“1989 – Images of change”: National Prize Winners
Vlad-Constantin BADEA (PDF | 4,30 MB)
Vlad-Constantin BADEA (20, from Târgovişte, Romania, currently undergraduate student at the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca) entitled his entry 1989: The turning point. Involution – Revolution – Evolution. He used a huge variety of sources – archive documents, academic literature, testimonies of various acquaintances, photos and a questionnaire applied to the students of his former high school “Constantin Carabella” from Târgovişte – in the endeavor to present the basic aspects of the history of Romania during the communist rule and after 1989. The entry includes some insights into the personal life-story of the author’s great-grandfather, who was arrested and sent to a labor camp in the 1950s, but focuses more on the macro-political evolutions at national level. Nevertheless, the author succeeds to illustrate various perspectives about the recent history of Romania by including newspaper cartoons and excerpts from the opinions of several people from different generations. His conclusion is: “There are two legacies that shape today’s Romanian society: the legacy of communism and the legacy of the 1989 Revolution”.
Marcin SENDERSKI (PDF | 332 KB)
Marcin SENDERSKI (22, from Warsaw, Poland) aims in his entry That is how we did it in Poland – a tale on entrepreneurship“ to draft a very brief, but fully authentic story on Polish entrepreneurship. He starts from the economic crisis of the 1980s and its impact upon collective mentalities and the revival of market economy, sanctioned already in December 1988 through the so-called Wilczek’s bill, named after Mieczyslaw Wilczek, the communist minister of Industry, a bill which “has paved the road to capitalism. It let people work as much as they wanted and earn as much as they were able to. This was the golden age for enterprising people”. Although he outlines also the merits of the institutional reforms introduced by the ‘Balcerowicz Plan’, Marcin Senderski does not limit his analysis at macro-economic level, but also adds powerful images and stories told by various acquaintances about the lacking work ethic and the “mental devastation” brought by communism, as well as about the success of the new entrepreneurs, and the remaining challenges 20 years after the demise of communism.
