The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online

XII (2006), no 19 59
1960. The gaps between the discourse of the state and the life of citizens, and how social
work institutions try to fill them, appear also in the case study by Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and
Pavel Romanov about the children’s home „Krasnyi gorodok“ (Red small town). A similar study
for the Kozma-Street Settlement, by Dorottya Szikra and Eszter Varsa, analyzes the
differentiation (based on gender, class, and ethnicity) in the practice of social work in
Hungary between 1935 and 1945.
The third part addresses aspects of the interrelations between social policies and social
movements in Bulgaria, Slovenia, Latvia, Poland and Hungary. Milena Angelova sheds some
light on the interrelations between private welfare activities and the growing responsibility of
the state in her study of the fight against tuberculosis between 1908 and 1948. Vesna
Leskošek recalls the importance of the feminist movement for the development of social work
in Slovenia in the period preceeding World War II. The different self-help organizations of the
Latvian Jewish community between 1900 and 1940 are the object of the contribution by Juris
Osis and Liesma Ose. The consequences of legislation and demographic evolutions on the
Latvian Jewish minority are observed in two cities. Izabela Szczeopaniak-Wiecha, Agnieszka
Malek and Krystyna Slany oberve the system of abandoned child care in Poland, focussing on
the foster family as the oldest form of care for deprived children. Eszter Varsa analyses the
ethnic differentiations operated by the first maternity leave regulation in Hungary, between
1960 and 1980.
The fourth part recalls the history of the professionalisation of social work in Romania and
Slovenia. The development of the vocational training systems for nurses and midwives, in
interwar Romania, is recalled and analyzed by Silvana Rachieru. She underlines the particular
significance of the establishment of the „Principesa Ilena Superior School for Social
Assistance“ in 1929. Finally, the history of Slovenian vocational training from 1940 and 1960 is
the object of the last essay of this section. Darja Zaviršek shows how the state played a
crucial role, considering social workers as necessary, albeit transitional, for the construction
of the „socialist society“.
In the final essay of the book, co-editor Dagmar Schulte synthesises the similarities and
differences in the foundation, the professionalisation, the main targets, the daily routine and
the specificities of social work in these countries.
The unconventional time period adopted by the initiators and researchers of this project,
refusing the secure political periodizations to the benefit of less definite boundaries, is
crucial in making many of the essays published here important contributions for the study of
European professional welfare. They are a salutary effort to enlighten an unknown field of
comparative social historical research on the eastern bloc but also to stress the important
continuities with pre-war years developments in these countries, without silencing the
discontinuities. „Need and Care“ offers some useful tools in the writing of a contemporary
social history of Western and Eastern Europe.
Mathieu Denis, Berlin.