‚Our Russian Passport‘: First World War Monuments, Transnational Commemoration, and the Russian Emigration in Europe, 1918-39
The existence of so many Russian war monuments outside Russia adds a new dimension to our understanding of the memorialization of the First World War, for such memorials were found not in Russia but in European countries where Russian emigres made lives for themselves after the 1917 Revolution. The construction of war monuments promised to be a good way to manage important aspects of the personal and public bereavement that Russian people faced in European diaspora in the interwar period. Emigres, moreover, also used war memorials as a means to signify their right to belong to a common European experience, and elites in countries like France, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia integrated Russia’s war, through the emigres, into national commemorative practices. This article shows that transnational values like international friendship, wartime alliance, and solidarity across national and ethnic boundaries could be important parts of the commemorative culture of the war in nation-states across interwar Europe, even in Germany. Without these transnational features of First World War remembrance, which both encouraged the emigres to build war monuments and to some degree impeded their appearance in the Soviet Union, there may not have been Russian monuments to the war anywhere at all.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/627?rss=1
Humanitarianism and National Sovereignty: Red Cross Intervention on behalf of Political Prisoners in Soviet Russia, 1921-3
From 1921 to 1923 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sought to protect the individual rights of political prisoners in Soviet Russia. This action represented the culmination of the Red Cross’ attempt after the First World War to transform the humanitarian rights assured to soldiers by the Geneva and Hague conventions into universal rights for all people. The Red Cross, employing concepts that demonstrate a connection between humanitarianism and human rights, argued for a right to assistance that transcended national sovereignty and authorized international intervention in the sovereign affairs of states. The article traces the ideological origins of this universal humanitarian right through the debates on civil war at the 1912 and 1921 International Conferences of the Red Cross and then analyzes the ICRC's use of private and public channels to protect political prisoners in Soviet Russia. Despite initial international support, the ICRC failed to achieve a humanitarian intervention from the former Allied powers at the Genoa Conference in 1922. As a result the movement retreated to a more conservative stance regarding the role of humanitarianism vis-a-vis the nation-state, a stance it maintained with tragic consequences through the 1930s and into the Second World War.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/652?rss=1
The Many Heads of the Hydra: Local Parafascism in Spain and Europe, 1936-50
This article aims to draw attention to a body of research that is now more than two decades old in Spain: the workings and composition of local government under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Recent research into provincial governments, city halls, and provincial and local Assemblies of Spanish Traditionalist Phalanx of the JONS (Falange Española y Tradicionalista de las JONS, FET-JONS) during the Spanish Civil War and first period of Francoism from 1936 to 1950 can contribute greatly to wider discussions on fascism in Europe and redress how historians of fascism have sidelined Francoism despite its longevity and unique characteristics. This article argues that by defining parafascism in its own right, by what it was rather than what it was not, and by defining fascistization as a dynamic process, studies of Francoism at the local level can fill a gap in debate on generic fascism and help to construct a decentralized transnational history of fascism, parafascism, and conservatism.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/702?rss=1