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Samizdat, Air Pollution
Pollution from the Black Triangle was a tremendous source of water and air pollution in Eastern Europe, but it was not the only source. Heating systems that relied on coal power, and cars using leaded gas and lacking catalytic converters added to this immense problem, which especially plagued larger cities, including Prague.
Initially, the Czechoslovak Communist….
Samizdat, Consumer Goods
Czechoslovaks watched the unfolding of perestroika [restructuring] in the Soviet Union and its slow introduction into their own economy with great interest, although there were obstacles to doing so. While the Czechoslovak Communist Party was ready to start experimenting with economic perestroika, it maintained reservations about glasnost [openness or publicity]. It suppressed reports about….
Statistics on Polish Catholicism in the Communist Era
The information presented in this table highlights some of the ambiguities regarding the position of the Roman Catholic Church in the Polish People's Republic. The basic message in these data is that Catholicism thrived between WWII and the 1990s. These decades saw an expanding network of parishes and a dramatic surge in the construction of church buildings. However, by comparing the last….