30 October: ‚Applied’ Communism After a Hundred Years. (Un)Learned Lessons for Humankind

The Witold Pilecki Center for Totalitarian Studies hereby extends an invitation to an international debate entitled:

‚Applied’ Communism After a Hundred Years

(Un)Learned Lessons for Humankind

30 October 2017 / 6 PM /

Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw, Sala Kolumnowa, Krakowskie Przedmieście Street 26/28

The debate will be held in English and will feature the following speakers:

• Prof. Igor Cașu (State University of Moldova)

• Prof. Pablo Perez Lopez (Universidad de Navarra)

• Prof. Gonzalo Larios Mengotti (Universidad Gabriela Mistral)

• Prof. Alexandra Richie (Collegium Civitas)

• Prof. Wojciech Roszkowski (Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences)

The discussion will be chaired by the Program Director of the Witold Pilecki Center for Totalitarian Studies, Dr. Wojciech Kozłowski.

About:

Richard Pipes remarked at some point that the first determined effort to realize the communist ideal by using the full power of the state occurred in Russia between 1917 and 1991. Building on this observation, the Witold Pilecki Center for Totalitarian Studies organizes a roundtable marking the centenary anniversary of the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution – the first grand-scale instance of applying communist ideology to the living organism of a state and nation. Introducing communism to post-Imperial Russia initiated a phenomenon, named by The Black Book of Communism “the most colossal case of political carnage in history”, that claimed 85-100 million lives and for a time being seemed unstoppable in conquering the world.

Communism considerably determined the global history of the twentieth century in a variety of ways: by decimating and enslaving peoples and nations, destroying religions, distorting and ruining economies, destabilizing international politics, and crippling cultural development, as well as by forming parties, governing states, waging wars, charming Western intellectuals and seducing followers in all corners of the globe.

The roundtable seeks to review this worldwide phenomenon, assuming diverse geographical perspectives and social-cultural backgrounds: South-American, Western, Central- and Eastern- European. The logic and dynamics of the conversation will be founded on a few core questions, which lead from the particular to the universal:

1. How in a long run did the 1917 outbreak of “applied” communism affect your region?

2. How your regional perspective may illuminate the all-human experience of communism?

3. For humankind, what seems to be the take-away from the century of communism?