Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialism in East Central Europe, 1953-1956

This theme issue presents the findings of a conference that gave forum to some of the most recent results and findings of international research into some as yet unexplored social and political dimensions of the changes in the intellectual life broughtabout (and brought to light) by the crisis and revolt(s) of 1953-56 in East-Central Europe. The political and social dynamics of academic professions (disciplines or/and research communities) and various artistic fields is the central concern for the papers included. The efforts of the state-socialist regimes to establish and maintain far-reaching controls over the intellectual/cultural life collided inevitably with their increasing needs for trained expertise in a large number of areas connected with the economic modernization projects and with the high level of interventionist ambitions characterizing all the major policy areas. The tolerance of or/and efforts to promote professional development, manifest in many policy areas of the post-stalinian Thaw, brought by necessity to the agenda a whole array of problems considered as highly sensitive and inconvenient by the nomenklatura. Professionalism (as well as artistic autonomy) implies a particular type of societal organization within which trained expertise is the central value and selection and reward by merit assessed by similarly educated experts is the rule for recruitment to and advancement in occupational fields/hierarchies. The ideal of the party-intellectual, on the other hand, defined loyalty and political-ideological reliability as the central value, and implied the presence of a politically controlled cadres administration as the way of recruitment and promotion even (or, especially) in occupations of high complexity and demanding educational prerequisites. The clash between these diametrically opposite cultures and modes of societal organization may be claimed to have been the major issue around which the conflicts and negotiations between the nomenklatura and the practitioners of various cultural/academic fields developed in 1953-56.