotations), but quotations over fifty words should be indented and single-spaced without inverted commas. Translations are not generally needed for quotations from the Slavonic languages, although it is left to the author’s discretion if they wish to include the original. Where a passage presents particular difficulty, translation may be offered, either in parentheses in the text, or in an endnote. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system without diacritics, which must be used except where conventions for alternative transliterations exist. Quotations in languages other than Slavonic will require translation. Non-English words in the text, apart from names, should be italicized. Notes and References Contributors should adhere to MHRA and the journal’s house-style in the presentation of numbered footnotes and references. Any general note on the article (e.g. personal acknowledgements) should appear as a first unnumbered note. Within the text, references and notes should be indicated by a superscript Arabic numeral. Articles and publications cited in the text should then be listed in full in the footnotes: for books: Bernard Comrie and Gerald Stone, The Russian Language since the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 2. for articles in books: George Schöpflin, ‘The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myth’, in Myths and Nationhood, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1997), pp. 31–33. for periodical articles: Lubomir Dolezel, ‘Poststructuralism: A View from Charles Bridge’, Poetics Today, 21 (2000), 640–41. For particular text(s) repeatedly cited, full bibliographical reference should be given in an initial footnote, with author/page references thereafter in parentheses in the text (Schöpflin, p. 31). Consistent abbreviations may be used in such references where appropriate. Authors are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of references. Tables and Illustrations These should be submitted on separate sheets, and numbered sequentially using arabic numerals for

Figures (illustrations, i.e. photographs, diagrams, and graphs) and Tables. Each must have a caption, source, and where appropriate, a key. The position in the text must be clearly shown (e.g. Figure 1; Table 1). Images should be submitted electronically in CMYK format as good-quality TIFF or EPS files, suitable for printing. As a guide images should be submitted at a minimum input scanning resolution of 300 dpi for full colour; 350/400 dpi for halftones; 600 dpi for slides or transparencies, 800 dpi for simple line drawings; and 1200 dpi for fine line illustrations. Please note that the final reproduction quality is dependent on original supply of correct format and resolution. The author must obtain written evidence of permission to reproduce images (in all formats, in perpetuity and in all geographical regions worldwide) from the copyright owner for the use of any illustrative matter in the journal and will be liable for any fee charged by the owner of the image. The caption should include relevant credit of the permission of the copyright holder to reproduce the image. For more information please see www.maney.co.uk/authors/copyright. Submission on disk On notification by the Editors that a paper has been accepted, a final version of the article should be submitted on disk in Microsoft Word. Submission on disk will improve typographical accuracy and accelerate publication. The filename and software must be indicated on the disk. In preparing the disk version, there is no need to format articles: please include italics or bold type where necessary, but not style or footnote codes. Footnotes should be typed at the end of the file as part of the text, or supplied in a separate document. In the main text, numbering of notes should be indicated by superscript numbers. References and captions should be placed at the end of the file, or in separate files. Please use hard returns only at the end of paragraphs; switch auto-hyphenation off; do not justify text; and do not use automatic numbering routines. Consistency in spacing, punctuation, and spelling will be of help. Tables should be submitted as separate files and keyed horizontally from left to right using a tab between columns, not the space bar (or keyed in Table mode in Word). Proofs Proofs will be sent to the author-nominated e-mail address for correspondence. Proofs are supplied for checking and making essential typographical corrections, not for general revision, alteration, or changes to illustrations, which will not be allowed. Proofs must be returned to the editor within 5 days of receipt. Copyright Authors who wish to reproduce material from previously published sources or where the copyright is owned by a third party, such as sections of text, tables or images, must obtain written permission from the copyright holder (usually the publisher) and the author(s)/artist(s) of the original material. A line giving the full source of the material should be included in the manuscript. Copyright is required for use in all formats (including digital), in perpetuity and in all geographical regions worldwide. For more information and advice please see www.maney.co.uk/authors/copyright. Permissions Any reproduction from Slovo, apart from for the purposes of review, private research or ‘fair dealing’, must have the permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Requests for such permission must be addressed to Permissions Section, Maney Publishing at permissions@maney.co.uk, who act on behalf of the School. In all cases, acknowledgement must be made to Slovo. Complimentary copies Contributors will receive a free copy of the journal in which their article is featured. Authors can also access a PDF of their article for distribution, obtainable from the Executive Editor at slovo@ssees.ac.uk.

SLOVO Volume 21

Number 2

Autumn 2009

CONTENTS Editorial Anna Rebmann

Articles Polish Contact Zones: Silesia in the Works of Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Rózd ycki Ewa Stan´czyk

Uneasy Twins? The Entangled Histories of Jewish Emancipation and Anti-Semitism in Romania and Hungary, 1866–1913 Raul Carstocea

Mail-Order Brides: Content Analysis of Eastern European Internet Marriage Agencies Yulia Zabyelina

Reconciling Family and Work in Central and Eastern European Countries Giovanna Rossi and Sara Mazzucchelli

101

Transitions in School Funding: The Case of Estonia Rosalind Levacˇic´

113

Book Reviews L. Briedis, Vilnius: City of Strangers (Amanda Swain); T. Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulages — Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia (Alexey Golubev); J. Hedda, His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (Mark Hurst); R. P. Blakesley and S. E. Reid, Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts (John Etty)

127

Film Review Chouga (Lauren Kaminsky)

132

Poetry A Selection of Poems Mark Ley

134

Selected content is available online free of charge at www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney To sign up for free tables of contents alerts please see www.maney.co.uk/online/tocs

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 49

Editorial Anna Rebmann Executive Editor, Slovo, 2008–09 Slovo is a journal in which we encourage the publication of research from diverse disciplinary perspectives. This issue continues this tradition of promoting diversity, containing articles written by both emerging and established academics from a wide range of disciplines. In the first article ‘Polish Contact Zones: Silesia in the Works of Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Różycki’, Ewa Stańczyk analyses the treatment of Silesia as a multicultural contact zone in the works of two contemporary Polish authors Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Różycki. In the second article ‘Uneasy Twins? The Entangled Histories of Jewish Emancipation and Anti-Semitism in Romania and Hungary, 1866–1913’, Raul Carstocea offers an engaging comparison of the relationship between emancipatory legislation and the rise of anti-semitism in Romania and Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Yulia Zabyelina, in her article on mail-order brides, provides an innovative examination of the use of the internet by mail-order bride agencies, employing comparative content analysis to produce a classification of agencies. In ‘Reconciling Family and Work in Central and Eastern European Countries’ Giovanna Rossi and Sara Mazzucchelli analyse work-family policies in Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, and Czech Republic, focusing on how the pressures of work and family are reconciled in these countries. In the final article of this issue, ‘Transitions in School Funding: The Case of Estonia’, Rosalind Levačić offers a detailed analysis of the changes in school financing since Estonian independence in 1991. Less conventionally, we end this volume of Slovo with a selection of poems by Mark Ley, an alumni of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The poems are inspired by the regions that provide the focus of Slovo’s content — Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. I would like to thank the many people who have helped in the production of this issue. First, I would like to thank the editorial board for their continuing commitment and I am especially grateful to the support from Mark Griffiths, Masha Volynsky, and Lauren Angius. Second, the publication of this issue would not have been possible without the academics who have assisted us in reviewing the articles submitted to Slovo. Finally, I would like to thank Lisa Johnstone and Sabrina Barrows at Maney Publishing as well as Slovo’s editorial advisor Professor Alena Ledeneva for their invaluable advice.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 64–85

Uneasy Twins? The Entangled Histories of Jewish Emancipation and Anti-Semitism in Romania and Hungary, 1866–1913 Raul Carstocea School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK

The period between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century is one that witnessed the rise and spread of anti-Semitism throughout Europe. This paper attempts a historical analysis of the development of anti-Semitism in Romania and a comparison with the case of Hungary in the period between 1866 and 1913. Such a comparison is interesting as the process of Jewish emancipation in the two countries could not have been more different: while in the Romanian principalities Jews were almost completely excluded from political life and faced important restrictions in all areas of activity, in Hungary they enjoyed full civil and political rights. As a result, anti-Semitism in these countries took different forms as well. In Hungary, anti-Semitism is usually viewed as a reaction to emancipation, while in Romania it accompanies the ofﬁcial policy of discrimination and exclusion. This paper follows the development of legislation dealing with the Jewish populations in the two countries and tries to challenge the common perception of anti-Semitism as a phenomenon appearing as a reaction of the majority population to Jewish emancipation. This comparative discussion is carried out taking into account the different historical contexts of the two neighbouring lands and their impact on the situation of the Jews.

The stories of Jewish emancipation and of the rise of anti-Semitism are usually perceived as inter-connected. In the words of a great Jewish intellectual of fin-desiècle Budapest, József Patai, ‘Here, anti-Semitism was born as the twin brother of emancipation, and today, at the time of the fifty-year jubilee of emancipation, it too is fifty years old, is a Hungarian citizen, muscular, strong, and healthy’.1 This view 1

József Patai, ‘Antiszemitizmus Magyarországon, a galiciaiak, és a morál’, in Mult és Jövő (August 1918), quoted in Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996).

UNEASY TWINS

is confirmed by many of the accounts dealing with German and Habsburg Jews, which put forth the argument that anti-Semitism appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century as a reaction to Jewish emancipation.2 The purpose of this paper is to challenge this assumption by examining the relationship between Jewish emancipation and anti-Semitism in its Romanian form. Such an analysis can benefit greatly from a comparison with the case of Hungary, which presents itself as an almost diametrically opposed experience. The working definition of anti-Semitism as a specifically modern phenomenon replacing the anti-Jewish attitudes of pre-modern times follows Jacob Katz’s historical reference: ‘the term anti-Semitism was introduced in Germany at the end of the 1870s to describe the negative attitude toward the Jews held by a part of the population at that time’.3 The need for a new term is justified by the specifically modern elements involved in anti-Semitism, which is different from previous anti-Jewish formulations in its adoption of a pseudo-scientific approach, incorporating along a partisan line certain aspects of socio-economic or racial theories.4

Preliminary remarks Hannah Arendt’s statement that Romania was ‘the most anti-Semitic country in prewar Europe’5 has been intriguing students of anti-Semitism for decades. Whatever its validity, it has stimulated interest in research related to Romanian anti-Semitism, a topic that most often went unmentioned during communism in Romania. The image of Hungarian Jewry in the period under consideration (1866–1913) stands in contrast to the perception of the situation of their Romanian co-religionists: unlike them, Hungarian Jews were fully emancipated at the time and enjoyed better conditions before World War I than probably anywhere else in Europe. The chronological span of this paper, as is often the case, is subject to a certain degree of arbitrariness. While partially motivated, it can also be easily contested, as the roots of these phenomena go much further back in time. However, we believe the period under consideration is relevant for several reasons. The first is that we speak of ‘Romania’ and ‘Hungary’. While the Romanian principalities were united in 1859 and were to achieve their independence as ‘Romania’ only in 1878, 1866 was the year of the new country’s first constitution, which, among other things, regulated the status of the Jews. At the same time, 1867, the year of the Compromise (Ausgleich) and of the transformation of the Habsburg Empire, practically meant for Hungary the achievement of complete internal independence. It was also the year of the full emancipation of the Jews in Hungary. Pursuing this analysis beyond World War I, albeit an interesting endeavour, would go beyond the scope of this paper and would pose problems related to the significant changes in territory that followed it. 2

3 4

Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 258. Ibid., p. 1. See, for example, Hannah Arendt’s distinction between nineteenth-century secular ideological anti-Semitism and pre-1870 anti-Jewish hatred, of religious origins. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: André Deutsch, 1986). Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 172.

RAUL CARSTOCEA

To mention but one example, given the period under consideration, Transylvania, with its significant Jewish population, will be referred to as part of Hungary.6 Its becoming part of Romania after World War I would certainly complicate the picture.

Early beginnings — the period before 1866 Jews were present on the territory of what were to become the Romanian principalities ever since the second century ad, the time of the Roman conquest, and were almost constantly referred to in the medieval records of the land.7 Although their presence appears to have been continuous, the size of the community before the nineteenth century was very small, with less than 10,000 Jews (almost completely Sephardim) in Walachia, and a slightly higher number (about 12,000) in Moldova.8 This situation changed radically after the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople, which allowed the Romanian principalities some degree of independence from the Ottoman Empire in terms of foreign trade, creating commercial opportunities that led to a phenomenon of mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews escaping their persecution in the Russian Empire and the province of Galicia. By 1859, their number reached approximately 135,000 in the two principalities.9 The Treaty of Adrianople also brought to the Romanian principalities a Russian occupation that lasted until 1834, and with it, a legislation imposed by the Russian governor, General Pavel Kisselev, usually referred to as the Organic Statutes.10 Alongside many other discriminatory regulations against the Jews, Article 94 of Chapter III of the law introduced an element of utmost importance for the further development of the issue of Jewish emancipation: the Jew’s definition as a foreigner. The notion of foreigner was also associated with the idea of ‘vagrant, thus easing the possibility of the Jews’ expulsion’.11 At the same time, it marked the beginning of legal definitions of Jews as economic profiteers and exploiters, and of the ‘Jewish nation’ as an impediment to progress, features present in the Romanian principalities, but absent in Hungary, and which will reverberate in the later anti-Semitic discourse.12 At this

7 8

Nagyvárad, Oradea after the war, was the place with the largest proportion of Jewish population in Hungary at the turn of the century — 26.2%. Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 429. Constantin Rezachievici, ‘Evreii din ţările române în evul mediu’, Magazin Istoricí, 10/222, (1985), 59–62. The figures are from an 1825 census, and no previous reliable figures appear to be available to this date. Neagu Djuvara, Între Orient şi Occident. Ţările române la începutul epocii moderne (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1995), p. 179. Carol Iancu, Jews in Romania 1866–1918: From Exclusion to Emancipation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 77. The first pieces of legislation in the Romanian principalities that explicitly refer to the Jews are Matei Basarab’s Pravila Bisericească (The Church Code, 1640) and Îndreptarea Legei (Amendment of the Laws, 1652) in Walachia, and Vasile Lupu’s Pravilele Împărăteşti (The Imperial Codes, 1646) in Moldova. These codes are all of religious inspiration; as a result of that, they laid down that all subjects who did not belong to the Orthodox Church were considered heretical; contact between Christians and Jews was prohibited under penalty of excommunication. A Jew was not allowed to testify in court, unless he was a physician. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 20. Dinu Bălan, Naţional, naţionalism, xenofobie şi antisemitism în societatea românească modernă (1831–1866) (Iaşi: Junimea, 2006), p. 411. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 25.

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point, as Carol Iancu points out, anti-Jewish measures appear to be of Russian origin, inspired by the retrograde tsarist legislation; they were to have a significant impact on later legal developments. At this time, the situation of the Jews of Hungary was first improved by a 1783 patent of Joseph II, entitled Systematica Gentis Judaicae Regulatio (Systematic Regulation of the Jewish Nation),13 which ‘ended the special regulations dealing with them, and they became subject to the general laws of the country’.14 This was followed in 1790 by Article 38 of the Diet, De Judaeis, improving their access to education, which ‘was to remain the basis of the legal position of the Jews in Hungary until 1840’.15 Finally, at that time, following Act 29 of the Diet, they obtained the right to live anywhere in the country with the exception of mining towns.16 All these regulations gradually advanced the status of the Jews, allowing them ever increased access to economic activity, including agriculture (as long as they employed Jewish workers). Such achievements also helped make them more aware of their situation and actively engaged in pursuing full emancipation. The Revolution of 1848 represented, as elsewhere in Europe, a moment of hope for the Jewish community in the Romanian principalities. Article 21 of the Proclamation of Islaz, a document of the revolutionaries, referred to the ‘emancipation of Israelites and political rights for any compatriots of a different confession’.17 A similar argument was made by Article 27 of the program of the Moldovan revolutionaries, Dorinţele partidei naţionale în Moldova (Aims of the National Party in Moldova), which, however, in light of the higher number of Jews in Moldova, advocated a gradual and not immediate emancipation. Another interesting element in Article 27 is the first mention of the ‘Jews’ transformation into a state of citizens useful to the state’.18 Thus, the connection between Jews and their role in the new state is explicitly stated, and this feature of their ‘usefulness’, which William Oldson amply expands upon, represents a recurrent theme throughout the nineteenth century.19 This ‘usefulness’ of the Jewry is extremely important, and while we will refer to it in more detail later on, it is probably necessary to briefly introduce it here and relate it to the case of Hungary. Jewish emancipation is often regarded by analysts as a victory of the Enlightenment, of rationality and liberal ideas against medieval prejudice. While this is no doubt a valid assumption, it is equally true that the direct motivations justifying this decision often followed equally rational but more pragmatic reasons. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a process of nation-building in both Romania and Hungary, and the role played by the Jews was by no means discussed only in terms of abstract principles. It is along these 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

Prior to this, the Jews in the lands of Hungary, also present there from Roman times, were subject to a long history of heavy taxation, expulsions (followed by recalls) and persecution during the Middle Ages and under Habsburg rule. For a detailed discussion of the Jewish community during this period, see R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, pp. 21–211. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 233. Bălan, Naţional, naţionalism, xenofobie şi antisemitism, p. 416. Ibid., (italics added). William A. Oldson, A Providential Anti-Semitism: Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth Century Romania (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991).

RAUL CARSTOCEA

lines that the answers to the dilemma of the strikingly different situations of Jews in the two countries should be sought. In 1848, the Jews of Hungary joined the Hungarian revolutionaries enthusiastically, giving the first concrete proof of what was to become their proverbial ‘patriotism’. Completely absent in the Romanian lands, one of the explanations for this feature is to be found in the countries’ distinct histories. Raphael Patai explains that ‘in the unceasing declarations of the Magyar patriotism of the Jews, the rabbis played a leading role. They took every opportunity to preach patriotism and faithfulness toward the king and the authorities’.20 This is in turn explained by the Jewish tradition of seeking protection and patronage from the official leadership during the long centuries of persecution.21 This makes sense in the case of Hungary, where their patrons were themselves masters of their own country. It would not in the case of the Romanian principalities, not even independent states in 1848; there, authority was perceived as lying with the Porte rather than Romanian leaders. Thus, while some Jews in the principalities joined the revolutionaries, probably in light of the expected emancipation, their participation was nowhere as extensive as in Hungary, where both their financial efforts and behaviour in battle were praised by many Hungarian patriots for many years thereafter. Another aspect worth considering is the outbreak of anti-Jewish riots in Hungary before the revolution. No such thing happened in Romania, and, while some authors stress that Jews participated in the revolution enthusiastically despite the violence directed against them, William O. McCagg Jr, after taking a closer look at the places where these excesses took place, believes that ‘in 1848, Jewry committed itself in very large numbers to the Magyar cause because of widespread German anti-Semitism in Hungary’s towns’.22 This in turn throws some light on the accelerated tendency of abandoning the German language in favour of Hungarian after the revolution. Interestingly enough, although by no means specific to the Romanian lands, some of the authors of the emancipatory documents of the revolution would be proponents of anti-Semitic ideology and legislation in the 1870s.23 Also interesting is the followup of the revolution which marked a moment of favourable legislation for Romanian Jewry; under the rule of Alexandru Ioan Cuza, the first prince of united Romania, the Jews enjoyed full civil rights.24 In Hungary, after its defeat in August 1849, the Jews were punished by the Austrians by the exaction of a special reparations payment from the Jewish community of ‘2.3 million florins, an enormous amount of money at that time’.25 Other setbacks in the process of emancipation added to this penalty, such as the reintroduction in 1852 of the Jewish oath or in 1853 of the 20 21

24 25

R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 271. Jacob Katz, ‘The Identity of Post Emancipatory Hungarian Jewry’, in Yehuda Don and Victor Karady, eds. A Social and Economic History of Central European Jewry (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp. 22–23. William O. McCagg Jr, ‘The Jewish Position in Interwar Central Europe: A Structural Study of Jewry at Vienna, Budapest, and Prague’, in Don and Karady, eds., A Social and Economic History, p. 64. Such as Mihail Kogălniceanu, writer of Article 27 of the program of the Moldovan revolutionaries, and later one of the most radical opponents of Jewish emancipation in his position as Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time of the Congress of Berlin. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 35. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 284.

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prohibition of owning landed property.26 However, the Jews managed to have the reparations payments annulled and transferred to payment of a smaller tribute (1 million florins) to a school and educational fund; this led to improved access to an educational system that, being state-controlled, became much more homogeneous than the previous community-based education. At this point, sharp opposition to this measure arose from the Orthodox Jewish communities. Such opposition made more visible a split already present within Hungarian Jewry, between the Orthodox and Neolog factions. While the latter had as their main objective emancipation, in all meanings of the term, and assimilation to the Hungarian population, this was naturally viewed with suspicion by the Orthodox. In 1861, the Congregation of Pest (made up mostly of Neolog) invited all Hungarian Jews to a conference meant to discuss an appeal for full emancipation; ‘of the 42 counties and 14 cities whose representatives were invited, only 19 counties and 9 cities responded, dispatching a total of 53 delegates, among them only two rabbis’.27 This indicated that the issue of emancipation was not pursued by all Hungarian Jews, and not even by their majority. This distinction between the different types of Jewry in Hungary has to be emphasized, and we will return to it in the conclusion, as in it lies another important part of the explanation between the different paths Jewish emancipation took in the two countries discussed here. Raphael Patai repeatedly underlines the existence of ‘two Jewish worlds that can be termed eastern and western. [. . .] Hungary was the borderline between these two types of Jewries’ and the country where the two co-existed in almost equal proportion.28 East of that border, Romanian Jewry consisted overwhelmingly of Orthodox Jews, immigrants from Russia and Galicia, with all the consequences that followed from that. No matter how cautious one would be of distinctions between East and West, the difference between the two groups was evident even to a neutral observer, the conspicuous presence of Jews that preserved their traditional beards, clothing, customs and language being constantly referred to by contemporaries. In the debates surrounding emancipation, whether before 1867 in Hungary or in 1878, the time of its consideration in Romania, no other feature stood out more prominently than this distinction. While ‘the Hungarian legislators, in their discussion of the Jewish question, made a sharp distinction between them [Hungarian Jews] and the immigrant Jews (read “Galician Jews”)’,29 Romanians were going to invoke the same argument in their continuous attempt to prevent emancipation. Since most Jews in the country were of this ‘Eastern’ type, to which even some of their fellow co-religionists were opposed, and since their emancipation, unlike that of the ‘Western’ Jews, could bring no benefits to the new state, Romanian legislators constantly referred to this argument when responding to the demands of the Great Powers.30 26 27 28 29 30

R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, pp. 292–293. Ibid., pp. 303–304. Ibid., p. 323. Ibid., p. 238. ‘The more narrow-minded among the indigenous Hungarian Jews looked askance at these foreign coreligionists, had contempt for them, and tried to play up the differences and the lack of commonality between themselves and these newcomers. The term Galizianer (German for Galician) or galiciai (the same in Hungarian) became a term of opprobrium and disdain that was to remain in use among the Hungarian Jews well into the interwar years of the twentieth century’. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 238.

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A constitution and a compromise — 1866/67 Complex problems often have apparently simple solutions, especially when these are formulated into laws. This was the case in Hungary, where efforts towards emancipation going on at least since 1783 were finally accomplished with a very succinct and yet comprehensive formulation in Act 1867:17, following the Austro-Hungarian ‘Compromise’ and the achievement of internal independence by Hungary: ‘1. The Israelite inhabitants of the country are declared equally entitled to the practice of all civil and political rights as the Christian inhabitants. 2. All laws, customs, or decrees contrary to this are herewith invalidated’.31 Two sentences also annulled the full civil rights enjoyed by the Jews of the Romanian principalities from 1848 to 1866. They represented Article 7 of the Constitution of 1866, following the forced abdication of Cuza and his replacement with a foreign prince of German origins, Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The text of the article reads: ‘The status of Romanian is acquired, preserved and lost according to the rules established by civil law. Only foreigners of Christian rites may become Romanians’.32 This document barred the way to naturalization of foreign Jews, and created a premise according to which ‘in the future, they [Jews] could be (and were) treated as foreigners against whom many discriminatory measures were directed’.33 What is referred to by Carol Iancu as the ‘officialization’ of the Jewish problem marked the beginning of a time of expulsions (legitimized by the Jews’ foreign and ‘vagabond’ character) and legal discriminations that lasted uninterrupted and in the face of European protest until 1878.34 In Hungary, following emancipation, a Hungarian National Israelite Congress took place between 1868 and 1869. It only partially achieved its goal of creating a central organization of Hungarian Jews.35 The majority that did agree to it was committed to cultural integration, ‘and it effectively promoted the spread of Magyarization among the Jews’.36 However, the Congress also both deepened and made more visible the rift separating the different Jewish groups, Orthodox and Neolog, which came to be called a ‘schism’.37 In spite of its negative connotations, it also yielded positive results. Open competition between these two factions led to an acceleration of the process of modernization and to increased ‘enthusiasm’ for the Magyar language, with the Orthodox trying to outbid the others.38

31 32

33 34

36 37

Act 1867:17, cited in R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 314. ‘Legislatie — Resurse pentru democratie: Constitutiunea din 1866’, Asociatia Pro Democratia, < http://legislatie. resurse-pentru-democratie.org/const_1866.php > [15 December 2007]. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 39. Victor Neumann, Istoria evreilor din România: studii documentare şi teoretice, (Timişoara: Amarcord, 1996). Nethaniel Katzenburg, ‘Central European Jewry Between East and West’, in Don and Karady, eds., A Social and Economic History, pp. 36–37. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 320. For an excellent discussion of this ‘schism’, see Michael K. Silber, ‘The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy. The Invention of a Tradition’, in Jack Wertheimer, ed. The Uses of Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), pp. 23–84. William O. McCagg Jr, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 136–37.

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The ‘incubation period’ — 1866–1878 What is described by Katz as the ‘incubation period’ in the history of German antiSemitism39 — corresponding to the period from the beginning of the 1870s to the publication of Wilhelm Marr’s pamphlet The Victory of Judaism over Germanism in February 1879 — can be said to correspond to a similar development in Romanian and Hungarian history from 1866/7 to 1878. In the Romanian principalities, backed up by legal discrimination, the image of ‘the Jew’ began to crystallize into a veritable enemy image. The situation in the two countries appears different altogether: while in Hungary anti-Semitism began to emerge as a reaction to emancipation, in united Romania anti-Semitic ideology followed the official policy towards Jews. It is thus not surprising that some of the leading personalities of Romanian politics at the time engaged in violent anti-Jewish speeches or actions.40 The ‘Jewish question’ in the principalities was beginning to take specific directions at the time. New factors were added to the pre-modern religious dimension of anti-Jewish prejudice: the ‘economic argument’ was one of these. Romania was a primarily agrarian country that until the middle of the nineteenth century had not developed a middle class. The social structure was made up of boyars (the big landowners) and peasants, forming the overwhelming majority of the population. ‘The intermediate role between these two classes was largely filled by the Jews in Moldavia’.41 Furthermore, in the boyars’ attempts to protect their position and prevent the rise of a national middle class, the Jews were highly instrumental. As a result, while the nineteenth century witnessed the tardy rise of a Romanian entrepreneurial class, it also witnessed its aggressive reaction against what was rightfully perceived as a selfconscious, and to some extent united, competing group. It is against this background that one is to understand I.C. Codrescu’s address to the Jewish community: ‘If you realize that our struggle is not against your religion, but against your desire to monopolize the middle class of our society, tell that to Europe, to the foreign governments to which you are sending your complaints’.42 One can contrast this situation with the one in Hungary, where even the positive outcome of the struggle for emancipation is considered by some authors to be the result of an enduring coalition between Hungarian nobles and Jews.43 This relationship has its roots in a very similar situation as the one in the Romanian lands: ‘all over Hungary Jews became the main middlemen between noble estate owners and the western markets; and a few began to step into a new business, that of managing estates for nobles who either wished to live away from home or who did not want 39 40

41 42 43

Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 260. One can refer here to Ministers of the Interior Ion Brătianu and Mihail Kogălniceanu’s circulars, involving expulsions of Jews or police raids against Jewish neighbourhoods, with the pretext of combating vagrancy; to the encouragement of riots by various prefects, with the support of the police; to Minister of Foreign Affairs Nicolae Ionescu’s 1876 suggestion that Jews, ‘the national plague’, should be sent to Palestine, etc. Iancu, Jews in Romania, and Neumann, Istoria evreilor din România. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 8. Ibid., p. 71. McCagg Jr, A History of Habsburg Jews, pp. 132–33.

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to be bothered’. Moreover, ‘the interdependence of the Jews and the nobility in Hungary lent a substantial enrichment to both’.44 To understand why this was not the case in the Romanian principalities, one would have to look again at the specific differences between the two countries, in this case between their respective nobilities. When comparing Hungary with Galicia, McCagg finds that: . . . in Hungary the gentry class, the nemesség, was more numerous and politically significant. [. . .] In the 1840s [. . .] there was one noble in Hungary for every 20 commoners [. . .]; its sheer numbers gave it strengths in the democratizing nineteenth-century world that other European nobilities lacked.45

Such numbers are closer to those of the middle class rather than of the nobles in the Romanian principalities, where boyars were a different species altogether. Another distinction lies in the political possibilities available to each group: the Hungarian gentry enjoyed a very high degree of autonomy and administrative power through their National Diet; Romanian boyars were traditionally dependent upon the favour of the ruler (foreign for a century before 1821), and rapid ascensions went alongside depositions and summary executions. As a result, ‘the Hungarian nobility stood for “progress”’;46 the Romanian boyars formed the Conservative Party. A political phenomenon also became manifest: the practice of discrediting politicians through accusations of being corrupted by ‘the Jewish purse’ led to a gradual radicalization of political tactics. ‘During the electoral campaigns, measures against the Jews doubled in intensity in order to win the favor [of] the voters’.47 Finally, another determining factor for the transformation of anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism in the Romanian principalities was added after the union of Moldavia and Walachia. One could call it ‘national’, or rather, focusing only on the negative aspects of Romanian nationalism, as Iancu does, the ‘xenophobic factor’. Referring to Yaacov Talmon’s book Destin d’Israel, Iancu makes a distinction between nationalism as a revolutionary factor and as a conservative force.48 Without discussing the validity of this distinction in theoretical terms, it seems that it holds some validity for nineteenth century Romania, where revolutionary nationalism prevailed up until the union of 1859. In the political struggle against the foreign domination of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires, all help appeared valuable, and thus Jews were considered in 1848 as part of the ‘brotherhood’ that will overcome the tyranny. However, once the union was established and the country began envisioning independence, the direction of nationalism changed towards conservatism. The most visible consequence of the former foreign rule appears to have been the development of a ‘siege mentality’ as a response to the ‘defensive need of the Romanian nation’.49 44 45 46 47 48

McCagg Jr., A History of Habsburg Jews, pp. 132, 133. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 72. Yaacov Talmon, Destin d’Israël. L’unique et l’universel. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1967); ‘Nations established as states [. . .] are generally inclined towards conservative nationalism, while those struggling against foreign dynasties or colonial powers to gain their independence naturally turn towards revolutionary nationalism’. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 74. Bălan, Naţional, naţionalism, xenofobie şi antisemitism, p. 438.

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The objective of creating a Romanian middle-class was coupled with ‘the fight against foreigners, with the aspiration to live through itself alone’.50 In the evolution of such a defensive line of nationalism, one particular group that appeared as particularly ‘suited’ as a target for attack was the Jewish community. As we have seen, they were legally defined as ‘foreigners’; they represented direct competition to the new Romanian middle-class, the driving force behind nationalism; they were the group that through its language, customs, dress code, religion was most distinct from Romanians;51 and they were significantly less protected than other ‘foreigners’. Given the change of their status from that of ‘corporation’ (as they were considered in the Middle Ages) to that of ‘nationality’ with the Organic Statutes, it was easy to ‘fear’ them as a competing nationality within the Romanian state, especially because of the complex demographic pattern.52 The nationality aspect of the ‘Jewish question’ developed along significantly different lines in Hungary. We have already referred to the Jews’ ‘patriotism’; as a result of the competition between the Orthodox and the Neolog, this became even more exacerbated in the period following emancipation. Unlike in the Romanian principalities, where they identified themselves as a nationality,53 in Hungary Jews insisted on describing themselves as ‘Hungarians of the Mosaic faith’.54 This made them extremely ‘useful’ (to return to this qualification) in the Magyarization process undertaken by the authorities after 1867. The fact that Jews declared themselves of Hungarian nationality, and professed a ‘love of the fatherland’ comparable to that of Hungarian nationalists, assisted the rulers in ‘maintaining their claim for exclusive prerogative in the face of the precarious statistical balance with the subdued nationalities’.55

Romanian independence and the Congress of Berlin (1877–1878) The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 brought about the awaited opportunity for Romania to achieve its independence. Military participation in the war, combined with an immediate response in exploiting delicate situations among the Great Powers,56 led

Ştefan Zeletin, Burghezia română. Originea şi rolul ei istoric, 2nd edn. (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1991), p. 19.

Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 76. While there were 134,101 Jews in the Romanian principalities in 1860, representing approximately 3% of the population of the country, they were unequally distributed, representing 9% of the Moldavian population (124,867 out of 1,325,096 total), and only 0.4% of Walachia’s (9234 out of 2,400,921 total). However, the demographic aspect is more complicated, due to the major Jewish concentration in towns; they amounted to 50% of the population of Iaşi, the capital of Moldova, were in a majority in the town of Roman, and small towns like Dărăbani were even entirely Jewish. Iancu, Jews in Romania, pp. 77–83. See, for example, the different reactions to Zionism in Hungary and Romania, to which we will refer later. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 431. Katz, ‘The Identity of Post Emancipatory Hungarian Jewry’, p. 22. ‘Almost every nationalist victory overturned some earlier decision of the great powers, as the Romanians played them against each other. This was true both of Vladimirescu’s revolt and of unification, rejected by the Paris congress in 1858 but achieved in 1859. No great power supported Romanian independence in 1877, and Russia opposed the kingdom’s entry into the Russo-Turkish War until the last moment, but Romania won independence on the battlefield and then at the Congress of Berlin’. Vlad Georgescu, The Romanians: A History, ed. by Matei Călinescu, trans. by Alexandra Bley-Vroman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), p. 187.

53 54 55 56

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to independence, proclaimed on 9 May 1877. The Congress of Berlin, meant to lay the foundations for durable peace in the Balkans, meant two particular things for Romania: obtaining recognition of independence from the Great Powers, and a territorial issue concerning the southern part of Bessarabia, seized by Russia during the war. At the Congress, Romania’s independence was conditioned on two grounds (Articles 44 and 45 of the Congress): the acceptance of the territorial change proposed by the Great Powers at the Congress in accordance with Russia’s interests,57 and the guarantee to the implementation of the principle of the equality of rights, civil and political. The latter condition, expressed in Article 44 of the Congress,58 directly addressed the ‘Jewish question’. The expected result was Romania’s alignment to the policy of states in Western and Central Europe with regards to Jewish emancipation, the granting of full citizenship rights. However, the expectations of Europe were not to be met. Through a subterfuge devised through interpreting the existing legislation, the Romanian parliament, in accordance with Prince Carol I, ‘found an excellent pretext for not resolving Jewish emancipation. Since the Jews were all foreigners, in order to enjoy all rights, including political ones, they had to be naturalized as Romanians’.59 This was to be done through a revision of the aforementioned Article 7 of the Constitution of 1866 that would extend naturalization to Jews. The national and international debates surrounding the introduction of the previsions of Article 44 of the Congress of Berlin in the Romanian Constitution were fierce. While the Western European powers expressed their disapproval at the Romanian subterfuge and called for the introduction of Article 44 of the Congress in the constitution, this only contributed to the exacerbation of anti-Jewish discourse in the country. International pressures were viewed from the point of view of interference in the internal affairs of an independent state, and the idea of ‘international conspiracy’ appeared for the first time in the country’s press. Both liberal and conservative newspapers brought up the country’s ‘colonization’, its becoming a ‘slave nation’ and turning into a ‘black Palestine’.60 As the debate was taking place, publications started to translate and reproduce articles from German anti-Semitic newspapers. At the same time, the speeches surrounding the revision of Article 7 of the 1866 Constitution display some of the first expressions of anti-Semitism in Parliament. One of the new notions, playing on the aforementioned concept of a conflict between nationalities, was that of a ‘state within a state’. In his speech in the parliamentary session of 10 March 1879, Senator Voinov stated the following: ‘It is immaterial in 57 58

59 60

Through which Romania agreed to cede southern Bessarabia to Russia, in exchange for Dobrogea. ‘In Romania, the difference in religious belief cannot be held against anyone as a reason for his exclusion from, or unfitness for, the exercise of civic and political rights, admission to public office, functions and honours, or the operation of different industries and exercise of different professions in any region whatsoever. Freedom and the public forms of all religions are guaranteed to all nationals of the Romanian State as well as to foreigners and no obstacle shall be placed in the way of the hierarchical organization of the different faiths or in their relations with their spiritual leaders. The nationals of all Powers, businessmen or others, shall be treated in Romania without distinction of religion on a footing of perfect equality’. Article 44, Congress of Berlin, cited in Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 93. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 95. Pressa, 12 June 1879; România Liberă, 11 June 1879.

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which country they live, the Jews do not become assimilated. They form a nation within the nation and remain immobile in a state of barbarism’.61 Other concepts proliferated in Parliament during these debates were those of an ‘invasion’ of Romania,62 of the Christian state, of Jews as agents of revolution and ‘communists’,63 and so on. The racial argument, a common feature of anti-Semitic discourse in Europe, was also introduced for the first time in these parliamentary debates.64 Each of these arguments would be picked up and developed by various anti-Semitic ideologists during the period before World War I. However, the picture of the debates surrounding the issue of emancipation has to be seen in the context of the international pressures on the country. Ever since 1866, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the most influential Jewish organisation, under the leadership of Adolphe Crémieux, responded to the discrimination in Romania by petitioning various governments in Europe to address this problem in their interaction with the Romanian government.65 Other prominent Jewish figures, such as the Rothschild family, Sir Moses Montefiore, and Gerson von Bleichröder, Bismarck’s banker and financial advisor, were involved in the struggle to obtain the emancipation of Romanian Jews. The latter especially played a significant part in the dynamics of the problem, due to his involvement in an unrelated but eventually connected issue: the so-called ‘Strousberg affair’ of the Romanian railways. Part of the German commercial and political interests in Romania, the building of the Romanian railways that began in 1868 proved to be a financial disaster for German investors. Under pressure from some of the more prominent investors, Bismarck dispatched Bleichröder (together with Adolph Hansemann) to Romania in the fall of 1871 to solve the financial crisis. Bleichröder, who was already dedicated to the cause of Jewish emancipation in Romania, used the opportunity and his leverage on Bismarck in the attempt to pressure the Romanian government into granting civil and political rights to Jews. As a result, the adoption of Article 44 by the Congress of Berlin was not only perceived as a great triumph of liberalism in Romania, but also led to his acclamation as a champion of Jewish rights in Europe.66 His brief triumph was followed by Romania’s non-compliance with the incorporation of Article 44 in the constitution, and its mere adoption ‘in principle’. As early as September 1878, a mere two months after the Congress, Bleichröder intimated 61 62

Cited in Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 128. By deputy Misail, in defeated tones that are anticipating Marr’s pamphlet. Also upheld by Vasile Alecsandri, famous Romanian poet and opponent of any revisions to Article 7. Iancu, Jews in Romania, pp. 129–31. By deputy Leca: ‘They will corrupt our people; they will introduce the commune as in the other countries, because they are the leaders of the communists’. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 130. ‘During the session of March 10, 1879, Senator Voinov quoted the Marquis of Pepoli, who defended Romania in the Italian Senate. The Marquis said: ‘In Romania the Jewish question is a racial question. It is not true that the Jews who live in Romania are Romanians; they belong to a race which has superimposed itself on the Romanian people”’. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 129. Carol Iancu, Bleichroeder şi Crémieux. Lupta pentru emanciparea evreilor din România la Congresul de la Berlin. Corespondenţă inedită (Bucureşti: Hasefer, 2006), pp. 18–24. ‘In return, he received the most extravagant praise from Western Jewry and from the Jews of Jassy (even a poem likening him to Moses, which he begged them not to publish, as planned) . . . It was Bleichröder’s greatest moment, a fitting climax to what briefly seemed to be the triumphant end of his Rumanian endeavors’. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), p. 378.

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that ‘despite Bismarck’s call for a complete emancipation of Romania’s Jews, the chancellor would probably settle for less’.67 His suspicions were to be confirmed by later developments, when Romania’s game of postponing the issue through the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly eventually worked. The final version of the revised Article 7 of the Constitution, published in the official press organ of the state on 25 October 1879, read: ‘Distinction of religious belief or membership will not constitute in Romania an obstacle to the acquisition of civic and political rights and their exercise’.68 Furthermore, naturalization was to be performed on an individual basis. Although this legal resolution of the issue was initially opposed by Germany, France and Britain, the countries eventually recognized Romania’s independence in 1880. This came to a large extent due to the reaching of an agreement between Germany and Romania on the issue of the Romanian railways, always more important to Bismarck than the fate of Romanian Jews.69 Britain followed suit, as ‘both tired of the situation and desirous of cultivating amicable relations with the Romanians’,70 they pursued the priority of their foreign policy and commercial arrangements at the expense of the adherence to equal rights principles. A reluctant France followed suit, and the end of the diplomatic crisis saw the Romanians maintain the discriminatory legislation under the formal cover of ‘individual naturalization’. At this point, Bleichröder himself tried to justify his failure and argue for the gradual emancipation that (except for being a fait accompli) he would have strongly rejected two years earlier.71 What this meant practically was an acknowledgement of the victory of Romanian nationalists, who managed to obtain their preferred result, while at the same time adding the argument of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ directed against Romanian independence to their ideological arsenal. Before setting out to analyse the final period under consideration, the one from 1878 to the beginning of World War I, we should take note of a peculiar occurrence at the Congress of Berlin regarding Hungarian Jews. Strangely enough, the antiSemitic ‘programme’ put forward by Győző Istóczy (that had just started being promoted) of deporting the Jews of Hungary to Palestine found an echo with three Jewish men, ‘of whom otherwise nothing is known, [and who] used Istóczy’s 67

68 69

70 71

Oldson, A Providential Anti-Semitism, p. 80. Letter of Bleichröder to Crémieux, Berlin 18 September 1878, cited in Iancu, Bleichroeder şi Crémieux, pp. 263–64. Monitorul Oficial, 25 October 1879. ‘In the decisive period after the Congress of Berlin, Bismarck gradually understood that the whole Jewish question could be used in order to coerce the Rumanians into a conciliatory course on the railway question . . . In short, Bismarck — the ‘warm-hearted, humane’ Bismarck, as Bleichröder had called him — proved cynically adept at using the philo-Semitic and liberal principles of western Europe for his own ends; just as he was about to use the anti-Semitic and illiberal principles of the conservatives at home’. Stern, Gold and Iron, p. 392. Oldson, A Providential Anti-Semitism, p. 87. ‘Those who know the Romanian situation will recognize as I do that a full and sudden emancipation at a time of agitations that trouble the country and incite the population would have led to the persecution of our coreligionists, whereas in this manner the goal is attained without provoking convulsions in that country which in the first place would have fastened on our friends’. Letter of Bleichröder to the Central Committee of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 14 February 1880. Iancu, Bleichroeder şi Crémieux, pp. 339–40.

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“program” to lend weight to a petition to the Berlin Congress’.72 The petition addressed Bismarck and Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), asking ‘for a home in the ancient land of our fathers, as a legal and independent kingdom, according to the enclosed motion of Istóczy’,73 and was signed by M. Levy, T. Freund and C. Meir Reisler. The proposal was judged accordingly to its superficiality and naïveté and was not placed on the agenda of the Congress. However, it is worth pointing out for two reasons: first, it anticipated the Zionist movement, while coming from a country which was to prove the most bitter opponent of Zionism; second, it displayed the first such instance of Zionists (or ‘proto-Zionists’, in this case) using the support of anti-Semites in their work for the establishment of a Jewish state, as Herzl was to advocate a decade later.

‘Golden Age’ and legal persecution — Hungarian and Romanian Jewry 1878–1913 In the history of Hungarian Jewry, the half-century between their emancipation and the end of World War I is referred to as its ‘Golden Age’. They enjoyed full equal rights, were full partners to the Magyarization process going on at the time, ‘and their Hungarian patriotism was welcomed by the nation as a factor that added weight to the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and tipped the balance in favor of the Magyar half of the population within Hungary itself, as against the non-Magyar national minorities’.74 Furthermore, the period between the Law of Reception of 1895, through which Judaism was conferred equality with the Christian religions, and the Numerus Clausus Law of 1920 was ‘the only period in the millennial history of the Hungarian Jews when legally no distinction whatsoever existed between the Jewish and non-Jewish population of the country. During that brief quarter of a century, all the laws of the state covered all the inhabitants’.75 As expected, the anti-Semitic reaction came, and, albeit limited in scope, it displayed a thoroughly backward, medieval character that probably worked towards its own discrediting. The blood libel of Tiszaeszlár (1882), a European-(in)famous trial, brought out all the medieval charges against Jews that seemed buried forever in the ‘Golden Age’ of emancipation and fared worse in this respect than any of its Romanian counterparts. More important than its outcome (the accused were found not guilty) was that the publicity around it sponsored a wave of anti-Semitic agitation in Hungary. Following his arrest and subsequent acquittal due to the publication of a pamphlet entitled The Judaized Hungary, Istóczy’s popularity increased, and he founded the National Anti-Semitic Party, which gained 17 seats in Parliament in 1884. Such formations would only appear in Romania after 1910 and were short-lived, to become prominent again only after 1923. However, the popularity of Istóczy’s party and its anti-Semitic program was to die down rapidly, following a record crop in 1895 and the subsequent economic recovery.76 72 73 74 75 76

R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 348. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 359. Ibid., p. 357.

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While in Hungary, as in Germany, the rise of anti-Semitism took place against the background of a profound and lasting economic crisis following the reforms that were initiated after the 1867 Compromise, and was ‘undoubtedly influenced by developments in Germany’,77 in Romania it was closely linked to a political decision, and to the debates surrounding it. This also helps explain the character of antiSemitism in Romania, where, except for being a cultural and political movement with great impact on Romanian nationalism, it was coupled with official state policy until the time of Jewish emancipation in 1919. The delayed Jewish emancipation in Romania, as well as the participation of the state in the marginalization and even exclusion of Jews from all walks of life, makes up for the peculiarity of Romanian anti-Semitism in the period before World War I. While the Hungarian government of the period can at worst be accused of indifference to the anti-Semitic phenomenon and of lack of devotion to the supervision of the implementation of emancipation laws, the Romanian one is responsible for many discriminatory policies, which added weight to the affirmations of the anti-Semites. As a result, referring back to Katz’s terminology,78 and paralleling similar developments in Western Europe, one can speak of a transition from the ‘incubation phase’ of anti-Semitism prior to 1878, when anti-Jewish feelings were widespread but relatively vague and inconstant, to a ‘crystallization’ after the Congress of Berlin, when the phenomenon became a permanent presence in Romanian public discourse and was elaborated in a more theoretical manner. The evolution of Romanian anti-Semitism from 1878 to World War I can be followed on two levels: one of antiSemitic discourse and the formation of anti-Semitic organizations, and the other regarding official state legislation with an anti-Jewish character. The first feature is one that is common to many European states, impressive by the diversity of the arguments, as well as by their virulence. The second one, less radical yet with much more impact on the situation of the Jews, highlights the specificity of the Romanian case, and will constitute therefore the main focus of our analysis, which tries to follow the relationship between the issue of emancipation and anti-Semitic manifestations. The first feature of the naturalization provided for by the modified Article 7 is that it did not happen, or, more precisely, it only included an insignificant number of Jews. Except for the Jewish veterans of the 1877 war,79 which were given the status of a special category and were emancipated as a group rather than individually,80 out of several tens of thousands of requests presented in the period between 1879 and 1913, only an extremely small number of Jews were naturalized.81

77 78 79 80 81

R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 347. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 260. Their number was 883 according to Iancu, 888 according to Neumann. Section C, Paragraph 2 of the Article 7 of the Romanian Constitution. Monitorul Oficial, 25 October 1879. ‘From 1879 to 1900, only 85 persons were naturalized, 27 of whom died during the same period. In 1913, besides the veterans of 1877, the total number of naturalizations after the Berlin Congress was 529. This increase was due to the Jews of Dobrudja. In fact, the government decided in 1909 to grant political rights to the residents of that area who had formerly been Turkish subjects’. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 112. While different figures are provided by other authors, there is general agreement that the total of naturalized Jews before 1913, including the veterans of 1877, was lower than 2000 persons.

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The number of anti-Semitic laws and circulars passed by the Romanian governments during this period (from 1879 to 1913) is over two hundred.82 These affected various domains of public life, from the military (aimed at preventing Jews from acquiring citizenship rights through military service) to education, liberal professions such as medicine or law, and traditional occupations, such as trade and handicrafts.83 In the absence of legal instruments for protecting their interests, the Jews were defenceless against ‘the rotating Liberal and Conservative governments [that] vied with each other in the number and seriousness of laws enacted against the Jews’.84 By 1913, Jews could no longer be: officers, clerks or students of military schools, gendarmes, physicians, veterinary doctors, midwives, chemists, pharmacists, nurses, attorneys, tobacco or alcohol sellers, itinerant traders, stockbrokers or members of the journalists’ union.85 At the same time, a policy of expulsions was aimed at eliminating the Jews that had managed to integrate in the extremely closed post-1879 Romanian society. While until 1881 expulsions were still being ordered under the pretext of combating vagrancy, a law on foreigners from 18 April 1881, ‘provided for the expulsion by decree of the Council of Ministers of foreigners who might disturb the peace or threaten national safety (Article 1). The government could expel anyone from the country without reason (Article 2)’.86 This law proved a useful tool for the Romanian government to eliminate reputed Jewish figures that criticized their discriminatory policies.87 At the same time that the various Romanian governments made the modified Article 7 into a veritable weapon for the enforcement of its discriminatory legislation, anti-Semitism acquired considerable ‘prestige’ as a result of its association with some of the most prominent Romanian scholars, politicians and writers. There were basically two lines along which anti-Semitic discourse developed before 1913, related to the two main issues confronting Romania at the time. The first one followed the pattern of the evolution of Romanian nationalism, which, having achieved the objective of independence, at this point ‘became focused on the union of all Romanians into a Greater Romanian state’.88 The second direction followed the concern with socio-economic conditions, and, more specifically, with the ‘“peasant question”, the central problem of Romanian economic and political life after the penetration of capitalism into Romania and its negative impact on the old, feudal social structures’.89 82 83 84 85 86 87

Carol Iancu, Emanciparea evreilor din România (1913–1919) (Bucuresti: Hasefer, 1998), p. 37. Iancu, Jews in Romania, pp. 110–24. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., pp. 110–24. Ibid., p. 125. ‘Among them were M. Gaster, a doctor of philosophy, decorated with the Order Bene Merenti for his books on Romanian language and literature; E. Schwartzfeld, a doctor of laws, editor-in-chief of the Jewish newspaper Fraternitatea, who had fought . . . against individual naturalization; J. Schein, who worked for the Bukarester Freie Presse . . . The expulsions extended from intellectuals to simple craftsmen and workers, to businessmen, rabbis and women’. Ibid. Stephen Fischer-Galaţi, ‘The Legacy of Anti-Semitism’, in Randolph L. Braham, ed. The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 9. Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Anti-Semitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, trans. by Charles Kormos (Oxford: Published for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem by Pergamon Press, 1991), p. 7.

RAUL CARSTOCEA

Following the first argument, the national vision of a united Romania of all Romanians was seen as threatened by Jewish opposition on both local and international levels. In the particular case of Transylvanian Jews, this proved to be right after 1918, as, true to their Hungarian patriotism, they never became reconciled with the loss of Transylvania after Trianon and constantly militated for revisionism, even after Hungary introduced anti-Semitic laws starting with 1920, while Romania granted full emancipation at the same time. On the other hand, ‘the Jew’ was identified as the ‘cause’ of socio-economic problems and held directly responsible for the bleak state of the Romanian economy. At a time when Hungarian Jews were part of the country’s intellectual elite (the ones in this position in Romania can be counted on the fingers of one hand), disproportionately as compared to their four percent proportion of the population, in Romania anti-Semitism benefited from the prestige of prominent scholars, poets, historians and philosophers such as Bogdan PetriceicuHaşdeu, Ioan Slavici, Constantin Stere, Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Conta, Nicolae Iorga and Alexandru C. Cuza, the ‘father’ of Romanian inter-war anti-Semitism. The unfortunate combination of legal discrimination with anti-Semitic discourse in the period following the ‘failed emancipation’ of 1878 caused different Jewish responses, out of which the most important was mass emigration: ‘the total number of emigrants until the Great War was around 90,000, one third of the community’.90 However, a comparison with the demography of Hungarian Jews, enjoying their ‘Golden Age’ at the time, shows that the number of emigrants from the country far surpassed that of immigrants even in Hungary.91 Moreover, we also have to consider that immigration to Hungary was by no means negligible at the time, and we are left to conclude that emigration (mainly to the United States of America) was rather a general trend than prompted by the anti-Semitic measures of the Romanian government. While other Jewish responses included assimilation (predicated and attempted, more or less successfully, especially by rich Jews, community leaders, and the first generation of Jewish intellectuals) and the adherence to socialism as a particular assimilatory path,92 particularization and emigration were the most common consequences of the situation of Jews in Romania prior to World War I. The Jews who did not leave the country, with the exception of a small minority, turned either to Orthodoxy or to Zionism, the latter representing an important force in the struggle for emancipation.93 Once more, this is in stark contrast to the situation in Hungary, a country which, although Theodor Herzl’s birthplace, represented the most obstinate opponent of Zionism until World War I. The primary reason for this, as mentioned before, was the very high degree of Magyar ‘patriotism’ among Hungary’s Jews; the other came from the Orthodox communities, which saw the establishment of a state of Israel before the coming of the Messiah as blasphemy. In short, Hungarian Jewry

90 91 92

Iancu, Emanciparea evreilor din România, p. 37. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 430. For an excellent treatment of this phenomenon in its Russian context, see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 105–203. Iancu, Jews in Romania, pp. 160–72.

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‘stigmatized Zionism as both unpatriotism and irreligiosity’.94 The response of Miksa Szabolcsi, editor of the most influential Jewish weekly, Egyenlőség (Equality), to Herzl deserves to be quoted in full, as it does not only express the attitude of one of the most influential and politically engaged Hungarian Jews towards Zionism, but generally towards the position of the Jews in the country. Describing the position of the Hungarian Jews, I explained to [Herzl] what a folly it would be in Hungary, where the nationalities are the cause of so much trouble, to trot out with a new kind of nationality, the Jewish nationality, which is the basis of political Zionism. Nowhere is the idea of a new nationality as sensitive a matter as among us Hungarians. But quite apart from that, the Jew in Hungary is totally satisfied with being Jewish in terms of his religion (which, in fact, is totally sufficient). With regard to nationality he does not want to be anything else but Hungarian. And if he is of Hungarian nationality, he cannot be of Jewish nationality.95

This response represents the quintessence of the position of the Jewry in Hungary before World War I. In it, we can not merely notice the aforementioned ‘love of the fatherland’ and full identification with the host nation (‘among us Hungarians’), but also an awareness of the important role this had in the ‘nationality question’ Hungary was experiencing. As mentioned earlier, the half-century between emancipation and World War I represented a glorious period for Hungarian Jewry. Statistics indicate that ‘Hungarian Jewry in the thirty years from 1890 to 1920 was a definitely middle- and uppermiddle-class sector within Hungarian society, with strong overrepresentation in the higher-income occupations and low participation in manual labor and other low-income occupations’.96 The transformation of an agricultural economy into a modern, industrial one required intensified middle-class activity, and the Jews stepped in to fill this gap, encouraged by the Hungarian ruling elite. Such an encouragement was possible in a Hungary confronted with significant minority problems, where the Jews were the most (if not the only) loyal minority, one which, as shown above, fully identified with the Magyars. At the same time, Hungarian Jews’ achievements at this time are impressive not only in the economy, but also in the fields of science, literature and the arts, and even sports. Just as the Jews were instrumental in the Hungarian governments’ attempts to block access to key positions to other minorities, it is clear that in Romania this was not the case. In a fairly homogeneous country (before 1918), the Jews’ attempts at establishing themselves as part of the middle class were regarded with suspicion and hostility by the majority of the population, as an attempt not to complement, as in the Hungarian case, but to substitute itself for the ruling elite. Another important factor was the long Romanian history of foreign domination, to which the antiSemites frequently referred when discussing the new, Jewish, ‘domination’, and which found echo among the population.

94 95 96

R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 341. Cited in R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 344. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 438.

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To conclude this comparative account of Hungarian and Romanian Jewry between 1866 and 1913, brief mention must be made of a feature that partially shadowed the bright picture of Hungarian Jewry’s successes. Except for the spread of anti-Semitism, already referred to before, which led Herzl in 1904 to prophesize that ‘before long you will have such an anti-Semitism in Hungary that compared to it our [Austrian anti-Semitism] will seem like nothing’, informal discrimination continued to persist in different forms. This was a period of ‘strictly legal equality, which, however, proved a far cry from social acceptability, let alone acceptance, by the Magyars’.97 In spite of their achievements, or maybe precisely because of them, Jews continued to be refused access to the clubs and societies of the gentry, such as the National Casino.98 Although inter-marriage between Jews and Christians was now perfectly legal and not at all uncommon, tensions over such marriages still persisted, especially in the upper levels of society. Civil service positions most frequently proved inaccessible to Jews, as they were the preferred occupations of Hungarian lesser nobles who lost their fortunes after the abolition of serfdom, and occupational demographics show a steady decline in the fraction of Jewish teachers in higher education from 1900 to 1920.99 Even Jews who gained or bought ennoblement found out with dismay that in the eyes of their Christian peers, that title often amounted to nothing. This helps explain why some Jews, who had achieved immense success in Hungarian society and even managed to secure titles of nobility (or were even born with them, as is the case of Móric Kornfeld), converted to Christianity afterwards. Baron Lajos Hatvany, himself a converted Jew, expressed this feeling in his semi-autobiographical novel significantly entitled Urak és Emberek (Gentlemen and Men). Do you think that I don’t love this? That I would not like to say, ‘This is my home, this is my city, this is my country, wouldn’t I? [. . .] As you say, ‘This is my homeland’. But look, what can I do when it is forbidden, it is impossible, because they talk to me as to a dog, and don’t let me love it . . .100

Such an expression of bitterness from one of the Jews who ‘had it all’, including a title, points out that legal emancipation and the Magyar assimilationist policies stopped short of the complete integration of Jews in Hungarian society. As Raphael Patai remarks, the ‘common denominator everywhere was the sense of ‘otherness’ the Christian Magyars felt toward the Jews’.101 It is the persistence of this ‘otherness’ that needs to be addressed in the conclusion of this essay.

Conclusion — otherness, the blind spot of reason We have examined the history of Jewish emancipation and of the rise of anti-Semitism in two countries that, in all issues concerning their Jewish population, could not be

97 98 99 100 101

Cited in R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, pp. 344, 442. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 375. Ibid., pp. 389, 435. Lajos Hatvany, Urak és Emberek, cited in R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 376. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 442.

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more dissimilar. The case of Romania argues against the notions that Jewish emancipation and anti-Semitism are, in József Patai’s words, ‘twin brothers’, and that the rise of anti-Semitism is to be viewed simply as a reaction to emancipation. It was so in Hungary, where Raphael Patai believed ‘that anti-Semitism was a quasi-natural phenomenon, fed by the resentment of Christian Hungarians at Jewish successes in all areas of Hungarian economy and culture, and by the incessant Jewish harping on the great value of their contribution’.102 But in Romania, Iancu’s thesis, that ‘from 1866 to 1919, anti-Semitism was a genuine state institution in Romania, the basis of its socio-political system, propagated from top to bottom by governments aiming at the total ruin of a working population whose misfortune was not to have had Dacians as ancestors, and to follow the Orthodox Christian religion’,103 is not so radical as it appears to be. Furthermore, this paper has hopefully shown that an analysis of Jewish emancipation or the rise of anti-Semitism cannot be separated from a careful consideration of the historical conditions that often decisively influenced these developments. In this particular context, the nation-building projects that both Hungary and Romania embarked upon in the second half of the nineteenth century appear to offer interesting insights into the different paths to Jewish emancipation. To the very few that could still answer the question regarding the distinction between Hungary and Romania in terms of their responses to emancipation by appealing to things such as ‘national character’, the Holocaust in both countries would provide irrefutable evidence to the contrary. While the early emancipated Hungarian Jewry was almost completely destroyed, more than half of Romania’s Jews survived, and, moreover, ‘those who lived through World War II came mainly from the Old Kingdom (that is, from within the pre-World War I borders of Romania)’.104 Such apparent paradoxes represent the very premise for continued enquiry into the nature of such phenomena as anti-Semitism and their constant reference to the history of the countries in which they took place. The position of the Jews in different modernizing contexts could lead, as we have seen, to radically different responses. The ideological and discursive arsenal of anti-Semites, on the other hand, shows striking similarity throughout Europe. The references to the ‘Judaization’ of the country, to ‘Jewish invasion’, to ‘exploitation and domination’ are omnipresent from Germany to Hungary and Romania. The use of ‘subjective’ statistics to show a much higher number of Jews than the actual one is also so common among antiSemites that we did not even refer to it, although it was present both in Hungary and Romania.

102 103 104

R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 455. Iancu, Jews in Romania, p. 10. Oldson, A Providential Anti-Semitism, p. 4. Unlike in neighbouring countries, ‘about half of Romania’s eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews survived, a great number of whom — several hundred thousand — found their way to Israel’. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 172. This situation is in stark contrast with the one in Hungary, where more than eighty percent of the Jews died during the Holocaust. ‘According to the 1941 census, the number of Jews in Hungary (including the territories regained by grace of the Germans) was 725,000. . . . The total losses of Hungarian Jewry in the period 1941–45 were 680,000, leaving 139,000 who survived in Hungary (119,000 in Budapest and 20,000 in labor service in Hungarian territory’. R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 590.

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However, as we have already pointed out, the main common element in both countries, in spite of their striking differences, is the insistence on the distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Jews in the debates surrounding emancipation. This deserves more attention, for what was at stake in this case was much more than numbers. Christians and Jews alike pointed to a qualitative distinction between these Jews, a distinction expressed precisely in terms of the ‘otherness’ to which we referred earlier. Under pressure from the Great Powers to emancipate the Jews, Romanian authorities replied emphasizing the difference between ‘the Jews of Paris’, educated and assimilated, and their ‘Galician’ Jews. Similarly, ‘not merely rumor but fact was that many Hungarian Jewish leaders stressed the distinction between Magyar and Galician Jews, took an emphatically negative attitude toward the Galicians, and used the term Galizianer as an epithet of contempt’.105 In our perspective, it is precisely this ‘otherness’ that should be identified as the common denominator of anti-Semitism, and of prejudice in general, rather than the relationship to emancipation. Real or merely imagined, it defies logical explanation, being often described in terms of a ‘gut reaction’.106 However, such terms are useless for scientific analysis, and the nature of prejudice has indeed been given considerable attention. It appears to start from a process of generalization. As József Patai, with his characteristic lucidity, observed, ‘it has been the tragic fate of Jewry for millennia that everywhere people generalized and still generalize to its detriment’.107 Yet, as psychologists note, ‘there is no theoretical or empirical reason to assume that forming generalizations about ethnic groups is radically different from forming generalizations about other categories or objects’.108 And categorization is necessary for the rational ordering of the world — to cite Pierre Bourdieu, ‘to bring order is to bring division, to divide the universe into opposing entities’.109 Moreover, if we are inclined to pursue these divisions, as well as the ‘irrational’ suspicion and opposition to ‘otherness’ frequently invoked in this paper, to a more theoretical understanding, psychoanalytic theory, as the one branch of psychology dedicated primarily to the study of the unconscious, might have some answers. According to psychoanalysis (but having roots in the political philosophy of the Enlightenment), the perpetuation of these divisions, the perennial character of conflict and antagonism, are based on the initial antagonism positing reason, as an organizing principle, against and above the instinctual basis of the human being.110 As such, 105

106 107 108

109

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R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 453. Also, on the previous page, Patai identifies the main features that distinguished the ‘Galician’ Jews: ‘Yiddish-speaking, kaftan-clad, bearded, sidelocked Jews — conspicuously foreign in appearance’. Ibid., p. 442. József Patai, article in Mult és Jövő, August 1915, cited in Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 450. Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 144. He continues: ‘The limit produces difference and the different things “by an arbitrary institution”, as Leibniz put it’ (italics added). Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p. 210. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, trans. by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ‘Kant interprets the myth [of the fall] less traditionally, as the origin not of a sin but of ‘misology’ (the hatred of reason). Eating the new fruit was not a crime but an act of liberation. It was ‘decried’ as a crime because people held it responsible for the new sufferings it brought on them’. Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 236.

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the perceived external otherness is nothing more than a symbolization of our own negativity, of that which escapes us and yet ‘always returns to the same place’. Through a structural analogy with the individual, ideology can thus be understood as ‘social fantasy’, ‘basically a scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void’.111 It is on this screen that a society’s problems are synthesized in the enemy image of ‘the Jew’, singled out because of his ‘otherness’ (which in turn, is indicative exactly of what we lack, and thus of our own lack itself). Thus, ‘far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the “Jew” is a point at which social negativity as such assumes positive existence’.112 And, not to conclude as Lajos Kossuth did in 1848, that ‘prejudice exists, and against its reality, as the poet said, “even the gods fight in vain”’,113 perhaps the ultimate challenge against oppression probably lies in ‘our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the “nonexistence of the Other”, of tarrying with the negative’.114

111 112 113 114

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1998), p. 126. Ibid., p. 127. Cited in R. Patai, The Jews of Hungary, p. 277. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 237.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 113–126

Transitions in School Funding: The Case of Estonia Rosalind Levacˇic´1 Institute of Education, London, UK

This article traces changes in school financing policy in Estonia since independence in 1991. Estonia, in common with many other transition states, has reformed its school finance system since the collapse of communism, replacing a centralized system run by regional administrative units of central government with per pupil grants for elected local governments. These reforms were driven by political decentralization, which revived numerous small units of local government. As these municipalities were charged with responsibility for general education, a new method of determining education grants to support education expenditures was required. In the course of the 1990s, the earlier method of basing grants mainly on historical expenditure was replaced by determining municipal education grants in relation to the number of pupils. This funding method puts pressure on local governments to organize an efficient school network by adjusting the number of schools, classes, and teachers in line with the number of students. However, as pupil numbers plummeted, opposition grew to school closures which are blamed for exacerbating rural depopulation. In response to these political pressures per pupil funding was modified in 2008 so that the funding method discriminates in favour of high cost small schools in rural communities.

Introduction A number of transition states have reformed their school finance systems by replacing the communist period method of funding based on rules for allocating staff and

Emeritus Professor of Economics and Finance of Education. The article is based on research undertaken in Estonia in 2007 which included visits to municipalities and schools. I would like to thank Tatiana Kilo of the International Relations Department of the Ministry of Education and Research for organizing my study visit and Andrus Jorge, for his unstinting assistance with information on funding formulae. I would also like to thank everyone with whom I discussed education and who gave so generously of their time to explain the Estonian school funding system to me and show me round their schools. All mistakes, errors of interpretation, and judgements made are my responsibility.

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administered by regional administrative units of central government with per capita grants for schools which are managed by elected local governments. Estonia is one such example. Here, since independence in 1991, the centralized school financing system of the Soviet era was changed to a decentralized one, mirroring the revival of numerous small municipalities which were charged with responsibility for general education. This article examines how school funding policy in Estonia has evolved over the transition years. In doing this the key criteria of efficiency, equity, and transparency which are standard ones in evaluating the performance of school finance systems are applied.2 The school finance reforms in Estonia have consistently been driven by political decentralization. Initially the reformed school finance system was more strongly efficiency oriented in following the market principle of funding municipalities on a per pupil basis. Subsequently, in the face of declining pupil numbers and fears of rural depopulation being exacerbated by school closures, per pupil funding was modified in 2008 so that funding discriminates in favour of small schools in rural communities.

Background to the general education system in Estonia After independence in 1991, Estonia experienced rapid political and economic change. The first post-independence government was liberal, pro-market, and keen to foster decentralization and so revived pre-war municipalities as units of local government.3 Though Estonia has a population of 1.34 million, it had in 2006 as many as 227 municipalities. Almost 70 per cent of the population live in urban municipalities, but over per cent of municipalities are rural. Around half have less than 2000 residents, with the smallest having only 70 residents. In contrast, the average size of an urban municipality is just over 26,000, with the largest — Tallinn — having a population of 396,000. The structure of local government and the consequent political clout of the rural areas are important for education because the Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools (BSUSS) assigned responsibility for general education to local governments.4 The ownership of the vast majority of public schools was transferred to municipalities, while a small group of sixty-four (in 2006) ‘state’ schools — half of which are special schools and the rest mainly vocational schools — remained with central government. There is also a small private sector of thirty or so schools. The BSUSS Act specifies that education provision by municipalities includes day time schooling, evening adult classes, and distance education. A municipality applies for an education licence to the Ministry of Education and Research (MER) in order to establish a school, which has to conform to the national curriculum. 2

Kenneth Ross and Rosalind Levacˇic´, Needs Based Resource Allocation in Education via Formula Funding of School (Paris: International Institute of Educational Planning, 1999). Sander Põllumäe, ‘Rethinking the Sub-municipal Level of Local Government’, Department of Government Summer School “Public Management Reform” (Tallinn: Tallinn University of Educational Sciences, 2002) <http://www.unpan.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/NISPAcee/UNPAN007842.pdf> [accessed 14.12.2007] The BSUSS Act has been modified several times: the latest version dates from 2005. Estonian State Chancellery, Basic Schools and Upper Secondary Schools Act (1993) <http://www.legaltext.ee/text/en/X30049K9.htm> [accessed 12 December 2007]

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The Estonian education system provides nine years of compulsory eduction, starting at the age of seven, followed by grades 10 to 12 which are optional.5 The main types of public school are primary schools catering for grades 1 to 6, basic schools for grades 1–9, and upper secondary schools for grades 10 to 12, which are divided into gymnasiums for academic courses (run by municipalities) and vocational schools. In 2006 in the municipal sector there were 85 primary schools, 264 basic, and 236 secondary schools. General education for grades 1 to 12 must be provided free of charge in the public sector. The main language of instruction in a municipal school is decided by the local council.6 This is an important issue as only 69 per cent of the population is ethnic Estonian: 26 per cent is Russian, while the remainder consists of many other ethnic groups.7 Since independence there have been a series of curriculum reforms, including a new state-wide system of external assessment of pupils at the end of grade 9 and grade 12. The birth rate in Estonia has fallen drastically. From 1989, when data were collected, the birth rate to 2001 fell by over 50 per cent, since when it has began to rise slightly. The number of pupils enrolled in schools peaked at 219,000 in 1990 from which level it had fallen by 25 per cent by 2006/7.8 This demographic decline continues to pose severe structural adjustment problems for the school network.

Transition from the Soviet era school funding system 1989–1997 During the Soviet period general education was de-concentrated and administered by fifteen centrally appointed regional governments, known as counties, to which the Ministry of Education channelled both revenue and capital funding for general education. The county distributed revenue funding to schools in its area using a centrally determined set of rules (or norms) for calculating how many teachers were required to teach a given number of pupils in a grade as determined by regulations regarding the number of lessons per subject per grade in the national curriculum. Further norms were used to allocate each school’s complement of staffing posts (i.e. the range of posts from directors, laboratory assistants to cleaners) depending on the number of classes or numbers of pupils within specified ranges. Over time this system became ‘historical funding’ i.e. basing this year’s funding on the number of employees already in post last year and not adjusting this in line with falling enrolments. Between 1989 and 1993 the current system of single tier local authorities emerged. The Local Self-government Foundation Act of 1989 re-established a local government system in Estonia and the first democratic post-war municipal elections were held in the same year. From 1989 to 1993 the first tier of the Estonian local government consisted of rural communities, boroughs, and towns, while the counties remained as the second tier. When the constitution was adopted in June 1992, 90 per cent of 5 6 7

OECD, Reviews of National Policies for Education: Estonia (Paris: OECD, 2001). The language of instruction is that used in 60 per cent of teaching. Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Estonia Today: Population by Nationality: Fact Sheet (Tallinn: Press and Information Department, Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2006) <http://www.vm.ee> [accessed 10 December 2007] From data supplied by Ministry of Education and Research.

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Estonian’s rural municipalities, boroughs, and towns were granted the status of selfgovernments. In 1993 the State Assembly approved the creation of the current one-tier local government system under the Local Self-government Organization Act. The municipalities as a whole obtain almost 60 per cent of their revenues from their own sources — mainly consisting of a share of locally collected taxes, fees, and charges. Forty per cent of revenue expenditure is funded from central government grants, almost half of which are for education. The initial response of many municipalities to their new responsibilities for general education was to open more schools, mainly primary schools, as they were able to utilize buildings that had been schools in villages before World War II. The number of schools rose from around 620 in 1989 to 740 in 1995, even though pupil numbers were falling, especially in the early primary years. Consequently costs per pupil were rising. The requirement for the state to provide grants to owners of schools (both municipal and private) towards defraying the costs of educational provision was clarified in the BSUSS Act. Chapter 8 of the Act stated that a school shall have its own budget and its revenue comprises allocations from the municipality budget and the state budget, as well as from any private sources. The costs of a municipal school must be met by the municipality, as owners of the school. Annual grants for education should be based on the number of pupils and cover teacher salaries including social taxes, in-service training of teachers, and text books. Private schools are also entitled to the same per pupil current funding as the municipality schools in the municipality in which they are located. The BSUSS Act therefore required a fundamental change in how the newly assigned municipal schools were funded. The government in power in 1993 was led by politicians of a neo-liberal persuasion, to whom per pupil funding of general education appealed for a number of reasons. It would create competition within the public schools sector, and between public and private schools, whose growth would be encouraged by a per pupil state subsidy. There was, in addition, a desire to promote internal efficiency by inducing municipalities to reduce the number of schools at a time when pupil numbers were falling rapidly. The first attempt at per pupil funding was made in 1994. The Ministry of Education and Research (MER) took the total budget for general education for each county, which was still determined as in Soviet times, and divided it by the number of pupils in the county to derive a per pupil amount per county. Thus there were fifteen per pupil amounts — one for each county. The MER channelled the money to the counties, which continued to distribute resources to schools using the Soviet era norms. This system was only per pupil in name as nothing had really changed.

Formula funding of schools 1997–2008 In 1995 a new minister of education decided that a genuine per pupil funding system should be devised for the determination of education grants to municipalities and private school owners. A working group of about eight, consisting of officials from MER and the Ministry of Finance and representatives of municipalities, was set up to work out a formula which was considered by a bigger steering group of around sixty representing counties, municipalities, the teacher unions, and school level

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representatives. After much discussion a formula was devised for implementation in 1997, but due to a change in government the formula was not implemented until September 1998. The formula did not apply to state schools which continue to be funded directly by MER. This formula for determining municipal education grant remained essentially unchanged, apart from including more items of expenditure, until 2008, when a fundamentally revised ‘new formula’ replaced the ‘old formula’. The municipalities’ grant for education is a categorical grant — it must be spent on education. Central government makes explicit which types of expenditure the grant for general education is intended to support. Initially, the formula allocated money only for teachers’ salaries (including social taxes) and textbooks. In 2003 small grants for academic subjects and extra-curricular activities were added. A per pupil allocation for capital expenditure (investment) was introduced in 2005 and in 2007 a grant for workbooks was included as well. In addition, municipalities received a contribution from the state budget for providing school lunches as required by law for pupils in grades 1 to 9. Municipalities are expected to pay for schools’ operational costs and non-teaching staff entirely out of their own budgets. Apart from the subsidy for the ingredients of school lunches, municipalities are not obliged to spend the sub-grants, into which total education grant is subdivided, in exactly the same amounts as they are calculated by the formula for distribution purposes. The ‘old formula’, while it allocated on a per pupil basis, took some account of differences in municipalities’ cost per pupil by differentiating the grant in relation to municipalities’ size and location. Rural municipalities with over 500 pupils were given a weight of one. In 2007 for example, such a municipality received for each pupil in regular day time classes 13,670 Estonian Krona (EEK) for teacher salaries, 282 EEK for textbooks, 458 EEK for workbooks, and 1,385 EEK for investment (capital expenditure) i.e. 15795 EEK in total per pupil — regardless of the grade in which the pupil was enrolled. Urban municipalities received a lower weighting and smaller rural municipalities a higher weighting. There were in all eight weights ranging from 0.89 to 1.5 for eight municipal groupings. In addition, specific islands had individual weights added of between 0.7 and 1.2. Part time evening class students were weighted less than one and pupils with special needs more than one. The municipal weights were decided from an analysis of the actual past expenditures of municipalities and selected so that a municipality with a weight of one could fund the costs of a having fifteen pupils per teacher. In calculating the allocation for a municipality, the number of regular day-time pupils was multiplied by the per pupil amount, and the number of evening and distance students by 0.8 times the per pupil amount. Each amount was then weighted by the municipality’s coefficient to obtain the total funding received for these categories of pupil. The allocations for pupils in special classes and for pupils who receive various forms of special provision were obtained by multiplying the number of pupils in each category by the weight for that category and then multiplying by the per pupil amount for a regular pupil. All municipalities received the same per pupil allocations for these categories of special needs pupils as the municipal weights were not applied to these allocations. Until 2000, the funding went from MER to the education departments of the counties, rather than directly to municipalities. Each county received the total allocations by formula for the municipalities within its territory and continued in the main

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to distribute this funding to the schools using the Soviet era norms for working out teaching costs. However, from 2001 the Ministry of Finance (MoF) sent the funding directly to the municipalities, who at this point became fully exposed to the link between pupil numbers and funding, and took full responsibility for determining their schools’ budgets, constrained by the need to meet their legal obligations. Decisions about both the structure of the school funding formula (e.g. the weights) and the amount to be distributed result from negotiations between the MER, MoF, and the two associations representing the municipalities, the Association of Estonian Cities and the Association of Municipalities of Estonia (for rural local governments). The annual negotiations for some years focused mainly on the determination of the overall amount. Dissatisfaction emerged amongst some political interests about how the ‘old formula’ was operating. From 2003 to 2007, as well as the annual negotiations, pro-longed discussions took place on the development of a revised formula, which was finally introduced in 2008. The ‘new’ formula differs from the ‘old’ mainly in allocating additional money to small municipalities to support them in maintaining small schools.

The efﬁciency and equity of school funding under the ‘old formula’ In assessing the functioning of the ‘old formula’ one needs to consider its effects in terms of efficiency and equity. The per pupil formula was intended to promote efficiency in the school network by encouraging municpalities to reduce per pupil costs by closing small schools and reorganizing classes so that the pupil-teacher ratio was raised — or at least was not as low as it would have been without such measures. Per capita funding, unlike the Soviet norms for inputs of staff and other resources, ensures that if municipalities become more efficient by reducing the number of staff per pupil they do not lose any funding, unlike the Soviet era funding system which funded largely in relation to the number of staff in post. The argument in favour of closing small schools is two fold. First, the quality of education is likely to be lower in small schools because there are few children of the same age to interact with each other in class, facilities may be poor due to lack of money to pay for maintaining and equiping the buildings and class rooms, and it is difficult to attract teachers to rural areas. Money is saved by closing small schools and classes because expenditure on teachers and buildings is reduced, and the costs of providing pupils with transport to a larger school are consisderably less. The money so saved can used for improving facilities in those schools that remain open. Despite these arguments, closing village schools is strongly opposed in Estonia — as in other countries — on the grounds that the school is the ‘heart of village life’ and without a school the village gradually loses its younger people and eventually dies. As the Estonian political system values self-determination by municipalities, this places considerable limitations on central government powers to require efficiency from local governments. A municipality is free to decide to spend money on maintaining costly small schools or on lavish new school premises and is held accountable for such expenditures by the local electorate and not the Ministry of Finance. Resource allocations that are internally efficient using the criteria of cost per pupil for a given quality of education, may well be different from allocations that are chosen by

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collective local preferences for a wider range of social objectives. Given the value placed in Estonia on the freedom of local governments to determine their own priorities and the relative weakness of central governments formed from coaltions of parties, the absence of a strong drive from central government to improve the internal efficiency of the education system is understandable, especially in a period when the total demand of the schooling system on the public purse had been declining due to the falling number of children and rising public revenues. The ‘old’ formula succeeded to some extent in forcing municipalities to reduce per pupil costs by closing schools. From a peak of 724 public schools in 1998, the number had fallen to 585 by 2006, the vast majority closed being primary schools. Despite these closures the ratio of pupils to teachers declined from 13.2 in 1998 to 11.1 in 2006 and the average size of school continued to fall. By 2006 40 per cent of schools had 100 or fewer pupils and the percentage of schools with over 1000 pupils had halved. From an efficiency perspective the characteristic of a per pupil formula, which is that it takes no account of the number of schools within a municipality or of the number of classes within schools, is desirable since it encourages municipalities to rationalize their school network and schools to organize efficient sized classes. However, to be horizontally equitable a school funding formula should not apply the same per pupil funding to all municipalities but reflect differences in municipalities’ costs per pupil that are due to structural factors beyond the control of the municipality. So, for example, if two municipalities with the same number of pupils each have three schools, but municipality A is sparsely populated and has three villages two hours travel time apart, while municipality B is quite densely populated and could operate with one school, then the formula should allocate more funding to municipality A according to its population density and poor road communications. The ‘old’ funding formula did not contain indicators of population density or of travel times, but relied only on municipal pupil numbers and the city/rural/island distinction for differentiating per pupil allocations to reflect differences in structural costs. A further issue is how equitable the ‘old’ formula was in the distribution of the financial burden of funding education between the different municipalities. All municipalities spend in excess of their grant for education, as they have to fund the operating costs of schools (non-teaching staff and school buildings maintenance and operations), but they have different capacities to generate their own revenues from local taxes, fees, and charges. The old formula did not include any element to offset inequality in the distribution of local govenment tax revenues per pupil. Fiscal equalization (of the financial resources of municipalities) is undertaken by a separate general grant, which equalizes 90 per cent of the difference between tax revenues and the assumed costs of the municipality’s local service responsibilities. There are a few very affluent municipalities whose tax revenues per resident after equalization are in excess of the estimation of their need to spend on local services. For the median municipality, education expenditure made up around half of its total spending on local services in 2005 though there was a considerable range in this proportion. Rich rural municipalities tended to devote a lower proportion of their total spending to education. There are two types of horizontal equity to consider: the amount spent per pupil by the different municipalities and the burden of education spending on residents.

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TABLE 1 Muncipalities’ education expenditure per pupil and ﬁscal burden on residents in 2005 Municipality by type

Number of municipalities

Average educational expenditure per pupil (EEK)

Municipality contribution to education per resident (EEK) Average (minimum, maximum)

Urban: poor

28,400

8,700 (6,050 to 12,550)

Urban: average

30,880

8,900 (6,850 to 10,730)

Urban: rich

32,530

10,600 (9,870 to 11,130)

Rural: poor

104

48,930

8,700 (5,650 to 20,320)

Rural: average

48,340

9,200 (6,250 to 27,430)

Rural: rich

73,130

12,800 (7,500 to 24,230)

Source: Eesti Statistika website. The classiﬁcation of municpalities follows that used by Eesti Statistika.

The amount a municipality spends per pupil depends on its structural costs — if it has a sparsely scattered population and/or poor transport links it cannot avoid having small schools, which cost more per pupil than larger schools. But expenditure per pupil also depends on local electors’ preferences for public spending and services. There is only an unequal fiscal burden to the extent that residents have to pay more per capita for education because of high structural costs, not because they prefer to have smaller classes or better equipped schools. Table 1 shows average spending per pupil in urban and rural municipalities differentiated by revenue levels. The data are from Eesti Statistika, which classifies municipalities into three groups — rich, average or poor according to their tax revenue per capita.9 From the last column of Table 1 it can be seen that the average contribution per resident to education was the same in poor urban and poor rural municipalities despite spending per pupil being higher in rural municipalities. It was only slightly higher in average revenue rural municipalities than urban. So one can conclude that on the whole the fiscal burden was equally distributed, but that there were notable exceptions, with the residents of some poor and average income rural municipalities paying considerably more per capita for education. Further examination of the data shows that these municipalities had very small schools. Another aspect of horizontal equity is expenditure per pupil. The criterion of horizontal equity for the distribution of expenditure is that pupils who have equivalent needs should be funded the same amount. The definition hinges on how ‘equivalent needs’ are defined. Here horizontal equity is restricted to ‘regular pupils’ i.e. those without special educational needs. Equivalence must also take account of structural cost differences. Only differences in expenditure per pupil which are due to differences in the structural costs of providing education in the local government area are consistent with horizontal equity.10 The achievement of horizontal equity in 9

In 2006 poor municipalities had 4100 EEK tax revenue per resident, average income municipalities 4100–6000 EEK and rich municipalities over 6000 EEK. In general structural cost differences are defined those that are due to factors that the local government cannot control, such as small school and class size due to low population density, poor transport communications, climate and the divergence of the prices of local educational inputs from the national average.

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educational expenditure per pupil nationally is incompatible with the political objective of local self-determination of spending levels on education (and other services) when localities have differing preferences for both the amount of pubic spending compared to private spending and different preferences for the distribution of public spending between the various local services. The data in Table 1 indicate that education expenditure per pupil was higher for the more affluent municipalities, especially for rich rural ones. Statistical regression analysis showed a positive association between higher per capita tax revenues and education spending per pupil within both the urban and rural groups of authorities. Thus, even after for controlling for the amount of education grant, the school finance system overall was not horizontally equitable in 2005: the amount spend on a pupil’s education, taking account of whether the muncipality was urban or rural, depended on local tax revenues per capita. Richer municipalities tended to spend more per pupil. One of the main complaints against the ‘old’ formula was that it was not sufficiently sensitive to the expenditure needs of some municipalities and schools. The weights in the formula were based on the size of municipality and, in a few cases on island locations, and this did not sufficiently take into account differences in per pupil costs due to difference in the actual size of schools and in the distribution of pupils between schools and between grades within the schools. Municipalities also objected that the same amount was allocated for pupils of all ages, although older pupils cost more to teach as they have more class periods a week. Another complaint was that the number of pupils in class may too small to generate sufficient state funding to cover the costs of the teacher time required by the national curriculum. A class may be formed in grade 1 with a sufficient number of pupils to generate funding to cover their teaching costs but if the number of pupils declines over time teaching costs for the class remain the same though the funding has declined. Another a major concern for local governments is affording the cost of teacher salaries. As stipulated in the BSUSS Act,11 teacher salaries are determined in a twostage process — a basic minimum set nationally and rates at or above the national basic level, which are set by each municipality. However, there is no fixed link between increases in teachers’ basic pay and the increase in the grant total, which is a cause for complaint by municipalities. For example, in 2007, teachers’ basic salary increased 18 per cent, while the total education grant increased by 15.7 per cent12 on average, though some municipalities got considerably less than this increase. A particularly crucial concern was that per pupil funding threatened the financial viability of small schools during a period of marked demographic decline. Despite reservations about the quality of education in small rural schools, they remain popular with many rural parents and several political parties support the maintenance of small schools. Municipalities are able to determine the closure and amalgamation of schools, but are reluctant to close uneconomic schools mainly because of parental opposition rather than objections from teachers, given that there is a teacher shortage,

11 12

The BSUSS Act is periodically revised. Interview at MER.

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particularly in rural areas. Another constraint on closing schools is the difficult legal process of dismissing teachers. In Estonia, local governments are relatively strongly placed vis-à-vis central governments. These are invariably coalition governments and change quite frequently: consequently ministers of education do not stay in office for prolonged periods. The two municipal associations send four representatives each to the Local Government Co-operation Assembly, which organizes how the municipalities negotiate with the government. Thus the rural areas, though representing 30 per cent of the population, have 50 per cent of the votes in this Assembly. Its purpose is to present a united local government front to central government, so that it cannot exploit any conflicts of interest between cities and the countryside. In fact, there appears to be little urban resentment over high subsidies for rural education. This may well reflect the relatively recent emigration from the countryside of most urban dwellers and the close connections between urban and rural areas in a small, compact country.

The new funding formula: 2008 In response to municipal dissatisfaction with the ‘old’ formula discussions about changes started in 2003. The funding formula working party included representatives from the assocations of rural and city municipalities as well as from the MER and MoF. The length of time revisions were under discussion reflects the difficulty of reaching agreement between the stakeholders and the changing coalition of parties in central government about an alternative formula. The proposals were consulted upon extensively and finally the ‘new’ formula was introduced in January 2008.13 This marked a significant change in funding policy as the new formula is designed to protect all but the very smallest schools in the smaller municipalities. For larger municipalities the new formula is very similar to the old one, but for municipalites which have 1,600 or fewer pupils in either of the major language categories — Estonian and Russian — the new formula is much more favourable. These municipalites are not funded on a per pupil basis but according to the number of classes that the formula assumes that each school in the municipality needs to organize, given the number of pupils in in each grade, treating Estonian and Russian medium pupils separately if they are taught in separeate classes. The municipalites with more than 1600 pupils in a language medium are funded per pupil for these pupils. Thus a municpality which has 2000 Estonian pupils and 500 Russian pupils is funded per pupil for Estonians and according to the teaching costs of the assumed number of Russian classes needed in its schools. The municipalities and the schools are free to organize a different number of classes but funding remains based on the assumed number of classes needed, not on the actual number created. By determing the number of classes needed in relation to the number of pupils in each grade, the government has made explicit the minimum size of school it considers should be maintained, while municpalities can sustain even smaller schools if they choose to allocate additional funds to support teaching costs.

Under government regulation no. 44 February 7 2008 Chapter II.

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The new formula is an example of an activity-led funding model as it provides funding for the calculated teaching costs per pupil within grade ranges in classes of assumed size, dependent on required number of lessons per week and an assumed average teaching load per teacher.14 Because the formula is activity-led, any changes in government policy which affect teaching costs, such as the prescribed numbers of lessons per week, increases in teachers’ basic salaries, or changes in maximum class size are directly mirrored in the grant allocations. The new formula reflects a government commitment to reduce maximum class size to twenty-four and sustain small schools with less thirty-four pupils per grade in stages I (grades 1–3), II (grades 4–6) and III (grades 7–9) but not in the upper secondary grades. The new formula is deliberately biased to provide additional funding for schools with very few pupils in the primary grades when the number of pupils in either language medium in the municipality is below 1600. A primary school with as few as two pupils per grade (twelve in all) is funded to run two mixed grade classes. The new formula also also explicitly funds minority language classes which the old formula did not. Muncipalities with fewer than 1600 Russian pupils and small numbers of these pupils per grade receive sufficient funding for organizing mixed classes of three grades with as few as six Russian medium pupils. The old formula funded just on the number of pupils regardless of lanuage medium.

Comparison of the old and new formulae The old formula provided good efficiency incentives for municipalities because it was purely per pupil. Therefore, municipalities were given incentives to reduce unit costs through amalgamating or closing schools and increasing class size (up to the maximum size). The absence of any difference in the weights for pupils in different grade ranges to reflect differences in costs due to different numbers of lessons per week was weakness of this formula as it penalized municipalities with a higher than average proportion of pupils in grades 7 to 12 which have higher per pupil teaching costs. The new formula has rectified this problem. In contrast, the new formula is per pupil only for those muncipalities with more than 1600 Estonian or Russian pupils. For smaller municpalities the funding received depends the number schools run by the municipality as well as on the number of pupils and how they are distributed between schools. This blunts the incentive to close schools. For example a municipality with twenty pupils per grade in stage I (sixty pupils in all) would get a state grant for teaching costs of 1,159,842 EEK if the pupils are enrolled in two schools (assuming ten pupils per grade in each school) and 682,260 EEK if the pupils are enrolled in one school.15 The new formula creates discontinuities in funding per pupil at key transition points when the number of pupils in a grade increase by one and triggers off additional funding for an extra class. There are ranges of pupil numbers over which an additional pupil results in lower funding per

Ibtisam Abu-Duhou, ‘Issues in Funding Basic Allocations Per Pupil by Grade Level: Activity Led Funding’ in Needs Based Resource Allocation in Education via Formula Funding of Schools, ed. by Kenneth Ross and Rosalind Levacˇic´ (Paris: International Institute of Educational Planning, 1999). This assumes the same cash amounts per pupil allocated in 2008.

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pupil. Thus the new formula has an element of moral hazard as it creates incentives for school directors and municipalities to organize pupils in stages I to III into classes in such a way as to maximize the funding per pupil. The designers of the new formula consider that it creates better efficiency incentives than the old formula because it makes explicit the minumum number of pupils in each stage of schooling for which central gvoernment funds teaching costs. The old, purely per pupil formula did not inform municipalities about the relationship between numbers of pupils per class and teaching costs, and did not give clear signals about the size of classes below which the municipality would have to fund teaching costs above those financed from the state grant. The new formula has actually shifted resources towards urban muncipalities as they have received an 18.2 per cent increase in state education grant compared to 11.6 per cent extra for rural municipalities.16 It was estimated that around 20 per cent of schools with pupils in grades 7 to 12 have teaching costs which exceed those assumed in the new formula and this gives municaplities an incentive to rationalize. It is argued that municipalities will not wish to run schools with stage I and II grades with less than six pupils per grade as such schools would have to operate with classes combing three grades unless the municipality provided additional funding. In the MoF view, faced with the alternative of mixed-grade small classes or amalgamating schools and transporting children to a school with single grade classes, parents and municipalities will prefer the latter except where travel times are too long. Both the old and new formula do not take into account differences in municipalities’ own revenues per resident. However, the new formula reduces the fiscal burden on residents in small rural municipalities that are currently making a relatively high contribution from own revenues per inhabitant to maintaining a high cost school network and in this sense is more equitable. Every municipality will be funded equally for having schools of equivalent size with the same numbers of pupils per grade. Therefore, advocates of the new formula argue that it is more equitable than the old one. However, the new formula, like the old one, takes no account of whether a high cost school network is forced upon a municipality by high structural costs per pupil or is due to local choice to maintain a costly school network for other social benefits. The ‘old’ formula was more transparent than the new one as it contained just eight municipal weights plus a few additional ones for island municipalities. It was easy to understand why a municipality received the size of grant it did. The new formula is much more complex and it is difficult to understand without some effort spent studying its provisions and in this way is less transparent.

Conclusion In Estonia, the prime motivation for introducing per pupil funding of general education was political decentralization and the assignment of general education as a local government responsibility. Many small municipalities had been created and it is acknowledged that these are too small to be efficient administrative units for 16

Communication from MoF February 2008.

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education, though they are valued by their communities as organs for local selfdetermination. Political decentralization required changes in the school finance system and these evolved over a number of years. In 1998 a per pupil formula was introduced in order to improve the efficiency of the school network which had declined post independence after the recently formed municipalities re-opened pre-war schools. The higher per pupil costs of rural municipalities was reflected in the ‘old’ formula by eight weights which varied the per pupil allocation according to the number of pupils in the municipality and island locations. Only in 2001, when the education grant was allocated directly to municipalities, did per pupil funding begin to exert strong financial pressure on municipalities with a high cost school network relative to their per pupil grant. During a period of severe demographic decline, the ‘old’ formula exerted pressure on municipalities to improve the efficiency of their school network by closing small schools and organizing larger classes. Thus it prevented a greater decline in internal efficiency than would otherwise have occurred. The fiscal burden on residents of the funding system under the ‘old’ formula was in the main relatively equitable as expenditure per resident was on average very similar in urban and rural municipalities of poor and average tax revenues per inhabitant. There were exceptions: a few poor municipalities had very high educational contributions per inhabitant. A commonly held view was that the ‘old’ formula was inequitable because the municipal weightings were too crude to reflect differences in municipalities’ needs to spend on education. The political will of central government to use per pupil funding as an instrument for promoting school efficiency waned in the face of strong rural opposition to the closure of village schools, especially for younger children in grades 1 to 6. With increasing affluence and a gradual migration to urban and sub-urban areas, the desire to preserve even very small rural schools for social reasons strengthened. The alternative view, that small rural schools do not provide as good a quality of education as would larger and better resourced schools, is not much articulated in Estonia outside education circles. The choice of where to make the trade off between internal efficiency of the school system and the perceived social benefits of village schools is essentially a political one. The new formula is the financial expression of a preference for the perceived social benefits of preserving village primary and basic schools over the alternative use of the resources, such as creating larger and better resourced schools in rural areas to which pupils are bussed. This formula illustrates well that underpinning the complex technical features of a school funding formula is a political decision about resource allocation. The new formula made explicit the government’s views on what is a financially viable school size. Primary schools with as few as two pupils per grade are financially viable with mixed grade teaching, while older grades are funded less generously for low numbers of pupils. Overall, the relative efficiency of the Estonian education system compared with other countries at a similar level of development is high, as far as can be judged by comparing countries’ expenditure per pupil relative to GDP per capita and to the 2006 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Estonia scored significantly above the OECD average in maths, reading, and science (where it came

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fifth). The proportion of high scoring pupils in science was high and that of low scoring pupils small.17 This good performance was acheived with an expenditure only slightly higher than the OECD average.18 Estonian lower secondary pupil expenditure as a ratio of GDP per capita was 0.25 in 2004 compared to the OECD average of 0.23.19 Estonia also performed well in terms of equity, with a relatively low variance in its test scores, low between school variance in science test scores and a relatively small proportion of the variance in pupils’ science scores that is explained by the PISA social, educational and cultural index of pupils’ home background. So, although the new formula favours the continuation of high cost small schools, it appears sustainable given the overall efficiency of the education system in Estonia and relatively small size of the school-age population as a proportion of the whole population.

17 18 19

OECD, PISA 2006: Science Compentencies for Tomorrow’s World, Vol. i (Paris: OECD, 2007). OECD, Education at a Glance (Paris: OECD, 2006). A simple regression of the PISA average score for maths, reading, and science in 2006 on expenditure per lower secondary pupil as a proportion of GDP per capita for thirty-three countries indicated that the PISA score for Estonia is 20 points higher than would be predicted from the estimated coefficients and that this difference is statistically significant.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 101–112

Reconciling Family and Work in Central and Eastern European Countries Giovanna Rossi and Sara Mazzucchelli1 Athenaeum Centre for Family Studies & Research, Catholic University of Milan, Italy

This paper presents an alternative view of work-family policies and looks especially at how families in different European countries are addressing issues of reconciliation between work and family at the present time. This relational differentiation inﬂuences the make-up of the sub-systems of family and work by creating new forms of interchange. These interchanges, which entail a mutual referencing code that enables the specialization of the interrelations between the sub-systems, are characterized by spill-over functions. This paper aims to address the questions of how — and toward which model (functional or relational differentiation) — the situation in Europe is evolving, questions which are ever more pressing in Europe’s current social and political climate. As new countries join the European Union, a change is taking place in both balances and structures, as well as a commitment on the part of member nations to modify existing polices, and to develop new policies and legislative apparatus in accordance with an EU master plan regarding work-family issues. This paper highlights emerging tendencies regarding family and work on the personal as well as the policy level in Central and Eastern Europe.

Foreword: reconciliation as relationship In today’s world, the situation a woman finds herself in is influenced by the necessarily difficult reconciliation between the requirements of her assigned roles and the amount of time she has available to fulfil those roles. At the same time, the very definition of the concept of work is undergoing a transformation. Thus, not only women, but society at large, are having to consider the rights and expectations of the 1

Giovanna Rossi is Full Professor in Family Sociology; Sara Mazzucchelli is PhD in Sociology and Social Research Methodology. This paper is a result of a collaboration between the authors: Sara Mazzucchelli wrote the analysis of policies in Central and Eastern Europe. For further information please contact: giovanna. rossi@unicatt.it; sara.mazzucchelli@unicatt.it

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family of which the woman is an integral part, and find a way to reconcile these with her work situation. After an extended history of institutionalized neglect and inadequate attempts at intervention, in recent years a greater sensitivity towards issues involving women, children, and families has begun to emerge. This sensitivity can be seen in the development of social policies whose goals are the reconciliation of work commitments and caretaking responsibilities, especially during specific periods in the family’s development.2 Reconciliation has various ethical and cultural meanings, and is interpreted differently according to the various social and geographical contexts in which it is applied. These varying interpretations have lead, of course, to a large variation in social policies. Nevertheless, a comparison, such as Epsing-Anderson’s model, that takes into account only the various types of welfare systems (liberal, conservative/ corporate, social democratic, universal)3 is insufficient; numerous critics have pointed out that a direct comparison is inherently incomplete, as it takes into account neither family relationships nor the dimension of gender.4 Furthermore, as Esping-Andersen’s model is primarily based on the importance of paid work, it ignores ‘the contribution to the common good of unpaid care-work’.5 Thus, a new interpretation of reconciliation, with the subsequent elaboration of social and reconciliation policies has evolved. This new perspective could enable the researcher to keep track of multiple factors and to view reconciliation as a social relationship (that is, as the factor linking the various dimensions of resources, objectives, norms, and culture of reference).6

An innovative perspective on work-life balance: relational differentiation in work/family issues The inherent conflict between family and work life is a consequence of a process of functional differentiation, which started in the modern era. However, the peak of this process — the individualisation of family life and work — shows the decline of this type of differentiation and brings about a new type of social differentiation between the two spheres: relational differentiation. Functional differentiation between work and family takes place when tasks are surrendered or separated, thus creating self-referential, differentiated sub-systems of family and work. In this type of differentiation, therefore, the sub-systemic symbolic code dominates. Thus, on the one hand, we experience an emotional closure of the family, which finds it difficult to regenerate itself as such, while, on the other hand, we notice an instrumental closure and an increasing de-humanization of work.

3 4

R. Palomba, A. Menniti, L. Cerbara, The Division of Paid and Unpaid Work and Use of Policies in Italy, (Tilburg: Work and Organization Research Centre, Tilburg University, 2000). G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). L. Zanatta, ‘Le politiche familiari in prospettiva europea’, Politiche e servizi sociali, I, No. 3 (1998), pp. 29–44. P. Abrahamson, T.P. Boje, B. Greve, Welfare and Families in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005). G. Rossi (ed.), La famiglia in Europa (Roma: Carocci, 2003).

RECONCILING FAMILY AND WORK

ﬁgure 1

103

The relational welfare framework in the work/family balance.

Relational differentiation, on the other hand, takes place through the creation of new forms of interchange that help to specialize life spheres (sub-systems) according to their interrelations through a code of mutual referencing.7 Thus, as the work/ family reconciliation issue is no longer evaluated according to functional differentiation (Liberal/Labour), but is instead re-defined by the relational perspective, actors, and forms of governance change. Far from de-differentiating the work/family relationship, a multi-stranded approach makes distinctions according to the distinguishing features of these relations. Although the former regime (Liberal/Labour) is characterised by indisputably important measures (prescriptive, negotiation, and birth incentive policies), it should be noted that they have a serious limitation, being the result of a compromise between the state and the market. As relational policies are determined by locally accepted concepts of cultural identity and of reciprocity in relationships they incorporate a variety of factors, such as families, companies, the private non-profit sector, and political institutions.8 The issues concerning the relationship between work and family are complex and multidimensional. ‘Reconciling [work and family] therefore means enabling multiple strategies, which denote a more satisfactory way of living’.9 These are called subsidiary strategies. They define and deal with work/life reconciliation through work/family enhancement and they consider work as subsidiary to family. Furthermore, as the state is considered to be subsidiary to civil society (families, companies and the third sector), reconciling measures are primarily defined by state interventions, but only where considered necessary and useful for promoting a balance between work and family. The goal of promoting this balance is to create a community-based welfare system that should be contextualized in relation to national and local labour markets and their specificities.

8 9

P. Donati, Famiglia e lavoro: dal conflitto a nuove sinergie, Nono Rapporto Cisf sulla Famiglia in Italia (Cinisello Balsamo (Mi): Edizioni San Paolo, 2005) pp. 66–69. Ibid., pp. 72–74. Ibid., p. 76.

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This conceptual framework views the reconciliation between work and family as an action system. Its goal (G) is to make work subsidiary to family. This means that the family/work relationship is conceived and treated as a relational good, and should be satisfactory per se: the success of this approach is then evaluated using the welfare of the community itself as the measuring stick. To achieve a work/family reconciliation, company governance, and networking between the family and external factors must be provided for and regulated according to specific rules (I) and supported by appropriate means (A) such as, for example, provision of flexible hours, early childhood services, company-provided welfare, and work leave. Even more important than the provision of these means is the monitoring of the access to and the results of these tools: whether they are used in a relational way and whether they promote a work/family reconciliation. This framework sees welfare as ‘feeling good inside the relationship’: the value model (L), thus, is the person’s ability to manage relationships in the family, at work, and within the balance of the two. This value model becomes a criterion for the enhancement of one’s life and actions.10

Comparing reconciliation measures and policies in Central and Eastern Europe The framework discussed above represents an ideal model that should inspire social policies and reconciliation tools in order to promote apparently scarcely reconcilable or even conflicting rights in a harmonious way. To reach this goal, it is therefore useful to compare this model with those measures and policies that have been developed in some Central and Eastern European Countries to promote this reconciliation. This paper aims to provide an answer to the questions of how and towards which model (functional or relational differentiation) these countries are evolving. As new countries become a part of the EU (a situation that inevitably leads to changes in previously-established balances and structures), these concerns become increasingly pressing. In compliance with the indications in the European Masterplan, EU policy makers have made a commitment to putting the principles of equal opportunity and the politics of reconciliation of work and family into practice, and have introduced and/or modified and updated individual policies and entire legislative apparatus. As an illustration of these actions, we will look at a few of the emergent tendencies in the policies and the choices of work/family issues — in particular, child care11 — in some countries of Central and Eastern Europe, using the following matrix (see Figure 2).

10 11

P. Donati, Famiglia e lavoro, pp. 78–81. We select one factor, childcare, to illustrate the alternative view; though it would be possible and necessary to analyse several other factors that are also part of the relational framework, like, for example, equal opportunities, wage system, long term care of elderly people, school system . . .

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ﬁgure 2

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Elements deﬁning different models of conciliation policy.

The AGIL scheme, proposed by T. Parsons and elaborated by the relational perspective,14 is the methodology we used to build the grid for analysis and to describe and understand the implemented policies as a ‘complex of mutual relationships that make the system’. Donati, in his review, uses the AGIL scheme as a method of analysis and observation of social relationality. According to the relational approach any social phenomenon is describable as a social relationship which is constituted 12

‘Strategies of rules’ stands for introducing, by law, norms that force the labour contexts to respect the employee’s rights to a sufficient time for himself and his personal relationships (e.g. norms that give the maximal working hours per week, laws on leaves) (P. Donati, Famiglia e lavoro (2005); D. Ventura, ‘Verso una governance societaria delle politiche di conciliazione: problemi e prospettive aperte dall’iniziativa Equal in Italia’, Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, 11 (2008), pp. 113–38). ‘Strategies of incentives’ stands for introducing benefits, mostly of fiscal character for those who organize the labour system in a way which is sensible to the personal needs of the employees. It also stands for providing support services for the caring tasks (child-care services, education services, care-taking services for non-autosufficient family members). P. Donati, Teoria relazionale della società (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1991).

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in the relations among its elements. The scheme thus provides an ‘agile compass’ to guide the analysis of a system of action focusing on four main dimensions: A (adaptation), covering economic, human, and organizational resources mobilized by the regulations to achieve the objectives; G (achieving goals), which identifies the objectives pursued by policy; I (integration), or the rules and actions that enable the practical implementation; L (latency) which is the underlying cultural model. This instrument has a multi-dimensional character that it can be applied at different levels of analysis. So we try to describe the configuration of the action’s system created by the policies regarding the four dimensions and their interrelationships in order to bring out the pragmatic relationship that characterizes them.

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe The political and institutional changes that have been enacted in countries of Central and Eastern Europe over the past fifteen years have been responses to challenges that are significantly different from those faced by countries of Western and Southern Europe and they are critical to a clear analysis of the family policy in these regions.15 Indeed, the Central and Eastern European contexts are marked by apparent contradictions and paradoxes, the origins and the dynamics of which lie in the west and in the south of Europe:16 in the transition from socialist and communist regimes towards democratic rule and participation in public life, the very high expectations of freedoms which emerged after the gaining of greater political freedom were lowered, and, in some cases, overturned.17 Before this transition, the common political feature of the different national contexts was their experience of socialist or communist rule: the state was the main guarantor and administrator of the life of its citizens. Within this structure, citizens negotiated their requests directly with the state; family members, associations or organisations did not become involved. In socialist regimes, the family is viewed as a private, rather than a public, enclave. Private decisions are made, but they have no public relevance. Consequently, in these Central and Eastern European countries this notion brought about a de-familisation of society and of policies: individuals negotiated directly with the state, without the involvement of intermediary subjects such as the family or family associations.18 Or better, the state overruled the families through the two earners model and by collectivisation of childcare in the form of early childcare institutions and there was no space for private decisions, nor for different choices given the totalitarian character of the system. 15

Actually many of the challenges during this transformation are similar to those in WE countries (ageing, demography, structural transformation of the post-industrial economies, effect of globalization). In this paragraph we give a very simplistic description of the specific CEE countries’ transformation. G. Rossi, ‘Family, work and welfare policies; challenges and perspective in East Europe’, International Review of Sociology, 17 (2007) pp. 293–301. The terms communist or communism are used in more colloquial than scientific way: in social science analysis it is in fact almost impossible to describe all that group of countries with this term without defining the ideological, systemic content of the term. S. Bould, S. Koeva, ‘Women as Workers and as Carers Under Communism and After: The Case of Bulgaria’, International Review of Sociology, 17 (2007) pp. 303–18; S. Saxonberg, T. Sirovátka, ‘Re-familisation of the Czech Family Policy and Its Causes’, International Review of Sociology, 17 (2007) pp. 319–41.

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The lack of free and voluntary participation of individuals in public life, of independent movements (i.e. those not controlled by the state), of a civil society, and of feminist groups resulted in scarce attention to and, as a result, little mobilisation around, issues of equal opportunities and gender equity. No less influential is the paradox produced by high rates of female labour participation, as, under the ‘gender contract’ introduced by the socialist regimes, women were allowed and encouraged to work, but with the implicit understanding that only men were expected to have a career.19 The transition to democratic regimes in these areas initially resulted in the dissolution of beliefs and a weakening of social bonds, and, at the same time, increased unemployment (especially among women) and even poverty. Thus, the early stages of the transition were geared mostly toward emergency measures,20 while the subsequent stages saw a progression to the application of a more conservative and traditional model of work/family policy. The goal of this approach was to augment the time allocated to women for family responsibilities, while still safeguarding their employment. However, this approach was not generally successful, as, with the increasing economic uncertainty and risk experienced by each individual — which paralleled the situation of their nations — there came a shift from a dual earner-carer model to a breadwinner model, as more and more women were forced to leave the labour force.21 Furthermore, the relations between Central and Eastern European countries, and the rest of Europe, which were restored after the fall of the Communist regimes, did not lead to significant development of gender equality or opportunities. This was due in part to the fact that, as equal opportunities between the genders has always been a fundamental feature of communism, and had thus been imposed as a policy, rather than as a means of meeting certain needs of society, it now carried a negative connotation among people from formerly-communist countries. The lack of feminist and/or women’s movements in these Central and Eastern European countries, as well as the absolute separation of public and private spheres, also contributed to the attitude of and approach to work/family issues. No less important to the policy and attitude transition which occurred in Central and Eastern Europe is the development of inter-generational relationships, especially as regards management of family strategies. Over the past decades, the politics of the relationship between the individual, the family, society, and the state has been addressed and, thus, experienced, in a number of different ways. Therefore, when faced with the rapid and radical transition from authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to a more democratic rule which is strongly oriented towards a capitalist economy, the various generations tend to hold conflicting opinions regarding the

A. Mikheeva, ‘Family Change and New Balance of Family Roles: the Case of Siberia’, International Review of Sociology, 17 (2007) pp. 357–71; A. Milic, ‘The Family and Work in the Post-socialist Society in Serbia’, International Review of Sociology, 17 (2007) pp. 373–94. Emergency measures, however, were different in the ECC countries as well as the outcome of social and employment policy measures that in some countries have led to more traditional, in others more liberal, in others again to more socialistic models of work/family policies. B. Łobodzińska, ‘Family, Work and Social Policy in Poland’, International Review of Sociology, 17 (2007) pp. 141–61.

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relationship between employment and the family sphere. This, of course, occurs also in comparisons made between the Central and Eastern European countries and the Western countries. Augmenting the length of maternity leave and increasing the supply of care services were both meant to supplement and support maternal care, but also to keep women away from the labour market for lengthy periods of time. Surprisingly, however, this attempt to restore a stereotypical model of a family (wherein the woman is involved in unpaid household duties and the man in paid work) led to a dramatic drop in fertility rates and to an increase in female employment levels. Hence, although these policies represented a new notion of the work-family balance, in which the goal of promoting and supporting a renewed compatibility between work and family responsibilities was evident, they generated unexpected and negative spin-offs. Interesting to note is the fact that, while at present these Eastern European countries do not seem to have a strong, specific interest in Western ideas or values (such as, for example, the issue of equal opportunities put forward by feminist movements), they do seem to want to adopt the appearance of promoting them by adhering to the parameters set by the European Union regarding issues such as gender mainstreaming in order to receive financial aid and political recognition. Thus, even within what appears to be homogeneous approaches to adhering to the European Union’s social and political framework, it is necessary to carefully analyze each country’s social context and the relationships between the different actors in order to appreciate the different political redefinitions.

Analysis The matrix presented above (Figure 2) enables us to trace the dominant trend, as well as a small exception to this trend, evident in these Central and Eastern European countries. The dominant trend — or policy model — referred to by most countries in this area (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, and perhaps Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania) is called the long leave ‘mother homecentred’ policy model and is characterized by a long critical conciliation timing (A, L) with reference to a maternity leave of approximately three years (the ‘active maternity’ phase) which is granted to working mothers.22 As for the most frequently applied measures, here the strategies of rules are clearly dominant (A): a long period of rather poorly paid leave and the absence of a link or of any sort of correspondence between the strategies of rules and of incentives (A, I), due apparently to the scarce availability and the innovative character of child-care services. In the Czech Republic, for example, a new reform of parental leave policy, valid from January 2009, introduces diversity in the duration of parental leave and it increases the contribution during the maternity leave from 69 to 80 per cent of the salary. The parent who stays at home with the off-spring (mostly the mother) may choose one of the following three options: 22

K. Wall, ‘Leave Policy Models and the Articulation of Work and Family in Europe: A Comparative Perspective’, Sociologia e Politiche Sociali, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2008), pp. 58–86.

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two years of parental leave with 11400 CZK monthly allowance (approximately €400) three years of parental leave with 7600 CZK monthly allowance (€270) four years of parental leave with 3800 CZK monthly allowance (€135). Once the family has chosen, the decision cannot be modified during the parental leave (A, I). Thus a woman who chooses to stay less at home with her children is in the economically most favourable position — not only does she receive the highest allowance but re-enters the labour market earlier getting a regular salary. On the one hand, the possibility of choice is welcome by Czech mothers, on the other they see as problematic the fact that the choice is not modifiable since the conditions on the labour market may change whereas their decision must not. There is little availability of childcare services for children under three so that mothers may keep choosing the three or four year option simply out of necessity and not by preference. Though the reform introduces an interesting concept, the flexibility is thus only apparent. Basically, the system remains the same — a rather long parental leave with a sort of male-breadwinner model. There is little to say so far about how women will actually use the offer on different duration of parental leave as only two months have passed since the reform was introduced.23 The policy makers (G) tend toward a limited (and, at times, non-existent) gender flexibility in applying these albeit-obligatory measures (A, L). In Poland, for example, on 1 January 2009, a new law entered into force which extends the maternity leave to twenty weeks (thirty-one for multiple births). Due to a low fertility rate, family policies in Poland are subject to public debate: there is, in fact, a need for both higher fertility and a larger labour force. The draft of the family policy introduced in 2007 is the first one in which gender and reconciliation policies are no longer ignored. Family-work reconciliation measures are thus given more attention: for example, if a parent on leave decides to work part-time or to use child-care services, the parental benefit will not be withdrawn.24 In these cases, as can be concluded from the information above, the woman is the principle caregiver (L). Therefore, it also follows that the most common labour model employed in these countries is the male breadwinner model (L).25 However, attention must be paid to terminology and model: Slovak families would tend to a full-time dual earner model. Part-time work is not common, although women (and even men, if caring for small children) might apply for working-hour reductions. The state administration is considered as the employer most open to such requirements. However, can we still talk about a full-time dual-earner model when 52 per cent of all unemployed workers are women? In Poland, until recently, the full-time dual earner model was the dominant one. Nowadays, ideally the families prefer to have a double income but this is not always possible for the high unemployment rate. Thus, 23 24

Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, <www.mpsv.cz> [accessed 22 March 2009]. P. Moss, M. Korintus, International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research 2008, Employment Relations Research Series nº 100, (London: Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, 2008) <http://www.berr.gov.uk> [accessed 22 March 2009]. C. Aliaga, ‘Gender Gaps in the Reconciliation Between Work and Family Life’, Statistics in Focus, 4, (Eurostat, 2005) <www.ec.europa.eu> [accessed 23 March 2009]; B. Łobodzińska, ‘Family, Work and Social Policy in Poland’; S. Bould, S. Koeva, ‘Women as Workers and as Carers Under Communism and After’).

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we could characterize the present model as a combination of male breadwinner and dual earner model. This model illustrates a specific configuration of parental employment in these countries and an evident gap between women with small children and those without children as regards both employment rates and type of economic activity (L). This gap is even more evident between the employment rates of women with children below six years of age and those without.26 However, the organization of labour and the view toward reconciliation between work and family responsibilities in these countries gives rise to a number of problems. In Slovakia, for example, parental care is considered to be one of the best in Europe. Nevertheless, a study by the OECD, views the long period of parental leave as a hindrance to the return to work for the woman (A, I). Even the women who benefit from this extended parental leave feel that their communication skills, professional contacts and professional information deteriorate during their three-year absence.27 Slovenia presents an exception to this generalized situation with its adherence to the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;one year leaveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; gender equality orientated policy model, a model which resembles that employed in the North European countries.28 In this model the conciliation time, while still extended (nine to thirteen months) is inferior to what we saw in the former (three-year) model (A, L). The prevailing measures, which are a fundamental point of Sloveniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s political strategy, are based primarily on the strategies of rules (A) and on a high level of remuneration (A, I), and secondarily on the adoption of significant incentive strategies (A). In these countries double-income families (L) are strongly supported through facilitated access to, and a constant increase in, available child-care services (A, I). The obligatory nature of the policy (A, I) is essential to both strategies, as this strongly affects the identity of the caregiver (initially the woman, then the state, through the offer of professional care services)(I, L) and the attention which is given to gender flexibility (A, L). The initial obligatory maternity leave is fairly short, but is then followed by a longer period of paid parental leave (A, I). This structure makes it possible for one of the parents (not necessarily the mother) to stay at home for most of the first year of life of the child. Thus, there is a strong emphasis not only on a gender-flexible division of the leave, but also on a quota reserved specifically for fathers.29 Slovenia exhibits high female employments rates and a low percent-average (11 per cent) of part-time employment among women. Interestingly, employment rates for women with and without children are analogous (L).30 Thus, in Slovenia the social 26

28 29

This difference reaches up to 39% in the Czech Republic, 35% in Hungary and 30% in Estonia (P. Moss, M. Korintus, International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research (2008)). C. Saget, Jobs for Youth: The Slovak Republic, (Paris: OECD, 2007) <www.oecd.org> [accessed 22 March 2009]. P. Moss, M. Korintus, International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research (2008). In Slovenia there are two weeks of paternal leave (with 100% of the salary reimbursed) and half of the eight months of parental leave are also paid (100%). Four months out of these eight are allocated to the father, but these can be transferred to the mother. Leave Policies and Research. Reviews and Country Notes, ed. by F. Deven, P. Moss, CBGS-Werkdocument 2005/3 (Brussels: Centrum voor Bevolkings en Gezinsstudie, 2005).

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policies seem to have provoked an erosion of the male breadwinner model and a shift towards the dual-earner model and the one-and-a-half earner model (L).31

Conclusions The past few decades have seen significant social, political and economic changes in these Central and Eastern European countries, and it is certain that the situation will continue to evolve. Although we can hypothesize about the direction of the basic traits of such changes, it is evident that they are being continuously transformed by internal politics, by external pressure â&#x20AC;&#x201D; both economic and political (such as reforms of welfare systems and the directions of the European Union) â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and by cultural factors (e.g. the advocacy of gender equality and equal opportunities) within the region. The models presented above cannot always be applied to real situations: some countries may represent a policy model only in part, while others ultimately may not fit with any model due to their particular specific characteristics which exclude them from any clear categorization. This does not represent a simple caveat, but poses an important challenge to research that aims to be comparative. What, then, emerges from our examination?32 As we have seen above, the European welfare systems based on the state-market dialectics (according to the functional differentiation) have led to the development of a set of instruments which are distinguishable in two basic strategies: rules and incentives (A). However, specific limits in this type of orientation of conciliatory policy reveal evident limits on efficacy and efficiency on both axes â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the rules and the incentives. These limits are in general due to a cultural deficit (the lack of a shared culture of conciliation (L)) among the agents (I).33 However, while certainly representative of an ideal situation, this emphasised neutrality does not tend to exist in reality; whether through rules or incentives, the political system intervenes in a significant manner in the family-work relationship. However, this often occurs without facilitating a corresponding dialogue between the symbolic and relational codes of each of actors. Thus, the construction 31

Although we lack data regarding the work status, as the percentage of women working part-time is rather low (11%), we might assume that the one-and-a-half earner model is not very widespread. The dual-earner model is the dominant one. We must highlight that data for analysis are taken mostly from reviews carried out by International Network on Leave Policy and Research (http://www.berr.gov.uk). This choice arose due to multiple factors: the completeness of information, which is not limited to legislation, but with annually updated data which analyze the trends of leave usage in different countries; the sought connection between the measure of leave and the package of measures and policies regarding conciliation, employment, family, and gender. This taxonomy, however, it should be stressed, is burdened by some limitations which make analysis difficult according to the criteria of functional and relational differentiation: the focus on matherhood and paid work; the available data, infact, do not allow reference to a family view but, rather, show the persistence of an individualistic or feminist culture who sees the reconciliation as a predominantly female problem; it is also clear the reference to the European legislation, as orientation of the assessment criteria, in considering the sphere of paid work as an hope feminine land of investment. These agents can be institutional or communal, national or local, representatives of the world of business or the world of labour, third sector organizations, workers or families, each of which must be considered as a holder of self-referred interests that may be examined in a neutral political arena.

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of a shared code (which should be the real target of a conciliation policy, according to a relational differentiation) does not take place. The dimensions of family and work life are considered on an individual basis, and subordinated to utilitarian market logic in its planning, proposals, and diffusion (functional differentiation). As a consequence, the operative instruments do not allow the emergence of a real mutual involvement between, or influence on, the various actors (functional differentiation). There is a lack of political action that assumes a complex form to keep women away from the labour market for employment policy reasons as well as for certain ideological reasons. This is probably not a result of a shared culture but the outcome of dynamic structural changes and the interlay between different economic, political, and social actors. Therefore a political action, as relational action — that is, action which would enhance full and humanising work relations (subsidiary) and would create a shared sense of ‘making family’ (as a relationship full of reciprocity, formal responsibility between sexes and generations) — is needed.34 This would entail a re-thinking of conciliation on the cultural level, which would then guide the planning of societary instruments of action for conciliation. To accomplish this, it is essential to recognize the mutual implications and responsibilities of both work and family, and to involve all essential actors (market, family, state, third sector and local government agencies). Allowing all actors to act as protagonists would influence change on the cultural and policy levels, and would thus encourage conciliation.

P. Donati, Famiglia e lavoro; D. Ventura, ‘Verso una governance societaria delle politiche di conciliazione: problemi e prospettive aperte dall’iniziativa Equal in Italia’.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 50–63

Polish Contact Zones: Silesia in the Works of Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Róz˙ycki Ewa Stan´czyk1 University of Manchester, UK

The article examines the presentation of the region of Upper Silesia in the works of two contemporary Polish writers: Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Róz˙ycki. It draws chieﬂy on Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of contact zone, understood here as a space of colonial encounters and coerced interaction between culturally distant subjects. The principal aim of the article is to explore the ways in which both authors deal with the hybridity, power dynamics, and sense of displacement that are inherent to this literary place of contact. While Zagajewski’s essay provides a semi-autobiographical representation of the post-war city Gliwice seen through the eyes of deportees from the former Polish eastern borderlands, Róz˙ycki’s poetry is a ﬁctional response to the post-German heritage of contemporary Upper Silesia. In this respect reference is made to post-colonial ideas of space and belonging. The article presents an analysis of both writers’ treatment of the Silesian space in order to examine the role it plays in their works with regards to questions of cultural contact and power relations.

Lost homelands vs. small homelands My examination of the literary representations of Silesia2 is based on the post-1989 literature and concentrates chiefly on the oeuvre of Tomasz Różycki (born 1970) and Adam Zagajewski (born 1945). The texts discussed in this article bear similar features to the so-called literature of ‘small homelands’ which has been developing in Poland since the late 1980s. The term is rarely applied, however, to poetry or non-fictional prose and refers mainly to the fictional prose of those writers who came to the fore

1 2

PhD candidate in Polish Studies, Department of Russian and East European Studies. In this article I focus chiefly on Upper Silesia however I use the general term ‘Silesia’ throughout the course of my argument.

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shortly before or just after the fall of communism.3 This article, nevertheless, will treat the poetry of Różycki and the essayist prose of Zagajewski, both written in the 1990s or later, as examples of that phenomenon, and will view them as thematically and aesthetically consistent with the works of the generally acknowledged representatives of ‘small homelands’ literature. Such a broad and inclusive understanding of the literature of ‘small homelands’ is inspired by Ryszard Nycz’s definition, which views it as literature ‘focused [. . .] on discovering peculiarities (otherness, singularities) [of] where the writers currently live’.4 It comprises texts that are rooted in a specific area or region and are a textual search for a territory that could be called home or, as the German language describes it, ‘Heimat’.5 Nycz points out also the significance of two tendencies that intertwine in these texts, namely the settling-in and the alienation strategy which he draws respectively from Czesław Miłosz’s and Witold Gombrowicz’s oeuvres. The critic emphasizes in this way both the sense of belonging and the feeling of displacement that are crucial for post-1989 Polish literature.6 Moreover, the texts to be discussed in this article are characterized by a new vision of a ‘small homeland’ that emerged in the early 1990s and offers the chance of a re-examination of Silesia through a ‘perspective which throws into prominence the exceptional character of the territories upon the Odra River and is independent, free of prejudice and [. . .] stereotypes’.7 Literature of ‘small homelands’ is part of a broader literary tradition that was present in Polish prose and poetry throughout the twentieth century. The representations of ‘small homelands’ originate from the post-war tradition of what could best be described as the ‘literature of lost homelands’, which includes texts based on the writers’ personal memory of inter-war Poland, and particularly its eastern borderlands, the so-called Kresy. Novels such as Dolina Issy (The Issa Valley) (1955) by Czesław Miłosz or Dziura w niebie (The Hole in the Sky) (1959) by Tadeusz Konwicki comprise a textual return to the writers’ homeland — Lithuania. Examples of a similar experience as regards Ukrainian borderlands include the works of Andrzej Kuśniewicz, Julian Stryjkowski and Włodzimierz Odojewski. The main feature of

The most popular writers whose prose is described as the literature of ‘small homelands’ include: Stefan Chwin (b. 1949), Paweł Huelle (b. 1957), Jerzy Pilch (b. 1952), Andrzej Stasiuk (b. 1960), Olga Tokarczuk (b. 1962), and many others. If we assume that literature of ‘small homelands’ comprises only prose writers who debuted in the late 1980s, neither Róz˙ycki’s poetry nor Zagajewski’s essays, as works of the New Wave representative, can be considered as such. Ryszard Nycz, ‘“Every One of Us Is a Stranger”. Patterns of Identity in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature’, in Framing the Polish Home. Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, ed. by Boz˙ena Shallcross (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), p. 21. Heimat is a specifically German concept which refers to one’s closest and most intimate surroundings such as neighbourhood, town or region. Przemysław Czaplin´ski, on the other hand, views ‘small homelands’ merely as places that permit one to find one’s roots and discover one’s identity. ‘Small homelands’ are, according to Czaplin´ski, spaces that are easily domesticated by the protagonists, which does not take into account the problems of cultural otherness and displacement crucial for these works. See Przemysław Czaplin´ski, S´lady przełomu. O prozie polskiej 1976–1996 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997), p. 238. Andrzej Zawada, ‘Podwójne dziedzictwo. Dolnos´la˛skie dos´wiadczenie historyczne w zwierciadle polskiej powojennej twórczos´ci literackiej’, in Mie˛dzy Wshodem a Zachodem: Europa Mickiewicza i innych. O relacjach literatury polskiej z kulturami os´ciennymi, ed. by Graz˙yna Borkowska and Monika Rudas´-Grodzka (Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków: Ossolineum, 2007), p. 127.

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these writers’ oeuvres is often a mythicizing and nostalgic approach to the lost places, ‘treated as a counterbalance to the uprooting space and the homelessness of where [. . .] [they] currently live’.8 The writers depict genuine towns and villages and recreate authentic landscapes, buildings and traditions, so the prose is often characterized by geographical and ethnographic credibility. It is sufficient here to mention the valley of the Wilejka River from Konwicki’s novel or Galicia from the 1970s novels by Andrzej Kuśniewicz. ‘Small homelands’, as presented in the post-1989 literature, are also genuine places. Unlike Kresy, however, they are accessible, they are not lost and they are mostly part of present-day Poland. Although the writers often refer to the history of the places, unreachable from their personal experience, they usually live in the regions, towns and villages they describe. The most popular locations include Danzig / Gdańsk,9 which is often presented as a Polish, German and Kashubian melting-pot, in the novels by Paweł Huelle and Stefan Chwin; the Protestant towns of the Cieszyn Silesia in the works by Jerzy Pilch, Opole / Oppeln in the poems by Tomasz Różycki, Breslau in the crime stories by Marek Krajewski, and unspecified Silesian towns in novels and short stories by Wojciech Kuczok. The Beskidy Mountains in Andrzej Stasiuk’s and Mirosław Nahacz’s prose also represent an important place on the map of ‘small homelands’.

‘Small homelands’ as contact zones Both traditions of writing about homeland recount the experience of living in a multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic community. It is particularly true in relation to ‘small homelands’. They are space palimpsests,10 in which various symbols of cultural, national, and ethnic identifications intersect and coexist. Literary representations of Danzig / Gdańsk, the Beskidy Mountains or Silesia deal not only with the actual multiculturalism but also with signs of a multicultural past, with objects denoting foreign presence and, most importantly, with dynamics of power struggles that such situations impose. This constant interaction between two or more cultures that takes place within the space of the literary ‘small homelands’ requires a revised approach, different from the category of otherness or binary opposites of self and other or us and them. What we need is a space-related concept that will describe the intersecting boundaries of two or more ethnicities and cultures, their interaction and reciprocal relations of power. The post-colonial dimension of these places and its repercussions should also be taken into account. In my view the concept of contact zone, introduced and elaborated by Mary Louise Pratt, permits all those elements to be tested. The critic derives the term from 8 9

Nycz, ‘“Every One of Us Is a Stranger”.. . .’, p. 21. The use of specific place names, such as Danzig / Gdan´sk, Gleiwitz / Gliwice, L’viv / Lemberg / Lwów / Lvov and Oppeln / Opole, will be motivated by the historical period to which they refer. For example, if speaking of the inter-war period, I use the Polish word ‘Lwów’ or the German ‘Oppeln’. If discussing the post-war years, I refer to Opole or Gliwice. I am grateful to my anonymous reviewer for reminding me of the need for this distinction. The multicultural history of Silesia and other regions has been reflected in their changing architecture, street names, and monuments. They can be thus compared to a palimpsest, a manuscript that has been written on more than once.

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linguistics, which defines ‘contact languages’ as improvised languages that develop among speakers of different languages ‘who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade’.11 As Pratt points out, such languages begin as pidgins and transform into creoles when they come to have native speakers of their own. They are often considered as chaotic, barbarous, and lacking in structure. On this basis Pratt develops the term contact zone, which refers to ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, [. . .] inequality, and [. . .] conflict’.12 Pratt’s use of the term ‘contact’ highlights the improvised and interactive character of the intercultural encounters and indicates that they should be read along the lines of coexistence, intersecting trajectories, and interdependence. This active reciprocity of cultures negates the stereotypical separateness of the colonizers (or the dominating groups) and the colonized (the marginalized peoples) and demonstrates dynamic relations of power and changeable patterns of domination present within the contact zone. Polish contact zones had not officially existed until the late 1980s. The communistcontrolled version of history insisted on homogeneity, which in consequence led to a strongly monolithic notion of Poland preserved in the awareness of the majority. As Elwira Grossman points out, the process of redefining Polishness proves to be an ongoing challenge: since its mythic image with a homogeneous face matches the nation’s common belief, which government officials moulded, mass media promoted and teachers taught in schools for almost forty-five years of communism. During this time, Polish national identity was being manufactured, regardless of ideological differences, by both Catholic Church and state authorities.13

The multinational, multi-religious, and culturally diverse regions, such as Pomerania, Silesia, and Warmia-Masuria, emerged as such with the collapse of communism. Their complex actual and, to a greater extent, also historical14 ethnic make-up emerged in the early 1990s and questioned the communist historiography. It also erupted as one of the major themes in the literature of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Palimpsest of cultures: Gliwice in Adam Zagajewski’s ‘Dwa miasta’ Polish Silesia, which is the main focus of the texts analysed in this article, can be considered a model example of a contact zone. Situated on the borders of Poland, the

11 12 13

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. Ibid. Elwira Grossman, ‘Introduction’, in Studies in Language, Literature and Cultural Mythology in Poland: Investigating ‘The Other’, ed. by Elwira Grossman (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), p. 2. Gregor Thum, in his exploration of the ‘multicultural character’ of the Silesian city Wrocław, rightly points out that Wrocław’s self-perception as a multicultural city is based on its ‘history and that of the entire province of Silesia’, which constitutes a ‘border region par excellence’. See Gregor Thum, ‘Wrocław and the myth of the multicultural border city’, European Review, 13/2 (2005), p. 229.

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Czech Republic, and Germany, the region used to be a genuine melting-pot. This is where Polish, German, Jewish, Silesian, Czech, and also Ukrainian and Belarusian15 elements met and clashed, creating a new form of borderland culture. The trajectory of this historically Germanic region describes a centuries-long battle for ownership, in which Poland and Germany were the main contestants. Along with Pomerania, Warmia-Masuria, and the Lubusz Land, Silesia comprised the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’,16 which were detached from Germany and incorporated into Poland after the Second World War. The local German population fled or was expelled, leaving their possessions behind, while the Poles forcibly resettled from the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian borderland territories came to live in what were previously German buildings. The experience of post-war population transfers and ‘re-polonization’ of Silesia has become the crucial problem for contemporary Polish writers. Their textual, often autobiographical, mapping of the contact zone permits them to deal with the sense of displacement and otherness that their ancestors, and consequently they, have had to face. The process of anti-assimilation or, as Nycz phrases it, sense of alienation, in the new Silesian homeland is well described by Adam Zagajewski’s essay ‘Dwa miasta’ (Two Cities) (1991). The two cities in the title are the Polish Lwów, from which the author’s family was expelled in 1945 and the post-German, Silesian town Gliwice, to which they were sent. The 1950s Gliwice of Zagajewski’s story becomes a multidimensional contact zone. It is not only a platform of the Polish-German interaction as one would expect but also a site of interplay between Polish, German, and Ukrainian elements. The latter is particularly complex since Ukraine, understood here as a region rather than a state, stands entirely for Lwów, whither the protagonists effortlessly travel in their imagination. Their physical presence in Gliwice and mental existence in Lwów engraves the literary representation of the Silesian contact zone with implicit problems of the Polish inter-war colonization of western Ukraine. Lwów becomes a place, which is mentally dispossessed by its former inhabitants. This dispossession runs along the lines of the omnipresent in the essay idealization and mythologization of the city. The image of the ideal Polish Lwów overlaps with the portrait of the post-German and simultaneously communist Gliwice, which is best represented in the description of the author’s walk through the city with his grandfather. The young Zagajewski, born in Lwów shortly before the relocation in 1945, did not learn to love any city except Gliwice, while his grandfather was completely devoted to Lwów: byłem absolutnie pewny, że idąc ulicami Gliwic, pośród pruskich, secesyjnych kamienic, [. . .], znajduję się naprawdę tam, gdzie się znajduję. Mój dziadek jednak, mimo że szedł tuż przy mnie, przenosił się w tym samym momencie do Lwowa. Ja szedłem ulicami Gliwic, on Lwowa. Ja byłem na długiej ulicy, która [. . .] nosiła szyderczą nazwę ulicy Zwycięstwa [. . .], on natomiast w tym samym czasie spacerował ulicą Sapiehy we

The Ukrainian and Belarusian influences came from Polish population deported after the Second World War from the former Polish eastern borderlands. The term ‘Recovered Territories’ was used originally by the communist authorities in order to highlight the ‘intrinsically Slavonic’ character of these lands, reject their German heritage and justify the process of homogenization.

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Lwowie. Potem, dla odmiany, wchodziliśmy do Parku Chrobrego (polski król miał spolonizować niemieckie drzewa), ale on oczywiście znajdował się w Ogrodzie Jezuickim we Lwowie.17 I was absolutely sure that as I walked the streets of Gliwice, among the Prussian, secessional tenement houses, [. . .], this is where I actually am. My grandfather, however, although he walked by my side, moved at the same time to Lwów. I walked the streets of Gliwice, while he walked the streets of Lwów. I was on the long street, which carried the mocking name of Victory Street [. . .]; he at the same time walked the Sapieha Street in Lwów. Later, for a change, we would go to Boleslaw the Brave Park (the Polish king was meant to polonize the German trees), but he, of course, was in the Jesuit Gardens in Lwów.18

Zagajewski’s Gliwice is a multi-layered palimpsest inscribed with various cultural influences that have gathered on its surface throughout centuries. These influences often meet and grapple with each other. The contact zone is also endowed with political senses that imply its complex post-colonial status. The Prussian remains, such as buildings, come across as Polish Lwów in the grandfather’s memory. The park trees, seen by the author as German remains, intertwine with the Polish tradition, which is expressed by the toponymy; in this case the park is named after Boleslaw the Brave or Bolesław Chrobry, the first crowned king of Poland. The ironically named Victory Street related to the victory of the Red Army over the Germans, which symbolizes the new socialist Poland clashes over the name of Sapieha Street in Lwów. Although those various political, historic, and cultural senses are seemingly unrelated, in Zagajewski’s representation of Gliwice they interconnect and coexist with a surprising logic. Moreover, the multi-dimensional post-colonial aspect of the Silesian contact zone is clearly recognisable in the interdependence of the evoked places, people, and names. The reference to the king, Bolesław the Brave, relates to the Polish rule over the region in the Middle Ages when Bolesław Chrobry incorporated Silesia into the Polish state. The Prussian houses are a marker of the eighteenth-century seizure of the region and its status as the Prussian Province of Silesia. The Victory Street, on the other hand, which could as well be called the Red Army Street or the Stalingrad Street, as many roads were in communist Poland, indicates Poland’s subjugation to Soviet Russia. To extend the analogy even further, the socialist Victory Street in Gliwice, as seen by the young author, is contrasted with Sapieha Street in Lwów, as preserved in his grandfather’s memory.19 Sapieha Street and Lwów itself refer to the period of Polish history when the country was a relatively strong colonial empire. By evoking both streets, the one in Gliwice, sign of Soviet domination, and the one in Lwów, symbol of the former Polish domination over the eastern borderlands, the essay emphasizes the two-fold character of the Polish post-colonialism and demonstrates how a country can be at once post-colonial and colonial, and how it can act respectively as the colonizer and the colonized. 17 18 19

Adam Zagajewski, ‘Dwa miasta’, in Dwa miasta (Warszawa: Zeszyty Literackie, 2007), pp. 17–18. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. The Sapiehas were a Polish-Lithuanian princely family, who acquired great influence at the beginning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the sixteenth century when the country was an important player in European politics.

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The grandfather’s memory of Lwów and his experience of Gliwice bring the two places together; they overlap and come into contact with each other but eventually remain distant. This interplay of Kresy and post-German yet communist Silesia, that takes place in the space of the ‘worse city’, as the author often describes his Silesian hometown, is visible also in the coexistence of the utilitarian objects. These goods are divided, according to their status, into three categories: aristocratic (or pre-war), bourgeois (described also as post-German), and socialist: [Rzeczy] arystokratyczne przyjechały ze Lwowa. Ponieważ rodziny deportowane nie dysponowały możliwością wywiezienia wszystkiego, zabierano tylko to, co najcenniejsze, srebro [. . .], obrazy, dywany, kilimy, akwarele, pamiątki rodzinne, rzadkie książki, stylowe meble. [. . .] Niemcy wyjeżdżając, musieli kierować się tą samą logiką [. . .] to znaczy zabrali swoje przedmioty arystokratyczne [. . .]. Zostawili za to mnóstwo rzeczy użytkowych, kuchenki, maszyny do szycia marki Singer, maszyny do pisania marki Erika i Continental, narzędzia, rowery, sztućce z nieszlachetnych metali. Metale szlachetne pochodziły ze Lwowa, nieszlachetne były poniemieckie. [. . .] Rzeczy socjalistyczne wreszcie produkowane były przez powojenną, nieudolną Polskę Ludową.20 The aristocratic objects came from Lwów. Since the deportees could not bring everything, they would take only what was most valuable, silver [. . .], paintings, rugs, kilims, aquarelles, family memorabilia, rare books and stylish furniture. [. . .] The Germans, as they were leaving, had to use the same logic [. . .] and pack only their aristocratic goods [. . .]. They would leave here lots of utilitarian things; cookers, Singer sewing machines, Erik and Continental typewriters, tools, bicycles and cutlery made of non-precious metals. Precious metals came from Lwów, the others were post-German. [. . .] and finally, the socialist things which were produced by the post-war deficient People’s Poland.

Like Lwów, the pre-war lieu de mémoire21 and the imposed post-war city Gliwice were sentenced to proximity; the physical entities associated with each space are also forced to ‘coexist, touch each other, absorb each other’s smells, and blend perpetually’.22 These, once separate, objects come into contact with each other and draw new lines of interdependence. The aristocratic paintings, silver, and rugs are a reminder of the family’s privileged position in the pre-war Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, while the post-German functional objects are the most visible symbol of their displacement. At the far end come the socialist counterparts that are, in all respects, inferior and, it seems, also worthless to the family members. Gliwice itself constitutes a threedimensional battlefield of objects where the problems of land and its (dis)possession come to the fore and the identities of the city’s former and present inhabitants come into question. At the same time the author gives a testimony to the experience of growing up amongst the ‘foreign traces’, as Paweł Huelle, one of the Gdańsk school

20 21

Adam Zagajewski, Dwa miasta, pp. 22–23. Pierre Nora’s term lieux de mémoire refers to spaces inscribed with memory-narratives, ‘from such natural, concretely experienced lieux de mémoire as cemeteries, museums, and anniversaries; to the most intellectually elaborate ones — [. . .] such as generation, lineage, local memory [. . .]’. See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), p. 22. Ibid., p. 23.

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writers, described it.23 The ‘foreign traces’, in both artists’ oeuvres, are signs of German presence that have been wiped out by the communist historiography yet preserved in the local landscape and encountered by its new inhabitants. This unusual interaction of objects is also a marker of the (post-)colonial condition of Gliwice. The complex construction of its space, as presented in Zagajewski’s story, conveys what Dariusz Skórczewski once described as ‘dwugłosowość [. . .] [polskiej] literatury [double-voicedness of [. . .] [the Polish] literature]’.24 This doublevoicedness thrives on the literary interrogation, manipulation, and deconstruction of the historical dichotomy of Poland, which comprises the experience of being at both ends of colonialism. In Zagajewski’s essay the power struggle between objects that belong to three different traditions, German, ‘Lwowian’, and communist, shows different stages of Polish (post-)colonialism, starting with its status as a colonizer of the Ukrainian L’viv and ending with its subjugation to Soviet Russia, which is metonymically represented by the mediocre quality of the 1950s objects.25 The senses hidden behind the German objects, however, are more ambiguous. On one hand they recall the most recent German presence in that part of Europe, on the other they reinforce the new settler’s urge to de-colonize and purify the post-German space. Even though it is not as explicit as in other works that depict post-war ‘small homelands’, such as Chwin’s Krótka historia pewnego żartu (A Short Story of a Certain Joke) (1993)26 or Huelle’s Opowiadania na czas przeprowadzki (Moving House: Stories) (1991), the de-colonization and ‘re-polonization’ of post-German space is also taking place here. The physical purification, however, which is present in the works of other ‘small homelands’ writers, is being replaced here by a symbolic purification. The process of overcoming the strangeness of the Silesian city and its symbolic purification run along the lines of its mental transformation into the lost Lwów. Interestingly, the same problems also prove to be important in Tomasz Różycki’s verse, which is analysed in the next section of this article. As the above discussion of Zagajewski’s essay demonstrates, the young author’s family lived mentally in the lost town, often unaware of the power struggle that their nostalgia enforced on the space of Gliwice. They viewed their new home as something that was ‘Gorsze. Mniejsze. Niepozorne. Przemysłowe. Obce [Worse. Smaller. Inconspicuous. Industrial. Strange]’.27 According to George Grabowicz, the essay represents Lwów as ‘the very essence of trauma and loss — on a personal, but even more so on a collective, all-Polish level’,28 which might explain why the two cities, different 23

24 25

27 28

The term comes from an interview with the Gdan´sk writers entitled ‘Dziecin´stwo po Jałcie’ (The post-Yalta Childhood). See ‘Dziecin´stwo po Jałcie’, Tytuł, 3 (1991), pp. 3–21. This dimension of small homelands has been strongly emphasized in the works on Gdan´sk and Silesia, particularly those by Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, Andrzej Zawada, and Tomasz Róz˙ycki. Dariusz Skórczewski, ‘Postkolonialna Polska — projekt (nie)moz˙liwy’, Teksty Drugie, 1–2 (2006), p. 111. Zagajewski’s representation of socialist goods corresponds with David Chioni Moore’s remark that societies that were dominated by the Soviet Union often considered it as inferior and barbaric. See Moore, ‘Is the Postin Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA, 116/1 (2001), p. 121. Boz˙ena Shallcross provides an extensive discussion of the purification of post-German places in Gdan´sk in her analysis of Stefan Chwin’s prose. See Shallcross, ‘The Archeology of Occupation: Stefan Chwin’s Writings on Danzig/Gdan´sk’, in Framing the Polish Home . . ., pp. 116–32. Zagajewski, Dwa miasta, p. 14. George Grabowicz, ‘Mythologizing Lviv/Lwów: Echos of Presence and Absence’, in Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, ed. by John Czaplicka (Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, 2005), p. 328.

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cities, are, in Zagajewski’s words, ‘skazane na trudną miłość [sentenced to a difficult love [. . .]]’.29

‘Vaterland’: Silesia in Tomasz Róz˙ycki’s poems Although it represents a different genre, Tomasz Różycki’s verse echoes most of the problems evoked by ‘Dwa miasta’. It joins, moreover, a broader discussion that the writers of ‘small homelands’ initiated, namely the literary examination of growing up amongst ‘foreign’ traces. It also stresses the strangeness of the Silesian space and throws into prominence the sense of displacement of the expellees from the former Polish eastern borderlands, the so-called Kresy. Różycki’s account, however, is written from a different generational perspective than that of Zagajewski30 and despite being largely autobiographical it paints a poetic and thus altered and fictionalized picture of the Silesian contact zone. The poet’s first volume Vaterland (1997) represents the region as a ‘homeland without a home’. In the poem ‘Entropia’ (‘Entropy’)31 the speaker pays homage to the lost city of Lwów which has been preserved ‘under the eyelids’ of the deportees and is being carried throughout their life like a burden. The city cannot be forgotten even if it mingles with the beauty of a Silesian sunset: Ten czerwiec, kiedy słońce gasi trawniki nad Odrą i kruszą się mosty, powiedziałem, że nie mamy ojczyzny, zaginęła w transporcie, a może rozniosły ją na grzywach armie konne, [. . .] Dlatego każdy uniósł, co mógł pod powiekami, ziemię, piasek, cegły, całe płaty nieba i zapach traw, i teraz nie wiadomo, co z tym robić, jak zamknąć oczy, jak spać i płakać. Jest czerwiec i coraz ciężej z nią iść. Pytam, dlaczego nie spalili Lwowa, dlaczego nie zamienili tego w popiół, lekki dym, nikt nie musiałby nosić takiego ciężaru całe życie i nawet we snach po stokroć upadać.32 This June, as sun douses the lawns by the Odra and the bridges continue to crumble, I say, we have no fatherland. It went missing during the transport, or maybe the cavalry scattered it in their horses’ manes,

29 30

Zagajewski, Dwa miasta, p. 60. Róz˙ycki was born in 1970 and although he did not directly experience the process of assimilation in the postGerman Silesia, as the young Zagajewski did, he inherited it in the form of family history. His relatives were among the deportees from Kresy who, as a result of the Yalta Conference agreement, were relocated to the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’. Tomasz Róz˙ycki, ‘Entropia’ (‘Entropy’), in The Forgotten Keys, trans. by Mira Rosenthal (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2007), pp. 4–5. Permission to reprint kindly given by Zephyr Press. Ibid., p. 4.

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[. . .] That is why each of us collected what we could under our eyelids, earth, sand, bricks, whole flakes of the sky, the scent of grass, and now no one knows what to do with it all, how to close the eyes, how to sleep or to cry. It is June, and it is getting harder to go on. I am asking, why didn’t they burn down Lwów, why didn’t they turn it to ash, light smoke. Then no one would have had to carry such weight throughout life and fall down a hundred times over, even in dreams.33

Similarly to Zagajewski’s essay, here too Lwów plays the crucial role in defining homeland. The land by the Odra becomes a stage in the ‘theatre of memory’ which is dominated by Lwów and its remains that have gathered under the eyelids of the expellees. The process of collecting the earth, sand, bricks, and sky of Lwów, as well as the metaphor of fatherland that has been lost during the transportation, convey the magnitude of loss brought by forced transfers. They also suggests the impossibility of settling-in when the memory of one’s homeland is still alive in the collective consciousness of a community. The nostalgic yearning for the fatherland, which on the one hand ‘went missing’ and on the other has been preserved as a mental burden, dominates the poem. It is, however, the city upon the Odra River, located on the western border of Poland, that becomes the site of this longing and at the same time a space in which various cultural identities intersect and coexist. The poem ‘Vaterland’,34 although it implicitly expresses a similar longing for Lwów, also highlights a different dimension of the territories upon the Odra. It evokes the Germanic traces present in the Silesian contact zone. The region is characterized here as the land of Germanic deities: Marzec, sezon królowania tłustych wiatrów zza Odry. W olszynie i w krzakach pohukują germańskie bożki. [. . .]35 March, the season when full winds reign from across the Odra. In the shrubs and the alder grove Germanic deities rumble. [. . .]36

Moreover, the local forests are full of ‘szwargotów hożych cór Germanii [the jabber of Germania’s buxom daughters]’.37 The Silesian ‘Vaterland’ appears to be a place with a strong Germanic heritage, which silences and subjugates the Polishness of its current inhabitants. First, it is described as the German ‘Vaterland’, and not the Polish ‘ojczyzna’; second, it is still a home for Germanic gods; third, its forests are filled with a ‘szwargot [jabber]’. The noun ‘szwargot’ is of particular importance here. Although it might designate any unintelligible and rapid speech in a foreign 33 34 35 36 37

Tomasz Róz˙ycki, The Forgotten Keys, p. 5. Ibid., pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

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language, it is normally used in Polish to describe the sound of the German language. The term not only encapsulates its foreign character but also implies a negative attitude to the language. As the above fragment indicates, the speaker sees his imposed homeland as utterly Germanic. Furthermore, the use of the word ‘szwargot’ suggests that he views these elements of the contact zone as strange and hostile. The second part of the poem, however, particularly the invocation which closes it, changes the notion of ‘Vaterland’ completely: [. . .] I to jest zdziecinnienie, weltschmerz, grudka soli na dnie popiołu po spalonym mieście, które noszę w pudełku od zapałek. Nie daj się zwieść wiatrom, bo porwą cię, uniosą i porzucą gdzieś w lasach, wśród szwargotów hożych cór Germanii, [. . .]. Jestem tu od dawna, trochę śpię i czytam. Nie mówiłem ci o tym, ale często budzę się w tej pustej łodzi, na środku rzeki, i wypatruję cię na brzegu, we mgle.38 [. . .] And this is senility, weltschmerz, a salt rock buried in the ashes of a burnt town that I carry in a matchbox. Don’t give in to the wind’s deception, or it will sweep you away, carry you off, and abandon you in the woods amid the jabber of Germania’s buxom daughters, [. . .]. I’ve been here for a long time, sleeping and reading a little. I haven’t told you about it, but often I wake up in that empty boat, in the middle of the river, and I watch for you on the shore, in the fog.39

The ‘Vaterland’ appears to be at once a ‘salt rock’ left after a ‘burnt’ lost city and the homeland from a dream to which the speaker refers in the poem’s last verses. In the context of Różycki’s earlier texts, it seems legitimate to associate both of them with Kresy. Both representations, that of the Germanic Silesia in the opening stanzas and that of the lost eastern borderlands in the last stanzas, are united by the word ‘Vaterland’. Although it appears only once, in the title, the idea of ‘Vaterland’ recurs throughout the poem and integrates different notions of homeland. Silesia appears here to be a complex space of contact which, similarly to the one in Zagajewski’s essay, is painted as an ongoing interaction of German / Germanic, Lwowian, and Polish elements. Both Lwowian and Polish components of the contact zone, as presented by the poem, are, however, suppressed and invisible. It is the German / Germanic character of the space that exercises power over its inhabitants and consequently questions their identity and sense of belonging. 38 39

Tomasz Róz˙ycki, The Forgotten Keys, p. 14. Ibid., p. 15.

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Różycki’s later works such as the epic poem Dwanaście stacji (The Twelve Stations) (2004) and his book of poems Kolonie (Colonies) (2006) shed more light on the contact character of Silesia and explicitly express the problems of displacement. They also look at the region from a slightly different angle. Dwanaście stacji is set in the poet’s home town Opole, described in German as Oppeln. Contemporary Opole, as presented in the first lines of the poem, which are stylized in the manner of the famous invocation from Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (Mister Thaddeus) (1834), is an illness: ‘Prątek czarnej żółci, smutny tumor | rozrastający się w duszy [Bacilli of black bile, sad tumour | growing bigger in one’s soul]’.40 This monstrous city, as the narrator explicitly admits, is located on the ‘gęsta rzeka o barwie sinobrunatnej, z pięknym rtęciowym poblaskiem [thick blue and brown river that has a beautiful mercurial glow]’.41 The river, according to the narrator, is inhabited by monsters and mutated carp. This seemingly politically neutral description of a polluted and damaged environment consists in fact of an encoded post-colonial message and a marker of the contact character of the region. Oppeln, like most of Silesia, experienced intensive industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century, while still a Prussian province. Despite the ‘civilising’ benefits of the development of industry, its harmful effects are irreversible and have to be faced by the local population. The same senses are more clearly expressed in the poem ‘Totemy i koraliki’ (Totems and Beads) from the volume Kolonie (The Colonies).42 The speaker sees his home town as an overwhelmingly post-German space which needs to be ‘repolonized’: Wszystko mam poniemieckie — poniemieckie miasto i poniemieckie lasy, poniemieckie groby, poniemieckie mieszkanie, poniemieckie schody i zegar, szafę, talerz, poniemieckie auto i kurtkę, i kieliszek, i drzewa, i radio, i właśnie na tych śmieciach zbudowałem sobie życie, na tych odpadkach, tu będę królował, to trawił i rozkładał, z tego mi wypadło wybudować ojczyznę, potrafię to wszystko jedynie w tlen przerobić, i w azot, i w węgiel, i żyć w powietrzu z sadzą, takie środowisko. [. . .]43 Everything I have is post-German — post-German city and post-German forests, post-German graves, post-German flat, post-German stairs and a clock, wardrobe, plate, post-German car 40 41 42 43

Tomasz Róz˙ycki, Dwanas´cie stacji (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), p. 7. Ibid. Tomasz Róz˙ycki, Kolonie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006), p. 42. Ibid.

EWA STAN´CZYK

and a coat, and a glass, and trees, and a radio, on this junk I have built myself a life, and I will reign here, on this waste, I will digest and process it, this is what I was fated to build homeland with, and I can only recast it into oxygen, and into nitrogen, and coal, and then breathe the air with soot in it, well, it is such an environment [. . .]

The space of the Silesian, post-German town still carries signs of otherness. It makes the process of settling-in even more difficult. The speaker clearly develops ‘a conscious de-colonizing stance’, to use Bill Ashcroft’s phrase.44 He distances himself from the German remains. It is this process that alleviates the strangeness of the landscape and allows one to deal with the sense of displacement. The accumulation of words with the prefix ‘post-’ is a way of separating the self from the hostile elements of the present. It is also a manifestation of the ‘need to clear oneself a space’, to process the remains of the past and to transgress colonialism and the domination of the other culture.45 By designating the forest, flat, graves, stairs, clocks, wardrobes, and other things as ‘post-’, the speaker excludes them from his temporal space, from his here and now. Despite the space-clearing gesture, however, the contact with the German element is inevitable. It is impossible not to build on the indigenous culture. The totems symbolising the settlers of Oppeln cannot be removed, as they are the substance of the place. The ‘otherness’ of the town is its conditio sine qua non. The harmful outcomes of the region’s industrialization, which are seen by the speaker as a legacy of the German past, demonstrate how contact between two cultures can persist through objects and space. This interaction between the individual and the space he attempts to domesticate creates tensions and transforms the literary contact zone into the site of a power struggle. In the poem under discussion it takes the form of a quest for belonging which oscillates between the need to ‘repolonize’ and re-colonize the space and the necessity to achieve this through recasting and decolonizing the imposed post-German remains. This process of purification of space that is so important in the works of other ‘small homeland’ writers, particularly Paweł Huelle and Stefan Chwin, proves to be crucial in Różycki’s oeuvre also. At the same time, it differs significantly from the ‘theatre of memory’ that Zagajewski’s protagonists enacted in order to forget about the strangeness of the Silesian space. Neither is it the nostalgic yearning for the lost Kresy that dominated Różycki’s earlier texts. The speaker from the poem under discussion is consciously embracing the post-German remains and is agreeing to build on them and recast them into his new homeland. This acknowledgement of the German heritage of Silesia, even if at times full of surrender, represents in a way the post-EU enlargement consciousness in which the multicultural past is, if not celebrated, at least acknowledged and recognized as valid. 44

Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back. Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures, 2nd ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 11. For a discussion of the notion of post-colonial ‘space clearing’ see Kwame A. Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, Critical Inquiry, 17.2 (1991), p. 346, p. 348.

POLISH CONTACT ZONES

Różycki’s poetic images of Silesia correspond also with Pratt’s remark that the different cultural influences that clash within a contact zone are involved in an active and mutually shaping relationship. It proves that the clear-cut division between self and other does not exist and that the space of cultural contact is in fact a hybrid and fluid construct. The above survey of Różycki’s work has shown a specific course of development in the presentation of the Silesian contact zone, from the nostalgic illusions of Lwów as the only homeland, through the gradual rediscovery of Germanic heritage in Silesia, to the ‘re-polonization’ of the region, and finally back to an all-encompassing ‘multiculturalism of space’ that reflects the past ethno-cultural make-up of the local population. Although deeply personal, the poet’s preoccupation with space and identity proves to be universal for all ‘small homelands’ writers. Adam Zagajewski has gone even further and described Różycki’s work as ‘transpersonal’ since ‘the persona of his poetry holds the memory of an entire family or tribe, or perhaps even of society in general’.46

Conclusion Although the texts discussed in this article represent different genres, all of them reveal a similar understanding of the Silesian space, in which the search for Polish identity is inevitably intertwined with the region’s Germanic heritage and the collective memory of Kresy. The Silesian contact zone, as presented in the works of Zagajewski and Różycki, demonstrates a complex deployment of power, motivated in many cases by the post-colonial condition of Poland. The coercion involved in most of these cultural encounters is often a source of tensions and conflicts, which lead on to attempts to adopt and come to terms with the imposed arrangement of space. In Zagajewski’s essay it takes the form of a mental withdrawal from reality, while in Różycki’s oeuvre it is a process of a gradual overcoming of its strangeness. The textual contact zones, as a means of dealing with genuine cultural tensions, convey the impossibility of detaching oneself from existing space and building one’s identity without referring to it. In this way, the Silesian contact zone throws into prominence the important problems of the twentieth century and contemporary Poland, such as migration, displacement, and the search for belonging.

Adam Zagajewski, ‘Foreword’, in Tomasz Róz˙ycki, The Forgotten Keys, p. XIV.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 86–100

Mail-Order Brides: Content Analysis of Eastern European Internet Marriage Agencies Yuliya Zabyelina1 School of International Studies, University of Trento, Italy

Along the lines of a qualitative inquiry, this article discusses two dichotomous academic interpretations of mail-order-bride services: it investigates the conditions under which mail-order-bride agencies have proliferated into a large-scale industry, and analyses the content speciﬁcities of mail-orderbride agencies that advertise Eastern European brides. Methodologically, the research employs a three-level content analysis with a sample of twenty-four marriage agencies selected from the top one hundred entries from the Google.com search engine. The ﬁndings indicate that not only do mail-orderbride agencies merchandise Eastern European women as a trendy product, they also promote inequalities on the basis of economic condition, gender, race, and national origin.

Introduction In the early 1990s, two historical developments coincided to turn the mail-order-bride market into a highly profitable business operating on a global scale: the first was the collapse of the USSR with the opening up of the borders of the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; and the second was the techno-informational revolution of the information and communication technologies and transportation facilities. The marriage brokers quickly moved to the internet as the most favourable location for the industry — fast, cheap, unregulated, and easily available — which enabled them to expand the variety of their catalogues, hence, reaching the global market. From the beginning of the new millennium, the mail-order-bride industry has experienced meteoric growth. The simplest Google.com search for mail-order brides yields a minimum of 500,000 entries.2 The majority of the entries are dedicated to Eastern European women looking for foreign husbands, as a rule, from more affluent

1 2

PhD candidate in International Studies. E-mail: zabelina_ua@yahoo.co.uk This search was made on 10 April 2008.

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countries. Driven by poverty, unemployment, and media images of Western lifestyles, women agree to become internet brides. They accept risky offers of marriage, hoping to find a better life. Although some mail-order brides finally find the opportunities they seek, many turn out to be the victims of violence, sexual exploitation, and even human trafficking.3 This study will evaluate the development of the mail-order-bride industry and explore the impact of information and communication technologies on the expansion of this industry. However, the main contribution of this article to the field will be the content analysis of mail-order-bride websites that advertise Eastern European brides. The central research questions to be addressed are the following: • • •

What are the differences between different marriage agencies regarding their status and outreach? What is the visual content of mail-order-bride websites? What are the specificities of the services provided by marriage agencies?

Specifying fundamental concepts When dealing with the poly-semantic richness of the terms mail-order-bride and marriage agency, it is necessary to reconsider a variety of overlapping definitions, all of which suggest that these two terms could be used synonymously. In a 1999 report to the U.S. Congress, mail-order-bride agency and marriage agency are presented as similar terms and are defined as: . . . a corporation, partnership, business, or other legal entity, whether or not organized under the laws of the United States or any State, that [. . .] for profit offers [. . .] dating, matrimonial, or social referral services to nonresident noncitizens, by — (i) an exchange of names, telephone numbers, addresses, or statistics; (ii) selection of photographs; or (iii) a social environment provided by the organization in a country other than the United States.4

Vittoria Luda di Cortemiglia, Associate Expert at the United Nations International Crime Research Institute (UNICRI), also argues for the overlapping nature of the two terms. She presents a very general and outspoken definition of a mail-order-bride/ marriage agency that is defined in her report as an online recruiting network, where ‘pictures, body measurements and descriptions of advertised women are provided’.5 This definition is easy to comprehend and is more widely used in public discourses on the topic. In contrast, Louise Langevin, Professor at the Faculty of Law at Laval University, questions the appropriateness of the term marriage agency, asserting that it does not reflect actual practices and activities: 3

Donna Hughes, Pimps and Predators on the Internet: Globalizing the Sexual Exploitation of Women and Children (1999) <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/pprep.htm> [accessed 30 December 2007] International Matchmaking Organizations. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: A Report to the U.S. Congress (1999) <http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid= 9ba5d0676988d010VgnVCM10000048f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=2c039c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d 6a1RCRD> [accessed 30 December 2007], p. 38. Vittoria Luda di Cortemiglia, Trafficking in Minors for Commercial Sexual Exploitation: Ukraine (United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, 2004) <www.unicri.it/wwd/trafficking/minors/docs/ dr_ukraine.pdf> [accessed 3 November 2007]

YULIYA ZABYELINA

They [marriage agencies] place the emphasis on the ultimate goal of marriage, which may or may not take place [. . .]. In fact, a woman attempting to immigrate through this process will not necessarily achieve her objective if the man she is to marry changes his mind, keeps her under threat of not fulfilling his promise or never had the intention of getting married at all, simply wishing instead to exploit her for services.6

Although the term does not imply any relationship to human trafficking or sexual exploitation, Langevin argues that ‘introduction agencies use this tactic of disguising the true objectives of their clients to mislead the more naive women’.7 Although Langevin’s argument about the inadequacy of the term marriage agency is important, the operative terminology of this article cannot be limited to just one concept of a marriage agency, since it is likely to significantly reduce the availability of the data. Using the concepts mail-order-bride agency and marriage agency interchangeably builds the poly-semantic variety that is necessary to investigate the heterogeneity of internet international personal introduction services.

Overview of prior research Although there is a considerable scarcity of theoretical and empirical research on online international introduction services, some scholars as well as representatives of international governmental and non-governmental organizations have succeeded in offering profound explanations of this growing socio-economic and cultural phenomenon. The entire corpus of studies conducted in the field can be roughly divided into two dichotomous groups set up artificially for the structural purposes of this article. The first category includes the research produced by academic scholars who predominantly claim that mail-order-bride websites are the new socio-cultural and technological means of sexual exploitation of women. Those in the second category, in contrast, tend to challenge the advocacy literature that condemns marriage agencies, asserting that this industry is a positive social development, an embodiment of international feminism, which has no connection to human trafficking or any other form of abuse. Donna Hughes asserts that the two components of globalization — rapid economic development and the advancement of information technology — have escalated the commodification and objectification of women that she links to the increase in global sexual exploitation. She acknowledges that the mail-order-bride industry is a new type of ‘global enterprise premised on men’s search for compliant, non-threatening women’.8 Hughes’s research is outstanding for its detailed description of the 6

7 8

Louise Langevin and Marie-Claire Belleau, Trafficking in Women in Canada: a Critical Analysis of the Legal Framework Governing Immigrant Live-in Caregivers and Mail-order Brides (Québec City: Université Laval 2000) <http://www.swccfc.gc.ca/pubs/pubspr/066231252X/200010_066231252X_1_e.html> [accessed 30 December 2007], p. 79. Ibid., p. 80. Donna Hughes, ‘The Internet and Sex Industries: Partner in Global Sexual Exploitation’, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (Spring 2000) <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/siii.htm> [accessed 13 December 2007], p. 37.

MAIL ORDER BRIDES

interdependency between information and communication technologies and the mailorder-bride industry. However, it lacks a systematized dataset to support her major theoretical statements. Donna Lee explains that ‘it [the mail-order-bride industry] is the organized business of capitalizing on women’s disadvantaged positions in pursuit of profit for the benefit of male consumers’.9 Kathryn Lloyd further acknowledges that mailorder-bride agencies are a means of trafficking women. ‘Operating virtually without regulation, the modern “mail-order-bride” industry prospers by exploiting the power disparities between men and women, the rich and the poor, those from developed economies and those from developing economies. Young women [. . .] are transported from their homes, like products, to male citizens of economically advantaged nations under the supervision of for-profit companies known as “mail-order-bride” agencies’.10 Contrary to the arguments presented above, Lisa Simons suggests some positive consequences of the mail-order-bride industry. She applies feminist theory to international matchmaking and claims that marriage agencies are a ‘positive force in the context of shifting gender relations within and between the countries involved’, where ‘the demand for foreign wives is complex and is not necessarily associated with a desire to dominate or to “colonize” foreign women’.11 She argues that ‘bride migration both reflects and contributes to international feminism in ways that have gone previously unrecognized by social scientists’, when women, despite their lack of self-identification as feminists, actually ‘embody feminist values of desire for greater gender equity’.12 These two perspectives on the role of marriage agencies are obviously positioned dichotomously in relation to each other. The studies conducted by Hughes, Lee, and Lloyd only occasionally include interviews with women who have experienced life as mail-order brides. Their arguments that connect the mail-order-bride industry to human trafficking and crime are, as a rule, based on a general belief that advertising is sexist and migration springs out of desperation and poverty. Their research is mostly based on media and advertising analyses that contain an analytic pitfall common to advocacy literature. Studies in the second group which only view marriage agencies as a positive development in the international feminist movement are also quite unconvincing. These studies neither explain nor explore criminal cases of marital fraud committed against women brought from developing countries via mail-order-bride intermediaries. Although court cases are rare, they might be a good indicator of some of the tendencies towards mediated sexual exploitation and, perhaps, human trafficking.

Donna Lee, ‘Mail Fantasy: Global Sexual Exploitation in the Mail-order-bride Industry and Proposed Legal Solutions’, Asian Law Journal, 5 (1998), pp. 139–79 <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/pubtrf.htm> [accessed 11 December 2007], p. 141. Kathlyn Lloyd, ‘Wives for Sale: The Modern International Mail-order-bride Industry’, Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business, 20 (2000), pp. 341–54 <www.popcenter.org/problems/Supplemental_ Material/trafficked_women/Lloyd_2000.pdf> [accessed 11 December 2007], p. 351. Lisa Anne Simons, ‘Marriage, Migration, and Markets: International Matchmaking and International Feminism’, (unpublished dissertation, University of Denver, 2001) <usaimmigrationattorney.com/images/ MarriageMigrationMarkets.pdf>[accessed 11 December 2007], p. 161. Ibid., p. 162.

YULIYA ZABYELINA

The mail-order-bride industry Some scholars have provided explicit evidence of the proliferation of mail-order-bride agencies that have increasingly developed due to the countless opportunities of the internet and other ICTs. They have shown that mail-order-bride agencies have been transformed into a multi-million-dollar industry that perfectly reflects the new commercial opportunities that the internet offers in the ‘marketing of women from the Third World countries to men in the industrialized nations’.13 The term mail-order-bride industry, defined as an ‘organized, large-scale economic activity [. . .] which involves buying, selling, the exchange of goods or the sale of services — [. . .] the object of [which] is ultimately the purchase and sale of the brides themselves’, unambiguously reflects the scale of the services marriage agencies offer and the amount of profits they make.14 Robert Scholes estimated in 1996 that the number of marriages resulting from mail-order agencies annually was 4000. In his most recent study in the spring of 1998, he estimated the number to be within a range of 4000 to 6000. He attributes this increase to the growth in the number of women listed annually, from about 100,000 in 1996 to 150,000 currently.15 Donna Hughes conducted a quantitative study on the recruitment of women by marriage agencies in the countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly Eastern Europe. ‘The search found almost 500 marriage agency sites with women from the former Soviet republics. Two hundred and nineteen (219) of these Web sites were indexed into a database. The 219 marriage agencies had a total of 119,649 women on their sites’.16 According to her data: . . . the countries with the largest numbers of women were the Russian Federation with over 62,000 women, followed by Ukraine with almost 32,000, and Belarus with almost 13,000. Countries with a few thousand recruited women were: Kazakhstan (3037), Kyrgyzstan (4190), Latvia (1760), and Uzbekistan (1139). The other countries had less than 1000 recruited women: Azerbaijan (204), Estonia (551), Lithuania (626), Moldova (884), and a few countries had less than a couple of dozen women, Armenia (23), Georgia (7), Tajikistan (8), and Turkmenistan (25).17

The role of information and communication technologies Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played a crucial role in the development of the mail-order-bride industry. Without the technological means to make the industry globally reachable, easily accessible for payments, fast in the

13 14 15

Louise Langevin and Marie-Claire Belleau, Trafficking in Women in Canada, p. 80. Ibid., p. 81. Robert Scholes, ‘How Many Mail-order Brides?’, Immigration Review, 28 (Spring, 1997) <http://www.cis. org/articles/1997/IR28/mail-orderbrides.html> [accessed 30 December 2007] Donna Hughes, ‘The Impact of the Use of New Communications and Information Technologies on Trafficking in Human Beings for Sexual Exploitation: Role of Marriage Agencies in Trafficking in Women and Trafficking in Images of Sexual Exploitation’ (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Committee for Equality between Women and Men, 2001) <http://www.coe.int/t/e/human_rights/equality/06._Trafficking_in_human_beings> [accessed 11 March 2008] p. 5. Ibid., p. 5.

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rendering of services, and confidential and highly visualized, there could never have been such a grand-scale business as international matchmaking. At the beginning of the twentieth century, mail-order-bride agencies were initially operated only on the basis of distributing paper catalogues, of which there were very few. Enjoying the advantages of the new communicative patterns, the mail-order-bride industry has entirely moved over to the internet. The wide distribution of the internet and the emergence and wide distribution of other information and communication technologies have revolutionized mail-order bride catalogues, making introductions faster, more time-efficient, and more enjoyable. The Council of Europe Group of Specialists has identified some of the likely ways that ICTs might be attractive and advantageous for the mail-order-bride industry:18 (1) Widespread, easy access to the internet. ‘The Internet [. . .] can reach huge numbers of potential consumer-husbands at very little cost. Frequent updating of information, the distribution of greater quantities of information, and the transmission of high-quality images and sound at low cost make it more attractive than the paper catalogues’.19 (2) The internet enables the owners of mail-order-bride agencies to keep the prices of their services affordable, while they can update pages quickly and easily, enabling mail-order-bride agencies to make higher, faster, and more secure profits. ‘Some services claim they are updating their selection of women bi-weekly’.20 (3) The users remain anonymous and their communication with mail-order brides is confidential. (4) Selling through the internet is a lucrative trade that does not require any major investment; a company with the most unsophisticated technology and little experience could easily start up a new mail-order-bride enterprise. (5) The internet is an excellent marketing and advertising tool, facilitating the promotion of the product to potential customers and the recruitment of women for the catalogues. Mail-order-bride agents have chosen the internet as their most preferred marketing location. Marriage agencies’ advertisements have become one of the most widely spread forms of commercial information and are aired in a variety of different formats, i.e. standard banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, and layovers. (6) Finally, the internet, primarily a linguistic medium, also appears to be an important visual medium, where high-quality images are posted, transferred, and exchanged. For producers of information, it is also a means of generating high economic revenues. The trading, marketing, and production of sexually explicit material have been ‘moved [. . .] into the home, where images can be

19 20

YULIYA ZABYELINA

scanned, produced, uploaded and downloaded in privacy [. . .]. All of these technologies have made it easier to produce, store and distribute images’.21 As one mail-order-bride agent explained: ‘So when the World-Wide Web came along, I saw that it was a perfect venue for this kind of business. The paper catalogs were so expensive that their quality was usually very poor; but on the Web you can publish high-resolution full-color photos which can be browsed by everyone in the World’.22

Content analysis of Eastern European mail-order-bride websites Methodology Methodologically, this research is based on a qualitative analysis of mail-order-bride websites that advertise Eastern European brides. The principal sample of the study includes twenty-four mail-order-bride agencies chosen from the top one hundred entries of the Google and Yandex search engines.23 Different search engines utilize different search criteria better. This ensures that the most appropriate and heterogeneous websites are included in the sample. As the primary sampling was conducted, the heterogeneity of the units of analysis, i.e. the combination of textual and visual elements in the original sampling, necessitated certain methodological adjustments in the design of this research, namely, the introduction of secondary sampling (subsampling). The sub-sampling procedure allowed the grouping of the principal sample into three sub-samples. The first sub-sample presents the classification of mailorder-bride agencies based on the reliability of their services and their overall legal status. The second sub-sample is built on a division of the visual data into three main categories. The images posted on different mail-order-bride websites are classified according to the degree of sexual explicitness. This measure is subsequently taken as an indicator of the potential abuse of the women. The third sub-sample dissects text-based elements of analysis. This level of content analysis sets up a classification of the services rendered by the sampled mail-order-bride agencies. The different elements of analysis in each of the sub-samples were preliminary analysed within a pre-face examination. The pre-face analysis was conducted in order to become familiarized with the data and, at the same time, establish a general working framework for the codes. Each unit of analysis from the three sub-samples was thoroughly reviewed and ascribed a code or a few codes. The codes ascribed to the data were joined together into coded groups.24 The three coding schemes, with 21

22 23

‘Group of Specialists on the Impact of the Use of New Information Technologies on Trafficking in Human Beings for the Purpose of Sexual Exploitation’, (Council of Europe, 2003) <http://www.coe.int/T/E/ human_rights/trafficking/3_Documents/Reports/02_EG-SNT%282002%2909revE.asp#TopOfPage> [accessed 11 December 2007], p. 20. Donna Hughes, ‘The Internet and Sex Industries: Partner in Global Sexual Exploitation’, p. 5. Selected mail-order-bride agencies: Anastasia International <http://uk.anastasia-international.com>; Edem Marriage Agency <http://edem-club.kiev.ua>; Marriage Trip Agency <http://www.marriagetrip.com/index.cfm — Marriage Trip.com>; Kyiv Connections Marriage Agency <http://www.kievconnections.com>; All Ukraine Beauties Marriage Agency <http://www.allukrainebeauties.com>, The Best Kherson Brides <http:// khersonbrides.com>; Annuchka Marriage Agency <http://en.annabarmina.com/ladies/ea9344.shtml>. The grouping procedure was based on the researcher’s interpretation of whether a particular code could be assigned to an image.

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one for each of the sub-samples, were set up on the basis of the coded groups. This allowed labels (categories) to be assigned to sections of data from the twenty-four selected websites. Based on the categories, three typologies were formed in order to systematize the results: 1. 2. 3.

typology of status and outreach of mail-order-bride agencies; typology of images on mail-order-bride websites; typology of services offered by mail-order-bride agencies.

Typology of status and outreach of mail-order-bride agencies As previously highlighted, there exists a diverse variety of different types of mailorder-bride agencies that have successfully found their niche over the internet. These agencies vary considerably in their status (official registration) and the outreach/scale of their activities (i.e. global, regional, local). The following codes were established: • • •

outreach/scale (global, regional, local); networking and cross-posting of catalogues; official registration.

Category I The coding procedure led to the differentiation of three categories of mail-order-bride agencies. The sampled units in Category I are characterized as the marriage agencies managed professionally. They hold official registration from local authorities or another legally empowered organization, depending on the region. These marriage agencies are typically registered as limited liability companies (LLC), privately owned enterprises (POE), or free enterprises (FE). Mail-order-bride agencies of this category have, to some extent, a global reach through their affiliations cross-posted on other websites or through extensive internet marketing connections to front-running corresponding affiliates in Europe and in the U.S. They do not just profit from the services they provide but also attempt to reinvent the business and make the introduction, payment, and registration processes transparent, reliable, and trustworthy. Globaladies.com (GL) is a good example of a Category I marriage agency. This online company claims to be ‘an email forwarding platform for Russian ladies who do not have their own access to the internet’ that operates across the entire value chain of the industry and has redefined many of the principles by which such business is conducted.25 One can also find testimony to their ethics and principles on the Globaladies.com (GL) website. Their law enforcement contribution is also advertised on their website; according to the owners, it is supposed to ‘protect the rights of women and maximally exclude the likelihood of the recruitment of women from the catalogues of Globaladies.com by potential traffickers or marital abusers’.26 This agency’s services are in compliance with the International Marriage Broker

25 26

Globaladies.com (GL), <http://globaladies.com> [accessed 13 April 2008] Testimony to their ethics and principles can be found at: <http://globaladies.com/rwg_header2.cfm?page=rwg_ preventfraud_content.cfm&vsrc=Internal&vcf=GL&vovkey=Russian%20Women&vmtype=&vsite=RWG& vpage=B00512&vref=1> [accessed 12 April 2008]

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Regulation Act (IMBRA). This means that if a woman’s personal contact information is requested by a customer, the agency representative will search for the name of the person requesting contact in the National Sex Offender’s Registry. If this person’s name is found in the database, he will not be allowed to use the service.

Category II The mail-order-bride agencies in Category II can be best of all described as businesses lacking the resources, experience, and capacity to properly manage their services. Such marriage agencies are mostly found on the internet. This is, therefore, the largest category of operating mail-order-bride enterprises. These marriage agencies are not usually founded by professionals but, as a rule, by those men/women who have married through international introduction services and claim to have enough experience in this field to be able to arrange for other couples to meet as well. Advertising this prior experience is the main means by which these mail-order-bride firms gain credibility and the clientele’s interest and support. They offer peer advice, tips, and recommendations, and they generally have very subjective content on their website. The owners tend to place a big emphasis on testimonial letters and, importantly, visuals of successful marriages. The websites of Category II marriage agencies do not contain any statement regarding the protection of women’s rights or any ethical codes. Neither are these agencies inclined to investigate claims of abuse. A good example of a Category II marriage agency is Elena’s Models.27 This agency has a strong brand, marketing Eastern European women. Their goal is to ‘provide a safe environment for Russian-speaking and Eastern European women and western men seeking a partner with the intention of future marriage’.28 This marriage agency’s main selling point is that the ladies included in the catalogues consist of ‘educated, professional women, who are established in life and would like to meet western men for dating and relationships’.29 The agency was created by Elena Petrova, born in Ekaterinburg (Russia), who went through the process of marrying a Western man and settling down on the Gold Coast in Australia. She is presented on the website as a certified specialist in transnational marriages, the author of many articles published in the Russian Women Gazette and Russian Women Magazine, and on NewWoman. ru, and many other websites. Elena Petrova’s book, 101 Tips on How to Marry a Foreigner: Practical Guidance for Russian Women Seeking Partners Abroad, is described as the best manual about marrying a foreigner for Russian women. Petrova has appeared on TV in several countries and her interviews and articles about her websites have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines all over the world.30 Category III Category III mail-order-bride agencies are the least reliable internet marketing enterprises, providing low-quality information that is cross-posted from a parent 27 28 29 30

Elena’s Elena’s Elena’s Elena’s

Models, Models, Models, Models,

<http://www.elenasmodels.com> [accessed 12 April 2008] <http://www.elenasmodels.com/press/08082006release.htm> [accessed 12 April 2008] <http://www.elenasmodels.com/press/menstats.htm> [accessed 12 April 2008] <http://www.elenasmodels.com/about/index.htm> [accessed 14 April 2008]

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website. They mainly benefit from pay per click (PPC) — an online marketing model whereby the advertisement posted on the internet bids on keywords and key visuals as the main predictors of the target market’s interests. These ads are called a sponsored link or sponsored ads and appear next to, or above, the usual results on search engine results pages such as Google.com. These marriage agencies depend highly on the number of clicks on their banners aired on free personal sites and blogs. They place ads and charge both men and women fees for managing the communication and matchmaking processes. These websites are used to find gullible women and men who can be exploited. Apart from that, this group of marriage agencies plays the role of an intermediary between the main website that compiles actual catalogues and the offshoot websites which are currently booming on the internet. This tendency makes the mail-order-bride industry a widespread, profitable enterprise which does not require either much human input or technological investment while generating quite high revenues. Robert Scholes has provided a good example of an agency in this category by tracking the content of Goodwife.com.31 At the beginning of his experiment, Scholes counted 153 daughter mail-order-bride links. Two months later, the number of affiliates increased to as many as 202 on the parent website. ‘In June of 2000, we identified 340 on the same parent web site. It should be noted, however, that there were also some 233 MOB sites listed on the parent web site “planet-love.com”, not to mention the countless other web sites we undoubtedly failed to find’.32 Although individual mail-order-bride websites exist on the internet, in order to increase their visibility and advertise more effectively, parent websites host a large number of sites specializing in the cross-posting of ads and a wide variety of thumbnail visuals of available mail-order brides. These agencies tend not to tolerate women’s rights and merely present women as a means of quickly making profits. To support this argument, it is enough to mention the catalogues issued by Goodwife.com, where women are grouped according to their ethnicity (e.g. Russian brides, Asian brides, Filipino women, etc.). Such a representation of women promotes ethnical stereotypes absolutely violating their human rights. Goodwife.com proudly claims on its website that male consumers are offered ‘97 sites for Asian brides, 54 sites for Latin brides, 150 sites for Soviet brides and 39 multi-ethnic sites’.33 This website and those of other marriage agencies of this category illustrate the cultural clichés that characterize the entire industry as a highly prejudiced and low-quality production. For example, Web sites for agencies specializing in Asian brides call themselves ‘Cherry Blossoms’, ‘Siam Lady’, ‘Exotic Asian Women’, ‘China Doll’, ‘Exotic Orchid’ and ‘Pearls of the Orient’, in order to emphasize the exotic aspect of these women. On the other hand, MOB agencies devoted to East European women emphasize the European aspect of the brides they ‘offer’, and have names such as ‘East Meets West’, ‘Club Natalia’, ‘Euro Girl’, ‘Savva La Belle’, ‘Siberia Princess’, ‘Kirov Classic Love’ and ‘Amour Bulgaria’. The

32 33

Robert Scholes, ‘How Many Mail-order Brides?’, GoodWife.com, <http://www.goodwife.com> [accessed 18 April 2008]. Louise Langevin and Marie-Claire Belleau, Trafficking in Women in Canada, p. 93. Langevin and Belleau, Trafficking in Women in Canada, p. 96.

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multi-ethnic sites are just as suggestive and stereotyped, with names such as ‘African Princess’, ‘Cuban Affairs’ and ‘Latin Treasures’.34

The women in these catalogues are merchandised using artificially created, discriminatory categories. ‘Using ethnic categories, MOB Web sites encourage the consumerhusband to preselect a bride according to his preferences, without confronting him with his racial prejudices with regard to other groups’.35 Some of the companies also play on the women’s submissiveness and emphasize the exotic, culturally- and historically-specific aspects of the women. For example, an image on GetMarriedNow.com presents a Russian woman in a swimming suit posing as if she were a model.36 The caption underneath says ‘Will I offend the American women because I am not overweight?’ Such a statement plays on the stereotype that American women are overweight and that Russian brides are, therefore, ‘better’. Other inscriptions next to the images of Russian brides reinforce a different set of predispositions: ‘Russia is famous for good sex and crime. I don’t do crime!’ The emphasis on historical and cultural specificities is also quite frequent. ‘Life in a Siberian Gulag isn’t that bad . . .’ is written next to a nice-looking girl in an orange outfit. ‘Did anyone say borsch?’ is inscribed above an image of Russian bride.

Typology of images on mail-order-bride websites Related to the content analysis based on the visual elements of mail-order-bride websites, the coding procedure finally led to the creation of three themes/categories. The categories were grouped so that they made up a continuum that enabled the construction of a simple grading scheme. (1) The first category, indicative images, assigned in the typology, includes two groups of images — indicative portrait and indicative posing. Indicative portrait images are typically non-erotic and non-sexual pictures. An indicative portrait image is usually a close-up shot where the emotional state of a mailorder bride is emphasized. The viewer is drawn into the subject’s personal space and emotions. Images included in the indicative posing group are usually more distanced shots where a mail-order bride is shown at full length. This category of images is most frequently used for the general introduction of a bride, as both her face (indicative portrait) and her body (indicative posing) can be critically evaluated by the subscriber. (2) Images in the second category — erotic images — are, as a rule, shots of women in revealing evening gowns, bathing suits, lingerie, etc. These images are more sexually explicit than those in the previous category. Women are generally positioned in seductive poses which suggest a sexually arousing context. (3) Finally, the last category in the classification of images is the category labelled porn. The images included in this category explicitly present women as sexual subjects with the distinct intention of sexually exciting the viewer. Women are captured in sexually provocative poses which also include the 34 35 36

Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p.96. GetMarriedNow.com, <http://www.getmarriednow.com> [accessed 15 June 2008]

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demonstration of some sexual activity as if in motion. Explicit activity refers to images where women’s genital areas are revealed and where images frequently involve masturbation. The content analysis of the mail-order-bride websites indicates that most of the mail-order-bride agencies provide an increasingly sexualized representation of the women in their catalogues. Women are depicted as sexual objects whereby their sexual attributes and physical attractiveness de-emphasize the existence of women as human beings. Women are presented as easily accessible, compliant, and complaisant, with exceptional appearances, but not necessarily outstanding levels of education, professional skills, or matrimonial capacities as a mother and a housewife. The sexualization of marriage agencies, particularly in its visual aspect, brings about crucial social shifts in the expression of sexuality and is closely connected with another theoretical construct derived from feminism — the sexual objectification of women. Women become alienated from their present, past, or future. Their life history does not matter. What matters is the image, as the main source of meaning, relevance, and choice. Women are merchandised and advertised to men who can evaluate, rate, and discard them. Men pick out women from online picture catalogues where they can designate the descriptive parameters of the woman they want: maximum and minimum age, height, weight, the size of her bust, waist and hips, general interests, and geographical location. It becomes obvious that women are placed in a position of subordination in relationship to the ‘consumers-husbands’. Agencies depict women as objects, highlighting their physical features, having special promotional sales of catalogues, referring to the women with numbers or codes, and implying that some women are younger, newer, or ‘better quality’ than others by making access to their addresses more expensive. The process of meeting women through an internet-based ‘marriage intermediary’ is sometimes portrayed as a process with three simple steps, ‘browse, select, proceed to checkout’, similar to that of any other online shopping business that sells books, high-tech gadgets, clothes, etc.37 Fierce competition among mail-order-bride websites has pushed the owners of the industry to advertise and present increasingly flashy, blatant, and attention-grabbing visual materials. It is also likely that the content of mail-order-bride agencies will become more sexualized in the future, regardless of the counter-efforts of selected countries or cyber communities. This makes it necessary to reconsider the rights of women who are becoming increasingly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse within the unregulated virtual flows.

Typology of services offered by mail-order-bride agencies Mail-order-bride agencies offer their subscribers a variety of services to assist them in meeting the mail-order brides of their choice. These services can be found in abundance on the internet. Yet, the operations of mail-order-bride agencies remain largely heterogeneous and, therefore, rather unknown and unexplored. In this section,

Michele Clark, ‘Mail-order Brides: Exploited Dreams. Testimony of Michele A. Clark’ (The Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 2004) <http://foreign. senate.gov/testimony/2004/ClarkTestimony040713.pdf> [accessed 11 January 2008], p. 4.

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there will be an attempt to systematically go over the third sub-sample and explore the typical services a consumer-husband would be offered. This section will explain in better detail the various specificities of the services available in the mail-order-bride trade. Mail-order-bride catalogues Mail-order-bride agencies post online advertisements that target male subscribers on the internet. These advertisements resemble personal ads for singles similar to those which can be found in newspapers, magazines, etc. However, these ads are different in the way that they are much more visualized and provide more detailed information. Each of the brides in the mail-order-bride agency is usually given a personal number on the website. Her personal advertisement usually includes the following information: name, age, a few physical details (eye colour, hair colour, the size of her bust, waist and hips, some distinguishing personality features), as well as some of her qualifications (knowledge of English), and interests. Additionally, the ads also provide the details of the place the bride comes from or identifies herself with. The personal advertisement usually includes two shots of the bride â&#x20AC;&#x201D; one is a photo of her face (portrait), the second usually features the bride at full height. These photos are usually available for free. There are additional photos available, i.e. photos taken in different postures and/or at different places. As a rule, additional photos require registration and extra payment from the interested male. The advertisement might also include the brideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preference of what type of husband she is looking for. Having categorized all the women in their database, mail-order-bride agencies offer their subscribers a convenient search tool which is supposed to make the search for the most suitable bride/brides easy and fast. Men are offered the opportunity to supply a maximum and minimum age, preferred height, weight, place of residence, and any additional information about the bride they are seeking. The men interested in the women subsequently offered will be asked to subscribe either to the site or to the catalogue. Only after this step is it possible to correspond with the brides. Later, the subscribers are asked to pay one fee for each bride. If the subscriber is hesitating about the choice of the profiles that he is interested in, he might want to choose another available option â&#x20AC;&#x201D; either paying a lump fee for several contacts or paying for a subscription for a certain period of time (a month, six months, a year). Some mail-order-bride websites also offer video clips which feature women engaged in an activity like dancing, cooking, singing, etc.38 Interviews with the women are frequently posted online as well. Videos are, of course, subject to additional payment. Moreover, mail-order-bride agencies also have a rating system, showing the most popular brides or the brides who have been contacted by the highest number of clients. Correspondence At this stage, when the potential husband has paid the registration or access fee, he can proceed to the next step of actually corresponding with the bride or brides he 38

For example, see Globaladies.com, <http://globaladies.com> [accessed 14 June 2008]

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has chosen. He is offered the choice of contacting a bride via e-mail, voice- and video-chats. The mail-order-bride agency offers translation and interpretation services which are paid by the subscriber. During this so-called ‘courting’ stage, it is suggested that the consumer-husband send presents to the bride that the mail-orderbride agency delivers. The gifts usually include chocolate, money, flowers, jewellery, and lingerie. The correspondence between the bride and the consumer-husband continues for three to fourteen months before they decide to marry. In cyberspace, that period is undoubtedly shorter because of the instantaneous nature of e-mail. During the immigration process, correspondence, gifts and telephone bills are provided as evidence of the existence of a genuine relationship between the consumer-husband and the bride.39

Tours Most of the mail-order-bride agencies in the sub-sample (87%) recommend that the potential husband meet with the bride/brides of his choice in her country. In the sample, there is no record of a case of a bride going to visit her future husband. The mail-order-bride agencies invite him to come to his chosen country on a romantic trip or prenuptial tour. The marriage agencies in the sample offer three types of tour: (1) The consumer-husband can decide to go and meet his bride. The agency assists him with the logistics of the trip (transportation, accommodation, etc.), as well as providing him with tips about the cultural background of his potential wife, i.e. customs and cultural specificities. (2) The consumer-husband can take a ‘bridal tour’, which consists of a visit to the country to meet women ready to marry or to date. The circuits organized by mail-order-bride agencies generally involve a competition among women who are looking for a husband. ‘These organized prenuptial trips belong in the category of sex tourism’.40 The company may then organize a package tour for a group of customers to travel to Russia to meet a wide selection of women and girls. ‘As many as 2000 women may show up for the “mixer” party for a group of only a dozen men. The company seizes the opportunity to photograph the women for the catalogue and videotapes the evening’s activities for use on late night cable infomercials’.41 (3) Some mail-order-bride websites are full of advertisements offering escort services, with detailed descriptions of the women (including images), prices and services. These women are naturally not considered as potential wives but still have a cross-posting connection to mail-order-bride websites. This review of mail-order-bride agencies’ operations reveals that women and men are positioned in an unequal position of power whereby the brides in the catalogues clearly tend to be oriented towards pleasing the men. The entire industry is based

39 40 41

Louise Langevin and Marie-Claire Belleau, Trafficking in Women in Canada, p. 98. Ibid., p. 99. Mail-order-bride Report to Congress (Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1999) <http://www.aila.org/ content/default.aspx?bc=1016%7C6715%7C16871%7C17119%7C13775> [accessed 3 March 2008]

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on recruiting women who are ready to fulfil customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; expectations and requests. Marketing is based on sexual, racial, and ethnic stereotypes. The sometimes subtle, but often blatant, sexualized services that the women are to perform for male subscribers are the most characteristic feature of the entire industry â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a business based on the domination of men and the realization of their demands.

Conclusion The mail-order-bride industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a transnational enterprise that hawks a new type of human merchandise with solely revenue-oriented ambitions. Having invested in this lucrative business, cultural entrepreneurs have established a commodity-centred definition of marriage to further their own economic interests. Not only have commodities permeated dating and matrimonial practices, but women are also merchandised as a widely distributed trendy product in the market. The act of consumption and the romantic relationship have been merged into an idealistic utopia. The marriage agencies naturalize the pre-paid communication between the bride and the male clients, portraying it as a romantic activity. The online marketing of mail-order-bride agencies distinguishes itself based on the following components that the owners of the industry draw upon to attract potential subscribers: (1) the glamour and stylishness of mail-order-bride websites emphasize that the marriage agencies enlist the most attractive women in their catalogues; (2) exoticism is represented by romantic/sex tour packages offered in abundance by marriage agencies that promise to take the husband to extraordinary and striking places; (3) intimacy is related to the personal information about the brides posted online as well as to the private and confidential correspondence promised to be made available through staff interpreters. The internet has not been chosen accidentally as the prime medium for mail-orderbride agencies. The internet provides mail-order-bride brokers with an excellent infrastructure for the maintenance and marketing of their business. This business is profitable, anonymous, and flexible in its legal aspects, taxation, and other regulatory policies. However, the capacity of the internet to store and transmit vast amounts of information within an unregulated market to an uncontrolled audience presents a variety of risks and threats. One of the dangers of the mail-order-bride industry is that it promotes economic and socio-cultural disparities: inequalities between countries on the basis of economic condition; global inequalities between the sexes; and prejudices on the basis of race, ethnic background, and national origin.

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 127–131

Book Reviews Vilnius: City of Strangers. By Laimonas Briedis. Pp. 296. New York: CEU Press. 2009. £24.95. Hardback. ISBN 978-9-6397-7644-9 Cultural geographer Laimonis Briedis uses diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and other texts from visitors to Vilnius to explore different narrative ideas of Europe over six centuries. The city of Vilnius, located at the geographic center of Europe but at its political and cultural periphery, serves as a threshold in Walter Benjamin’s concept of a condition rather than a place. Briedis’ study of this ‘zone where time and space swell’, where Europeans pass through rather than settle, is not only a significant contribution to the history of Vilnius but to a deeper understanding of changing concepts of Europe. The book was originally published in 2008 by Baltos Lankos, a leading academic publisher in Lithuania, and will be republished this year by Central European Press. The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, arranged chronologically. Beginning in 1323, chapter one traces the rocky entrance of pagan Vilnius into European Christendom, a process that established early perceptions of the city as a place on the edge of civilization. The Polish-Lithuanian nobility’s cultivation of the idea of Sarmatia in the 1500s, a nativism that maintained a cultural isolation which matched Vilnius’ geographic isolation, is discussed in chapter two. The third chapter continues the description of Vilnius as out-of-step with the rest of Europe during the Enlightenment. Seen through the eyes of renowned naturalist Johann Georg Adam Foster, who taught at Vilnius University from 1784 to 1787, Vilnius stands as a provincial, backward town where civilization quickly reverts to a feral state. In chapter four, Breidis presents a strong analysis of Vilnius during the Napoleonic Wars. A stopping place during the Grand Armée’s march to and retreat from Moscow, Vilnius participated in both the glory and the destruction of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia. Extensive sources from officers and foot soldiers, painters and doctors provide Briedis with a rich array of viewpoints both to describe the city’s experience of war and to analyze the ways in which its place in Europe was interpreted. Visitors such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, discussed in chapter five, saw Vilnius as a parochial town located at the edge of the Russian empire. With its occupation by the German army during the Great War, Vilnius ‘moved’ from the western edge of the Russian empire back to the eastern edge of Europe. In chapter six, the writings of soldiers and those who accompanied them once again provide the lens through which Vilnius is viewed. Vilnius’ large and vibrant Jewish community, introduced in the fifth and sixth chapters, is the central focus of chapter seven. The concluding chapter looks at Soviet Vilnius, placing emphasis on the impact of the significant demographic changes that occurred during and after the Second World War. With the demise of the Soviet Union, Vilnius has become the capital of a new Lithuanian nation-state in a new member of the European Union. Yet, as Briedis illustrates, this Lithuanianized city is still haunted by the ghosts of its multicultural past and its place on the edge of Europe. The descendents of Polish and Jewish residents who fled the city come looking for their roots. Recent discoveries of mass burials sites unearthed not only victims of Stalin’s NKVD but also the dead left behind in the Grand Armée’s retreat. For Briedis, these dead represent Vilnius’ ‘historical burden of Europe’ — a place in which Europe’s history has been played out, yet which remains today on the margins of European consciousness and identity. City of Strangers is an ambitious book that weaves together diverse narratives to present the historical development of the city of Vilnius. Briedis does not include the writings of Czesław © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2009

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Miłosz, perhaps the most famous commentator on Vilnius. Yet, given Miłosz’s selfidentification as a native of Lithuania and Briedis’ emphasis on foreign views of the city, the exclusion of Miłosz is understandable. Although he focuses on viewing Vilnius through changing conceptions of Europe, Briedis does not systematically address how and why these constructions of Europe changed over time. As a result, the book at times seems overly dependent on the personal experience of certain individuals. Despite this, the book is both an engaging historical narrative and an important analysis of the often- neglected ‘periphery’ of Europe. As the source base becomes more extensive in more recent centuries, Briedis’ analysis of the ways in which Vilnius’ place on the periphery provides a lens through which to view changing constructions of Europe becomes stronger. The diversity of the source base and the integration of Vilnius into the broader narrative of European history means that the work’s contribution goes beyond its specific topic of Vilnius. In addition to adding to the historical narrative of Europe, the book contributes to scholarship on construction of identity by analyzing how different conceptions of European identity were manifested in one city over an extended period of time. Briedis’ study of Poles, Jews, and Lithuanians contributes to scholarship on these three groups as well as on multiculturalism. University of Washington

Amanda Swain

The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags — Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia. By Tim Tzouliadis. Pp. 472. London: Little, Brown. 2008. £14. ISBN 978-0-316-72724-2 (Hardback) The birth of Soviet Russia initiated new large-scale migration processes. One of them — post-revolution emigration — has been a focus of historical research for decades, while the reverse process — immigration to Soviet Russia — received much less academic attention. One of the largest immigrant groups came from the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. This page of history is practically unknown in both Russia and America. That is why the publication of The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags, a monograph by Tim Tzouliadis, is a notable event and will certainly be useful, at least in the immediate future, for students and scholars studying pre-Second World War immigration to the USSR. Tim Tzouliadis, according to the information provided by the publisher, is a British writer and filmmaker with a background in documentary-making. It is not surprising, then, that the genre he used for presenting his research was journalistic writing. Historical scholarship represents the past through facts and reasoning, while fiction understands it through symbols and empathy. Journalistic historical writing in this respect lies somewhere in between. It operates with facts, but does it by creating a story and emotional involvement. It appeals to a wider audience than academic writing (and is more influential in shaping the public’s knowledge of history), since the mission of journalism is to distribute scarcely known information. Herein lies its drawback as well: while history and fiction create new meanings, journalism generally only informs people of what is already known. What is even more important is that the authors writing in this genre often become hostages of their stories, since by staying close to their subject, they are unable to generalize and depict it in a wider context. This seems to have happened with Tzouliadis who while writing his book was faced with the biggest overall question concerning this controversial situation: why was the regime so cruel to people who earnestly wanted to help it to build a better society? To answer this question, he turned to the accounts and studies of Stalin’s repressive policies and soon was lost in the vast amount of available material. The Forsaken has an impressive bibliography listing 682 printed sources, but the majority are only loosely related to American immigration to Soviet Russia. Still, the author actually uses most of these sources in an attempt to understand the nature and reasons of Stalin’s crimes. As a result, he drowns in the facts he is presenting and the sources he quotes, and this shift away from the subject effectively destroys his attempts to

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describe American immigration to the USSR, and transforms a large part of his writing into a compilation of sources. By practically disregarding the life of Americans in the USSR before the repressions (only 47 pages out of 364, excluding notes and bibliography, address this period), Tzouliadis fails to answer the key questions related to his subject: Who were the American immigrants to Soviet Russia — first, second, third generation Americans or recent immigrants? What were social and demographic structures of the immigration flow? What was the scale of re-emigration and the share of the repressed in the American diaspora? Information that could help to answer these and other questions is available in the Russian archives, and the author lists three of such sources in his bibliography, but the number of actual references to Russian archival sources is as low as five. The Forsaken is a powerful book in terms of its emotional impact. It has a thrilling story that the author skilfully narrates and it will certainly arouse academic interest in the subject it addresses. But, being a typical example of journalistic historical writing, it tends to compile, rather than to analyse original sources and to repeat commonplaces of historical knowledge. The author’s personal impressions dominate over the subject. This fact, coupled with the Tzouliadis’ lack of knowledge of Russian and the consequent inability to read Russianlanguage sources, makes his work insignificant as a piece of research. It also demonstrates that a stable pattern of representation of Soviet history during Stalin’s era — no matter what subject is chosen — has been formed in popular discourse which is likely to be reproduced in future works, particularly in the genre of historical journalism. Petrozavodsk State University

Alexey Golubev

His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia. By Jennifer Hedda. Pp. 307. DeKalb: North Illinois University Press. 2008. £38.95. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-87580-382-1 His Kingdom Come is Jennifer Hedda’s attempt to address the stereotype of inane backwardness that has been attached to the Orthodox clergy in the historiography of the Late Imperial period. In this work, Hedda coherently argues that there were clergymen in this period who actively sought social reform, dedicating their life to the pursuit of the ‘Kingdom of God’. The work focuses on the clergy in St Petersburg at the turn of the century. The author analyses social activist groups organised by the Church, illustrating how they adapted to the social and political changes of the early twentieth century. Using extensive source material from the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St Petersburg, Hedda explores the ways members of the clergy viewed themselves, and how they interpreted the mission of the Russian Orthodox Church. She also explores the ideals that motivated liberal clergymen and how they sought to reform the church. Hedda directs this analysis in three main areas. First, she seeks to examine who these clergymen were, with discussion of the church in St Petersburg in the nineteenth century and their educational institutions. Second, she examines how the they interpreted their mission in the world, focusing on the charitable work. Finally, Hedda evaluates how the clergy responded to the social changes in St Petersburg in the Late Imperial period. Thus, she manages to contain a vast amount of analysis into a strict and effective framework. Gregory Freeze has noted that previous scholarship on Orthodoxy in pre-revolutionary Russia has regularly ‘re-ploughed the old turf of church-state relations’.1 Hedda avoids this tedious analysis of church-state relations, offering new examination of the Church in this period. Her discussion of Father Georgii Gapon in the context of ecclesiastical life in St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century is indicative of this revisionist approach towards the 1

G. L. Freeze, ‘Recent Scholarship on Russian Orthodoxy’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2 (2001), pp. 272–73.

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Orthodox clergy. Her comments on Father Gapon are particularly illuminating, and offer a new insight into the moral convictions of this enigmatic character. It is refreshing to read about the Orthodox clergy in the Late Imperial period in an optimistic light. Hedda’s argument that the clergymen of St Petersburg were actively pushing for social reform is in direct contradiction to Richard Pipes’ conclusion that they were obsequious in this period. In order to back her assertions, Hedda utilises detailed source material throughout the work with great skill, drawing heavily on personal accounts of clergymen. The use of this ‘personal’ source base lends much weight to her convincing revisionist approach, and allows for lucid prose throughout. Hedda’s focus on St Petersburg gives the work a sense of cohesion and clarity that is worthy of praise. However, a mention of this focus in the title would be welcomed. His Kingdom Come would benefit visually from tabular representation of numerical sources and some pictorial representations of St Petersburg’s clergy. Hedda also confusingly refers to the role of the ‘Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod’ as the ‘Director General’, which despite being a more accurate anglicised translation, seems overly pedantic for a piece of academic scholarship on this area. Hedda’s concluding section is the weakest area of His Kingdom Come. In what could have been a coherent conclusion of arguments presented throughout the book, Hedda discusses a comparison between the clergy of Late Imperial Russia and clergymen in the Late Soviet period; which despite being very interesting, feels a little out of place. This would have been more suited to an epilogue and could have been explored in much more depth. His Kingdom Come is an impressive piece of scholarship that not only places the lives of members of the Orthodox clergy into a workable context, but also offers an insightful view on their role in Late Imperial Russia. Hedda successfully uses a revisionist approach to show that previous scholarship on the Russian Orthodox Church is outdated, and that the Orthodox clergy of the Late Imperial period were not as servile as once thought. University of Leicester

Mark Hurst

Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts. Edited by Rosalind P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid. Pp. 246. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2007. £39.95, (HC). ISBN-13: 978-0875803609 This collection of eleven articles focuses on a century of artistic interaction between Russia and the West, defined by the editors in their introductory chapter as France, Britain, and the United States. The period is book-ended by the reforming eras of Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s and Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s. The impact of the historical events in the intervening years is elucidated at various points in the articles. The ten contributors, all experts in Russian and Soviet art working in the USA, Canada, and the UK, aim to broaden the traditional discourse on Russian art by providing unusual examples of East-West dialogue. Articles by Rosalind P. Blakesley (University of Cambridge) and Susan E. Reid (University of Sheffield) briefly outline the significance of the ‘Long Engagement’ between Russia and the West. They provide a detailed analysis of both the origins of the debate with reference to Peter the Great’s westernising programme and the subsequent ‘Westerniser/Slavophile binary’ simultaneously referring to Cold War geopolitics. Two articles discuss nineteenth-century painting, and contextualise the debate by explaining the binary positions of the artistic approach of Peredvizhniki and the Miriskusniki (Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, ‘Opening up to Europe’) on the one hand, and the landscape painter Alexey Bogolyubov’s ‘mediation’ on the other (Rosland Blakesley, ‘Promoting a Pan-European Art’). As Valkenier notes, by the early 1900s Russian art had become established in the mainstream European cultural landscape yet the influence travelled almost exclusively eastwards. Valkenier and Blakesley explain how instances of interaction with the West affected Russia’s internal debate but neither suggests that Russia’s art could have had an effect on the West. Valkenier

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points out that contact with Western Europe inspired the impressionistic elements in Ilya Repin’s work, while Blakesley notes that the work of the Miriskusniki (members of the World of Art group) preceded painters like Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Vasili Kandinskii, though the book as a whole actually suggests that the relationship was more of a dialogue in Russia about the West. The mutually-opposed themes of the impressionist influence on realism in Russian art and the isolationism of Stalinist Socialist Realism appear in Valkanier’s essay and are revisited by Alison Hilton in her ‘Holiday on the Kolkhoz’. Further references to western trends allowed in Soviet art feature in later articles. A period of relative thaw under Khrushchev is the subject of Susan Reid’s article on Soviet painting ‘Toward a New (Socialist) Realism’. Western modernism in Soviet architecture is considered in two articles — ‘Soviet Schizophrenia and the American Skyscraper’ by Sona Hoisington and Catherine Cooke’s ‘Modernity and Realism’. Charlotte Douglas’s ‘The Art of Pure Design’ describes the relationship between Abstraction in Russia and the Bloomsbury Circle in London and aims to illuminate the similarities between the two approaches. Karen Kettering, by contrast, explains the perception of a distinct and homogenous, but clearly ‘out of step’ (she avoids making judgements about backwardness and progress) russki stil’ (Russian style) as it was first presented to the world at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition then at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Jane Sharp’s ‘Beyond Orientalism’ again suggests that any study of Russian art must include reference to the East as well as to the West though Sharp argues that this traditional binary opposition is too rigid to allow a nuanced understanding of both modernism and the avant-garde. A description of the depictions of female divinity in the works of Nikolai Roerich is the subject of John McCannon’s piece. This artist-explorer-mystic’s ideas about the nature of the world in the early twentieth century seem to tie Blakesley and Reid’s collection together. Roerich concocted a theory, which he derived from studies and observations of archaeology, shamanism and ‘theosophical speculation’ claiming that Europe and Asia descended from a common ancestry. Russia simultaneously united and divided Europe and Asia, and was therefore part of both. The result of this thinking was that Roerich’s depictions of female divinity are a mixture of Russian, Eastern and Western styles. Roerich’s obscurity, however, suggests something of the one-sidedness of the cultural relationship between Russia and the West which this study does not manage to dispel. Written in a readable style and well-illustrated with black and white images, this book will inform those historians in the field of Russian and Soviet cultural studies who are interested in painting, architecture and the decorative arts from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. No other single volume brings scholars of such renown together to discuss this issue, but students new to this subject may find this collection difficult to appreciate. In fact, the book will probably be most useful as an interesting addition to the debate for students already familiar with the traditional view of Russia as culturally-isolated and defined by its opposition to the influence of the west, since its primary purpose is to confront and engage in discussion around this perception. University of Leeds

John Etty

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 132–133

Film Review Chouga (Wyga). Director: Darezhan Omirbaev. Paris-Barcelone Films, France/Kazakhstan, 2007. Although based on Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, it would be a mistake to call Chouga, the most recent film by Kazakh filmmaker Darezhan Omirbaev, an adaptation. Omirbaev’s film instead projects the characters and conflicts of Tolstoy’s famous novel onto contemporary Kazakhstan without feeling beholden to the source text. In under an hour and a half, Chouga subverts the expectations of a film adaptation, and in so doing delivers a more accurate translation of the book to the screen. Omirbaev understands that the audience already knows the ending; his task is therefore not to reproduce but to evoke and transform. Chouga begins and ends with Tleguen, a sensitive young man who serves as the film’s modest, provincial hero. If Tleguen is Levin, then Altynai is his Kitty, a sweet girl from a respectable family who prefers the advances of her Vronsky, a millionaire named Ablai. As in the novel, the plot turns when our eponymous heroine travels by train to visit her philandering brother in hopes of helping him reconcile with his wife. Chouga and Ablai meet by chance at the train station, but as with all of the scenes in Chouga that echo Anna Karenina, one could easily miss the singular beauty of the film by looking for signposts from the novel. Astonishingly quiet, Chouga may have fewer words of dialogue than are contained in this review. A series of silent glances exchanged at the opera show us how Altynai discovers that Ablai desires Chouga. Similarly, a wordless shot of Chouga and Ablai sitting together in a restaurant is so sexually charged that we plausibly suspect her jealous husband of hiring thugs to assault Ablai when he leaves. Chouga’s politician husband is corrupt, but her lover the businessman is no better: Ablai’s friends find and torture his attackers, sending him the video evidence as a present. Critiquing both Kazakh political life and the emerging class of businessmen, the film resists demonizing either but shows them both to be cold and cruel. Ablai is certainly a cad and probably a criminal, but he is almost redeemed by moments of tenderness with Chouga that underscore his desperation and her seductive, redemptive power. Televisions, monitors, and other glowing screens abound in Chouga, demonstrating the prosperous consumer economy thriving among Kazakhstan’s elite and trickling down to those below (even Tleguen owns a television). When Ablai brings Chouga to his apartment, she absentmindedly glances at his flat-screen television, where a nature program shows slugs slowly coupling. When she runs away to Paris with Ablai, Chouga walks by a film crew and catches the eye of a cameraman, who stands in for the novel’s Italian painter. Meanwhile, at Altynai’s wedding to Tleguen (also a cameraman), the guests gossip about Chouga leaving her husband and child for a rich lover. ‘You only used to see that kind of thing in films’, they say. The idea of film stands for fantasy and escape, but these screens also serve to keep emotions at the safe remove of entertainment. Many film versions of great novels adopt a more literal approach, assuming that the pitfalls and pleasures of moving images require emotions to be nearer to the surface. Clarence Brown’s 1935 MGM production of Anna Karenina (starring Greta Garbo) packs an impassioned cry or a petulant outburst in nearly every scene, emphasizing Anna’s love affair with her son for maximum melodramatic effect. On the other end of the spectrum, Alexander Zarkhi’s 1967 Mosfilm production of Anna Karenina relies heavily on the text (it begins with the first page of the novel) and is presented so closely to Anna’s perspective that her unspoken thoughts are provided in voiceover. In contrast to both of these adaptations, Chouga leaves much unsaid, © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2009

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allowing space for the heroine’s inner life without asking the viewer to sympathize with her, and sometimes even inviting silent judgement of her. In its ambivalence, Chouga is more like Tolstoy’s original, refusing to erode the tragic dignity of the story by placing the blame on social conventions or personal pathology. But the parallels between Tolstoy and Omirbaev’s worlds beg vital questions about the fate of women in today’s Kazakhstan. Chouga sees doors shut one by one: first on her son, then on her husband, then on her lover, leaving her completely alone. This somber sequence is the only explanation we need for the tragic end that we know is coming, not least of all because we read the book. Gallatin School, New York University

Lauren Kaminsky

slovo, Vol. 21 No. 2, Autumn, 2009, 134–142

A Selection of Poems Mark Ley1 Laszlo Almasy The desert . . . there one feels clean, Perplexities resolved, loyalties simplified The sun does not question; it burns. Either, neither, both or nothing at all . . . Which am I? A riddle to myself, As I spy on the heart with stealth And guile. I find myself possessed By the secrets I feign to possess. How can we live at all, If not with courage and skill? This I have made my experiment. Fourteen and sad, I built myself A glider, launched from a hilltop And flew, flew—a few seconds only— Oh glory!—crashing meant nothing,— What were a few broken ribs to me? Anything to escape the castle, The cold corridors, my parents’ voices Rising, battling . . . Alone in the hall, Where Magyar knights once gathered Beneath the ceiling of Greek myths, I swore my own vows of honour. Africa, what did you want with me, A pale northern wanderer, In love with lost oases? All my life you have held me To some secret account! In the desert, I would drive full tilt At the dunes’ windward side, Sail to the top, and, with a hard turn,

Mark Ley graduated from the University of London (The School of Slavonic and East European Studies and King’s College London) in 1990 with First Class Honours in French and Russian.

POEMS

Slide broadside down the leeward Steep . . . a fine manoeuvre! Life itself I feel through my hands. The scorpion, the dung beetle And the sand viper—my comrades! We shared the Libyan desert, Terra incognita, rich in death. Blistering days and freezing nights Were the poles of my existence; Sandstorms charged me electric, And evening shadows showed More beauty than a life could hold. For that, I have suffered every horror, For a few mad instants of truth. The wise desert mocked our wars And adventures . . . the nonsense Men fight and die for! As for me, I would have made a pact With the Devil himself, had he shown me The way to Zerzura, or the lost army Of Cambyses. Those of us Who did not leave our bones there Still left something of themselves. What remains of me is a memory Of light. A moment of fire.

Fabergé Eggs Meteorites from a planet of fairy-tales And toys, they fell into history’s atmosphere, Trailing fires from Mars and Venus. Carved, turned, enamelled, chased, Gilded, painted, cast, blown, spun And wrought, tumultuous Easters Conjured into the hands of the fallible Royal orbs, apples of the Hesperides. Detail and sheen of flawless surface Bespoke the ethereal solid, Platonic And industrial,—fabrications from Faustus’ Crucible, infused with the peacock’s tail; Pomegranates seeded with stories And prayers, plucked from the tree By the Virgin’s hand! Ghostly doomed ice Of the Winter Egg: within, suspended Amid freezing fog, a basket of anemones Glows on a bed of golden moss.

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Elegy for Nikolai Gumilyov, 1886–1921 Death was always your secret friend; It had to end in a firing squad. You who worshiped beauty were not handsome, Tormented by the ugliness you saw In the mirror, the pale thin awkward hero Of a myth, not quite the Nietzschean superman Deserved by a godless dying world. Leader, adventurer, lover of women, Believing you could actually change the world, You stalked across the African plains, Like the first man, hunting invisible prey. Could life itself be conjured into art, And manhood be proven in danger? A new idea, a new test, and, then, Whatever came of the fight, the bloody birth! Marching round Petersburg in top hat, You stole poems from the air With warrior’s fists, striding on, Sure of your purpose, and nothing else. Many mistook your reserve for disdain, Ignorant that kindness could be shy, And, noticing only the weary pompous air, Missed the tender smile of a child. You exulted at the coming of war, A cavalryman for the love of Russia, Eager to prove yourself a warrior. Your soul had been long prepared, Accepting the trial without hesitation, Yearning for more and fiercer battles, Believing, always, against all evidence, In victory,—a man must suffer and create, With fasting and vigil to strengthen him, And foster new energies within. You quarrelled with the times, And with your own impossible self, Ever the aristocrat, no matter Revolution. In frozen starving Petersburg, abandoned To cockroaches, you remained grand And oblivious to the farce of politics, Never deigning to conceal old-fashioned views, From this vulgar destructive new regime. Skinny as a ghost, in threadbare coat, You strode the streets still, surrounded By students, hanging on the lecture That steamed from your mouth, as your hands

POEMS

Turned blue, and poetry rose supreme Over the graveyard of decent souls, Offering its science to the unredeemed. The world was dying and rotting around you, All dust and typhus,—at last, you rose As Russia fell, and, like a sad Houdini Slipping the chains in his sinking trunk, Broke free of cool proportioned verse Into the wolfish wilderness . . . You recognized no walls, and, for that, They put you up against one.

Kazakhstan Snow leopard eyes of the man within Foretelling a mountain death Sarmatian gold of the sun My life smelted in the snowstorm Kumiss of words Milked from the galloping earth Wormwood scent Of the steppe Where lifetimes migrate With the spring and autumn Like the saiga The sun-headed men Stride across rocks Haloed with concentric circles Planetary orbits The Golden Man Flies in his suit of stars With a silver cup To catch the moon’s elixir In the mountains of Ulytau Heartbeat in rock Dragon’s pulse Earth to heaven Heaven to earth Star-milk nourishing the baby Cosmonaut swimming through space Wolf’s tracks Mark the path of the first man The first to see the mountains The first to climb up on a horse

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MARK LEY

Rains of the Altai Cleanse me in light-storms From kurgan thunderheads Suckled at the breasts Of Mount Belukha As the deer sheds its antlers in season So I shed myself

The Last Khan Baron Ungern-Sternberg, 1885–1921, White Russian General and Last Khan of Mongolia The blood of the Teutonic Knights Yells through me-Mongolia’s warrior-king, Cutting down enemies with the sabre As I gallop over fiery horizons In yellow silks, astride a white mare. No mere man, but the God of War himself, I live to slaughter the unclean, Purge the world of the Bolshevik virus And the evil stench of the Jew! With a wave of my hand, I can raise Armies, legions of devils to ride West against the proletarian scum, A Golden Horde is mine to command! I am Genghis Khan reborn, And all Asia will become my empire, Under the yellow flags of Lord Buddha, In this crusading age of Shambhala. Heaven shall see the monarch restored. Barechested, hung with bones and charms, Smeared in filth and blood, I ride my nightmare like a shaman, A monk whose worship is the kill. The angry gods, skull-garlanded, Trampling corpses in their dance, Demand tribute in the temple’s gloom,— Lords, accept the generous sacrifice, Flayed skins of our foes, From my bloody hands! I keep my men about me like wolves, Packs that feed at my hand alone, And chase down any quarry for fun, Tearing flesh down to the bone. Wretches, traitors, hear the name

POEMS

Of Great Star Mountain, and tremble! I bow to no man, true scion of my clan, (Did not my ancestor, ambassador To Ivan the Terrible, have his hat Nailed to his head because he would Not doff it to the tsar, or any man?) Since the first fire of consciousness Ignited in me, I have fought a war Against the world, my puny inferiors, The craven, the ignoble, the weak. Truly, these are the Last Days, The battle for order and the world, When the ungrateful peasantry, Corrupted by their Jewish leaders, Rise up against their God-given masters. (What, Jews, rule the world, will you? Ruin nations and races from within? The blood of Zion is rising Amid earthquakes, famines, plagues, And the sword is whetted for battle, Angels and demons on horseback clashing! The toxic seed I shall exterminate; The snake I shall crush with my boot). The turn of the swastika Decides the evolution of men; My blue eyes are starting to see, To penetrate and manipulate minds. The Hidden Masters of the World Guide my hand, clenching the Cossack blade! (Sitting alone with my playing cards, I always draw the ace of hearts. What, by God, does it mean? Is the omen good or bad?) Now the triumphant East will rise In wrath against the doomed West, And set the pyre of history ablaze! It is the time of the wild horses, The cavalry charge into the cannon Of time-dust devils of the frontier, Ride with me through the very gates Of Hell!â&#x20AC;&#x201D;my horseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ears prick At the hints and inklings of nature, My wolfhound teeth rend each moment Like the tenderest meat. Break out the vodka-drink

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MARK LEY

To the white fever, and show us The visions in the opium cloud. Rage is my joy, my insurrection: To cross the endless grasslandsA sword at my hip, a gun in my beltAnd see no human sign, no excrescence, Is the highest pleasure, driving oneself To exhaustion, and beyond, becoming The land and sky, invincible, Ragged and scarcely human any more. Every torture the gods inflict on mortals In Hell, we shall enact them here on earth, Scourge the base and wicked without mercy, With ice and fire and savage beasts, In these wastes, where every tree is a gallows, For flayed hides to dangle from. Joyous war:—epic fruition of man! In these days the essence of life is uncovered, The false and mundane annihilated, The unity beneath screaming out. Wolves follow hard on our battles, Feasting on the feet of the dead, Strung up from branches along the roads. Sweet beasts, my friends and brethren, How I admire your simple purpose And skill,—stay at my sides, I will feed you On carrion kind unworthy to live. Out here I need no home, no possessions Save my opium-pipe, in whose clouds I scry the shapes of destiny, unfurling With infinite ease, so clear to me. What news do the soothsayers bring me? What prophecies for my troops? Let the scapulimancer do his work And the bones set the date of battle. I know—it is foretold—I shall perish out here When my time is come, but my victory Will survive me,—so bury me with my horse, And be done!

POEMS

A Better Future for Ukraine The violence of the edge Calls you to your senses, You feel the blow and learn, Against your will. . . There will always be a master, A tormentor; Freedom is not in the contract. Drink to the bottom of the bottle, And find what lies there, But paradise it will not be. Snowdrops in spring, Smell of cabbage on the landing. . . Like an old man playing chess Against the ghosts, I sit with my pen and paper, Feeling with my mind The naked body of a dancer. . . The city is covered with dust, As if already in ruins, Another civilization expired. Heathen devotions— Indo-European roots, Hieroglyphic as horses’ hooves— I lay at the blue Virgin’s Crimson-slippered feet, (Byzantine empress of martyrdoms, All those living dead buried Under the steppe grass) In Santa Sofia, offering sacrifice To Jehovah, Yahweh, Perun. Between Poland and Russia, Baptized in the river, Restless Cossack words Saddle their nightmares and ride. After all the rhetoric The truth is as clear and deadly As vodka, dark and weird As the legends you raise In a clanking old bucket From a village well.

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MARK LEY

A Bit Like Helsinki Reckless in pleasure, We held the nights close to our skins, And fell with the seasons To the deep core of the moon. Fathomless tides overtook us, Carried us far, far from shore, Into the Ocean of Storms, Masochists of love, anarchists of fear. The wild and the human Hold the dark in common; Your face is a moon to steer by In the midnight fury And your heartbeat Will lighthouse me home. Oblivionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s minx, I spidered the corners of your world And wove little stars For the voidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entertainment. Death sang lullabies Into the cot, And nursery rhymes Appeared in our fists.