Jan T. Gross and Magda Szcześniak: Dismantling Authoritarian Rule in Poland скачать в хорошем качестве

Jan T. Gross and Magda Szcześniak: Dismantling Authoritarian Rule in Poland

This event is a conversation between cultural studies scholar Magda Szcześniak and historian Jan Tomasz Gross who – while studying Polish contemporary history during the past decades – published a book co-authored by Stephen Kotkin on "uncivil society" in 2010. It offered a powerful explanation for the implosion of communism in 1989. Not long ago, we witnessed an election defeat of a non-communist authoritarian regime in Poland and are observing a tough and twisted process of dismantling that regime. Some of the following questions related to this process will be discussed in the Salon: Why did the PiS regime lose the elections? Did the regime implode or was it defeated? How can the regime change be best explained (political, economic, and socio-cultural causes)? What kind of institutional legacies does the new regime have to cope with? How can the “omelette be unmade?” – lessons from the early 1990s. Are there other historical analogies to learn from? Can one restore democracy by observing the rule of law? What are the key tasks of the government and civil society in general and of the politics of history in particular in breaking the resistance of the former regime? Magda Szcześniak and Jan Tomasz Gross will be joined in the conversation by János Mátyás Kovács. Jan T. Gross studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. After growing up in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he immigrated to the United States in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University (1975). His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, appeared in 1979. Revolution from Abroad (1988) analyzes how the Soviet regime was imposed in Poland and the Baltic states between 1939 and 1941. Neighbors (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, reconstructs the events that took place in July 1941 in the small Polish town of Jedwabne, where virtually every one of the town’s 1,600 Jewish residents was killed in a single day. Using eyewitness testimony Professor Gross demonstrates that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by their Polish neighbors "not by the German occupiers, as previously assumed. The shocking story occasioned an unprecedented reevaluation of Jewish-Polish relations during World War II and touched off passionate debate. In 2004 many of the Polish voices in this debate were published in translation in a collection, The Neighbors Respond. Professor Gross is also the author of several books in Polish, the coeditor of The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (2000), and the coeditor with Irena Grudzinska-Gross of War Through Children’s Eyes (1981), which uses school compositions and other documents written by children to study how children experience war and deportation. He joined the Princeton History Department in 2003 after teaching at New York University, Emory, Yale, and universities in Paris, Vienna, and Krakow. Professor Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson ‘16 and ‘48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus. Magda Szcześniak is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. Author of Normy widzialnosci. Tozsamosc w czasach transformacji [Norms of Visuality. Identity in Times of Transition, 2016] and Poruszeni. Awans i emocje w socjalistycznej Polsce [Feeling Moved. Upward Mobility and Emotions in Socialist Poland, 2023].