This special issue expands on the existing research on foreign-currency lending and the forex loan crisis in Eastern Europe by investigating other forms of housing-related finance and post-crisis developments. Bringing together hitherto disparate strands of research, our issue traces the linkages between macroeconomic developments, state measures, class dynamics, and social movements in the aftermath of the forex loan crises in Latvia, Romania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Hungary as part of their long-term trajectories of housing finance. We find that despite different political-institutional articulations, these trajectories all feature a new expansion of lending based on a bifurcation of the credit market into more secure, often subsidised mortgage lending aimed at better-off debtors and more risky non-mortgage loans used for housing purposes by more precarious households.
The common hamster (Cricetus cricetus L.) is supposed to be an abundant species in Eastern Europe including Ukraine. However, the current data on hamster’s occurrence in Ukraine from 1990 till nowadays show that the species became rare. The common hamster can be found in the West, North-East Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula. The species have declined in the forest-steppe zone and became extinct in most part of the steppe zone. Its actual distribution range has thus been strongly reduced. One of the possible causes of this decline is the habitat loss due to changes in agricultural management.
The paper examines the struggle between three agrarian parties
- the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union “Nikola Petkov”, the Hungarian Smallholders Party and the Romanian National Peasant Party - and the local communist parties and Soviet representatives after the Second World War. It identifies the pattern and forms of communist campaign against the opposition agrarian parties and places them in the context of domestic and international developments. The paper discusses how the abolition of agrarian parties contributed to the Sovietization of Bulgaria, Hungary and
Romania. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
Archaeometallographic data suggest that there were two technological models in Eastern Europe as early as the Bronze Age–Early Iron Age transition period (9th–7th centuries BC). We link their development to two routes via which knowledge of use of ferrous metals diffused from Anatolia. The first route reached the North Caucasus, the second route passed through Greece and the Balkans to Central and Eastern Europe. and Archeometalografická data naznačují, že již v přechodu mezi dobou bronzovou a ranou dobou železnou (9.–7. stol. př. n. l.) existovaly ve východní Evropě dva technologické modely zpracování železa. Jejich rozvoj spojujeme se dvěma trasami, kterými se znalosti užívání železných kovů z Anatolie rozšířily. První trasa překročila Zakavkazsko, druhá trasa vedla přes Řecko a Balkán do střední a východní Evropy.
This article analyses recent developments in Croatian housing finance to update the established account of housing finance and peripheral financialisation in Eastern Europe that is based on the boom-bust cycle of the 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s. During the bust stage of that cycle, changes in regulation and in the behaviour of debtors and creditors resulted in deleveraging and a shift away from the risky and exploitative lending practices characteristic of peripheral housing finance. However, new increases in household debt and housing prices since 2016–17, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, seem to have reversed these trends. While a boom-bust cycle of similar scope and modality to the first one is unlikely to be repeated, peripheral forms of housing finance have persisted to some degree.
The Welsh literary and cultural theorist Raymond Williams was, together with Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, a founding figure of British Cultural Studies. He is known, among other things, for the unorthodox interpretation of Marxism he called “cultural materialism”. We present here a Czech translation of Williams’s reflections on Die Alternative (published in English as The Alternative in Eastern Europe) by Rudolf Bahro. Williams’s text first appeared in the New Left Review under the title “Beyond Actually Existing Socialism” (NLR I, no. 120, March/April 1980). Translated by Magdaléna Michlová and Jaroslav Michl, introduced by Jaroslav Michl.