CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The exile after the coup in 1948 and the fate of Czechs abroad, who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, enslaved by the Communists, are an integral part of our modern history. However, this phenomenon is still neglected and the general public has only fragmentary information about it. Researchers are still unable to agree on the intensities of individual waves of emigration between 1948-1989. The most likely figure would be probably 250,000 people in total. The estimate of Czechoslovak State Security at the end of 1948 states 8614 refugees. Their first steps in the free world brought these people into the so-called displaced persons camps in Western occupation zones of Germany and Austria or in Italy. The first periodicals were published, the first seeds of political activity were born and later developed by numerous exile groups and entities. Almost seven dozens of newspapers, magazines and newsletters, and nearly one hundred ninety Czechs institutions, including political organizations, parties, academic clubs or think-tanks, operated in the free world after 1948. Despite the promising start and international support, the so called Council of Free Czechoslovakia, meant as the umbrella body for the entire exile, writhed in crisis, fell apart and reunited again, its members were wasting time with endless quarrels and were continuously losing the confidence of the exile public and their donors from the U.S. government. As time passed, the atmosphere in the exile changed, new topics, challenges and leaders raised. Dr. Nekola will discuss all aspects of the Czechoslovak Cold War exile (with a particular focus on the USA) in his contribution. If you would like to reach Dr. Nekola with comments or questions, feel free to reach out to him at marnekola@gmail.com.

Marina Zaloznaya speaks about her new book, published with Cambridge University Press Studies in Law and Society Series in April 2017. Using a mix of ethnographic, survey, and comparative historical methodologies, this book offers an unprecedented insight into the corruption economies of Ukrainian and Belarusian universities, hospitals, and secondary schools. Its detailed analysis suggests that political turnover in hybrid political regimes has a strong impact on petty economic crime in service-provision bureaucracies. Theoretically, the book rejects the dominant paradigm that attributes corruption to the allegedly ongoing political transition. Instead, it develops a more nuanced approach that appreciates the complexity of corruption economies in non-Western societies, embraces the local meanings and functions of corruption, and recognizes the stability of new post-transitional regimes in Eastern Europe and beyond. This book offers a critical look at the social costs of transparency, develops a blueprint for a 'sociology of corruption', and offers concrete and feasible policy recommendations. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social justice activists.

October 15, 2017 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the “hero of two continents” and a person called “the purest son of liberty” by his friend, Thomas Jefferson. Just who was Kosciuszko and what did he do in his life that deserves to be remembered, written about, and appreciated today – both in his native Poland and in his adopted country, the United States? In his remarks Dr. Pienkos will address these two questions and invite comments from his audience and a conversation about Kosciuszko and what he represents today.

What is the value of a statistical life (VSL) in a dictatorship? We structurally estimate the trade-off between monetary costs and fatality risk in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. Using regional variation in the level of political victims during the Great Terror, we estimate this VSL to be approximately $43,000, 6% of the VSL estimate of US in 1940 and 29% of the modern VSL estimate in India. These findings are the first explicit attempt to measure VSL in a dictatorship and are a novel contribution to the debate on autocracies versus democracies.