Sphären von Öffentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs / Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies ed. by Gabor T. Rittersporn, Malte Rolf, Jan C. Behrends (review)

466 Рецензии/Reviews Elke FEIN Gabor T. Rittersporn, Malte Rolf, Jan C. Behrends (Eds.), Sphären von Öffentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs / Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies (Frankfurt -am-Main: Peter Lang Verlag, Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften , 2003). 457 S. (=Comparative Studies Series, Vol. 11). ISBN: 3-631-38327-4. The present edited volume is a collection of the results of a conference dedicated to patterns of public spheres in Soviet-type societies that was held in 2002 at Berlin’s Marc Bloch Center, a Franco-German institute for Social Research cofinanced by the French and German governments that has shown a considerable engagement in social science research on Central and East European topics in the past years. After an overview article on public spheres in Soviet and post-Soviet societies by Germen sociologist Ingrid Oswald and her colleague from St. Petersburg, Viktor Voronkov, the volume contains twelve case studies written mainly by young (doctoral and post-doctoral) researchers from various East and West-European countries and the US. Their empirical contributions – seven of which are written in German and five in English – are framed by an introductory and a concluding chapter by the editors, which are available in both languages. The contributions treat a variety of cases taken from the Soviet Union (on communist Moscow’s self-staging through city planning by Monica Rüthers; the city’s most important culture and recreation park by Katharina Kucher; the phenomena of expressing self-critique under Stalin by Lorenz Erren; and on public spaces in Soviet communal apartments by Ekaterina Gerasimova ) and Central Europe (articles on art in Czechoslovakia and the GDR by Dieter Segert and Juliana Raupp; the East German Evangelical church’s institutionalisation in the public sphere by Michael Haspell; Catholic versus communist mass mobilization (efforts) by Izabelle Main; national narratives, self-images and the socialist public sphere by José M. Faraldo; female secret service collaborators’ perception of the Catholic counter culture in Hungary by Árpád von Klimó; and on the memory of 1956 in Hungary by Heino Nyyssönen), as well as a contribution dealing with the dynamics of communist propaganda in post-war China by Lorenz Bichler. The common focus of all of the collection’s contributions is the crucial question of identifying spheres and spaces of publicity and liberty (however limited), even in seemingly totalitarian, i.e., relatively closed, one-party and non-pluralist 467 Ab Imperio, 3/2007 societies such as socialist Central and Eastern Europe and communist China. To what degree can spheres of publicity actually be discerned in these societies, and how can they be analyzed? The editors’ point of departure is the claim that political processes and actors alone cannot explain social change, even though the political sphere is, of course, extremely important, especially in super-politicized societies such as communist ones. Instead, it is claimed that the dynamics of statepublic interactions and the ongoing processes of redefining (mostly implicit) rules and boundaries of political legitimacy is of crucial importance, not only for explaining the respective countries’ social and political development under communist rule, but also their paths of transformation up to the present. However, the authors concentrate not only on clearly discernable autonomous spheres such as counter cultures (dissident and religious environments , etc.), but rather on what the editors call “majority spaces,” i.e., places and spheres of mass mobilization , either of official, political or of seemingly unpolitical nature; in other words: any location where gatherings were allowed, including state-created public spaces. Thus, instead of focusing only on either ideological or anti-regime spheres and discourses, the volume is able to present a plurality of public spaces that do not always coincide with the common (Western) notions of public and private. The latter are therefore deemed unsuited for the analysis of strongly politicized, but nonetheless never fully closed, unified and statecontrolled societies such as the ones treated here. In this context, a number of theoretical, methodological and terminological issues and problems are raised by the volume’s authors. First of all, the common definition of the terms “publicity,” “public” and “private” are largely perceived as Western categories, and are questioned with regard to the analysis of Soviet-type...