Dariusz Jarosz

Regarding the Reception of the Stalinist Plan for the Transformation of Nature in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland

Environmental issues constitute an ever-growing field of research in world historiography. Only in small measure, however, does this interest seem to concern Eastern Europe, where it remains limited to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Works on how other communist regimes treated the environment are few and far between. For this reason one should welcome the attempt to fill, at least in part, the gap in our knowledge regarding the way in which these regimes were affected by the Stalinist plan for the transformation of nature. The volume’s publication was supported by the Visegrád Fund and by a number of academic institutions in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. In the preface to the monograph Paul Josephson, Professor at Colby College in Waterville (Maine) and at Tomsk State University, outlines both the origin of the plan and the way in which it was implemented, first in the USSR and then in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. Adopted by the Soviet leadership in 1948, the plan, according to Josephson, expressed an intention to subjugate nature to the Party. The scholar traces its origin back to the 1930s, when the Soviet Union became involved in the realization of a variety of great projects affecting the environment such as, for example, the construction of the Moscow–Volga canal * In the Name of the Great Work. Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe, ed. Doubravka Olšáková, New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. R E V I E W A R T I C L E S A N D R E V I E W S http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/KH.2018.125.SI.1.06 DARIUSZ JAROSZ Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw Kwartalnik Historyczny Vol. CXXV, 2018 Eng.-Language Edition no. 2, pp. 143–55 PL ISSN 0023-5903

Old Age in Communist Poland: Preliminary Research Questions

The article attempts at determining the most important factors shaping the social situation of aged people in Poland in the period 1945–89, seeking to describe, in vast amounts of detail, the demographic diversity (size of population concerned, gender categorisation, numerical amounts by age), residence (urban or rural region) as well as living conditions, health, and education status of the population concerned. Research has shown that the social security system in force played an increasing role in the shaping of the material situation of the elderly: in 1989 some 50 per cent retirement-aged people took advantage of its offer. That this system remained the basis for livelihoods of a definite majority of aged people in the 1980s primarily ensued from the extension of the farmer’s retirement and disability pension system. Nonetheless, a considerable group of elderly people (amounting to several dozen per cent, though estimates vary) received income below the minimum subsistence figure until the end of 1989 – thus remaining condemned to poverty and the need to seek for other, extra sources of income, such as assistance from family or acquaintances, gainful labour, and/or social protection.