While historians have approached the process of popular democracies absorption into the Soviet system at the end of the Second World War by stressing political and economic relations within the decision-making structures, the urban spaces produced during this interval, as sites of social interaction, remained under-researched. In Romania, the project conducted in Hunedoara between 1947 and 1954 illustrates the extent to which the Romanian communist state was aware of the urban spaces potential for social manipulation, as well as the strategies this authority undertook to employ politically the formative function of the built environment. The thesis revolves around three main questions: What did modernization mean for Romanian society by the end of World War II? To what degree did the attempts of Stalinization manage to impose on Romanian society the Soviet Unions cultural values and principles? And how can studying urban architecture tell us more about these topics? Drawing on newspaper and archival materials, the thesis concludes that inside the communist system, the ability to define modernity much less bringing it into being, depended on whether political elites and the party could provide institutional unity and coherent decision-making.

While historians have approached the process of popular democracies absorption into the Soviet system at the end of the Second World War by stressing political and economic relations within the decision-making structures, the urban spaces produced during this interval, as sites of social interaction, remained under-researched. In Romania, the project conducted in Hunedoara between 1947 and 1954 illustrates the extent to which the Romanian communist state was aware of the urban spaces potential for social manipulation, as well as the strategies this authority undertook to employ politically the formative function of the built environment. The thesis revolves around three main questions: What did modernization mean for Romanian society by the end of World War II? To what degree did the attempts of Stalinization manage to impose on Romanian society the Soviet Unions cultural values and principles? And how can studying urban architecture tell us more about these topics? Drawing on newspaper and archival materials, the thesis concludes that inside the communist system, the ability to define modernity much less bringing it into being, depended on whether political elites and the party could provide institutional unity and coherent decision-making.

The purpose of the presented dissertation is to analyse the functioning of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Antonín Novotný's period (1953- 1967). The dissertation deals with three main themes: the organizational structure of the central apparatus, the staffing and personnel policy (the so-called nomenklatura). The main intention of the study concentrates on the Party elite's mobility and formation and considers patronage (clientelism) as an approach to understanding the political process. From the perspective of the political pluralism it examines coalition building at the central level through an analysis of aggregate biographical career data of over sixty Communist politicians. During the second half of the 1950s the Communist regime broke with the most brutal aspects of totalitarianism. The abandonment of massive and arbitrary repression was the key policy change from the Stalinist era. In many ways it prompted the transformation into a different type of dictatorship, becoming a modern police state rather than a despotic terror state. Instead of previous large-scale repression as a key means of social control, the Communist regime focused on a so-called cadre policy as the main power authority. As far as economic troubles were concerned, the Czechoslovak...