Event

Monday 30 October, 19:30

1956 A European year

The year 1956 signified the beginning of the end of the continent's division due to the cold war and saw the start of a dynamic that led to the fall, in 1989, of the wall that separated the two parts of Europe . The collapse of the Stalin myth opened a breach for critics of the system and led to attempts to change, such as the popular movements in Poland and the revolution that took place in Hungary in the same year.

 

Programme
Moderator: Bashkim Shehu, writer of Albanian origins, CCCB consultant on Eastern Europe.

Speakers:

Andrei Grachev, political scientist, adviser to and spokesperson of Mikhail Gorbachev in the last years of Perestroika.
"The Cycle of Crisis: from the Thaw to Perestroika"
The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opened the door to the "thaw", as the process of de-Stalinisation was called. With all its ambiguities and limits, it became the inevitable framework reference for the reforms that Gorbachev undertook in the 1980s and that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet system.

Inoslav Besker, journalist, Professor of Political Science and Literature at the universities of Zagreb, Naples and Rome.
"Repercussions in the Communist Bloc and in Western Europe"
Following the denunciation of Stalinism, the crisis of the system had major international repercussions, both within the Soviet bloc (especially with the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the mass-based movements in Poland and the Prague Spring of 1968) and among left-wing groups in the West, which began to move away from Moscow (as evidenced by the rise of Eurocommunism and May '68).

László Rajk, architect, dissident under the communist regime and member of the Hungarian Parliament (1990-1996).
"From 1956 to 1989"
1956 was to be the cradle of the events that came to mark the end of communism in Eastern Europe: as collective memory in Hungary, as continuity put into practice in Poland, and with multiple forms of influence in other countries of the region.