Volume 71, December 2023, issue 4

This issue focuses on the continuity of personal networks during the transition from the socialist era to the postsocialist phase. Using case studies, the authors explore the question of how particular groups within the social, political, or cultural elite of different former socialist countries were able to retain influence over certain areas of activity during the period of change in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Their contributions are based on newly discovered archive material and are conceptually linked by theories on the legacy of communism, social capital, and informality. Drawing on these theories, the authors deal with different thematic fields, from the transformation of the Soviet museum system to the development of the Georgian banking system, from property conflicts in Hungary to political thought in Slovakia.

The study analyzes the continuities between the “national communism” of the 1980s and the “national populism” of the 1990s in the case of Slovakia. It describes how the legacy of the Slovak national communist program contributed to establishing the course and shape of Slovak transformation in the early 1990s and beyond. The main focus is on the ways in which the former communist intellectual elites used their informal networks to rebuild their institutional foundations after the fall of the communist regime. To retain their status, they created an agenda based on the concept of Slovak sovereignty and opposition to the political hegemony of both the Western-oriented post-dissident elites and the technocrats planning the radical economic transformation. Through their activities, the former national communists gained considerable political support, which they used to strengthen or establish populist and nationalist political currents in Slovak politics. The fact that they provided a more acceptable version of nationalism than their far-right rivals gave them a near monopoly when it came to forming the national ideology of the new hegemon of Slovak politics Vladimír Mečiar. By combining their networks from the past with the opportunities offered by the democratic transition, they contributed to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 as the first step toward creating a Slovak version of “illiberal democracy”.

This article focuses on the influence of personal networks on the property negotiations that accompanied the system change from socialism to democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At its center lies István Bibó College, a self-governing student dormitory in Budapest where Hungary’s current ruling party, Fidesz, was founded in 1988. The building in which the College is still located to this day once belonged to a Catholic congregation, which first claimed restitution in 1990. Against the backdrop of vague legal regulations, a lack of established procedures for dealing with restitution, and overt preferential treatment for the church, the college’s students ultimately relied on a trustworthy social network developed over years that had already been helpful in the face of the socialist authorities. It was this network that provided a sense of stability until the property conflict was resolved in the College’s favor toward the end of the 1990s.

Above all, the article documents the strong continuity in the leadership of Russian museums and in the corporate organisation of museum professionals. The lack of elite exchange that has been observed in other areas of Russian political, economic and social life is also evident in the cultural sphere. At the same time, it becomes clear that only a few members of the museum community had sufficient cultural and social capital to meet the challenges of the post-socialist transition. Nevertheless, it proved possible to secure the foundations of museum work with the help of a stable network of museum staff. However, this was at the expense of maintaining and strengthening patron-client relationships both within the network and with state institutions. Under these conditions, the museums only produced limited impetus for a process of democratisation and renewal in the field of culture.

This paper engages with the early years of the post-Soviet transition to a market economy, beyond the unfulfilled democratization and marketization narratives of the transition literature. I examine the functioning of the Georgian central bank (National Bank of Georgia) in the context of the hyperinflation of 1993-1994, and pursue the question of how the bank underwent a process of transformation and acquired new meaning. I thereby reinterpret the history of the central bank and conceptualize change in the process of transition, at the same time reframing the meaning of legacies in this process. Drawing on the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, I see the central bank of Georgia as a floating signifier that turned into a split subject, torn between socialism and the liberal imperatives of marketization. This paper describes institutional practices, as well as ideas about central banking, from 1991 to the start of the IMF’s macroeconomic stabilization program in 1994. The hyperinflation of 1993-1994 serves as the main context for analyzing this change. This is a period of openness during the disintegration and dislocation of the Soviet structure, in which struggles for new meanings took place in the transitional space between the weakened hegemony of socialism and liberal transition policies.