Patterns of Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe

218 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.This dissertation aims to trace how the peculiar structures of Communist political systems influenced people's means of protest and thereby helped to constitute general state-society relations. It is argued that big structural changes like the abolition of the market and civil society and the growth of the Party-state removed many resources necessary for people to turn their grievances into organised resistance against the authorities. This dearth of resources both reduced the amount of protest, and favoured relatively ineffective forms of protest. Because people were often prohibited from contesting state decisions, and tended to adopt less effective means of contention when they did, the Party-state dominated society. The dissertation follows a comparative historical methodology aimed at substantiating the theoretical argument and discrediting rival explanations by pattern matching within-case causal linkages, applied to the Soviet collectivisation campaign, the Hungarian Uprising and the Polish Solidarity movement.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD