Direct actions constitute an important repertoire of action for environmental movements in Western countries. This article differentiates two ideal types of this repertoire of action: the anarchist concept, which understands direct action in terms of values and as a preferred way of doing things; and the liberal concept, which uses direct action in an instrumental way. Based on my empirical research in post-socialist Czech Republic, the article focuses on debates over environmentalism and, to be more precise, on uses of direct actions by environmental organizations. It explains why the liberal concept was very limited and why direct action as a preferred way of doing things has not become a part of the repertoire of collective action. The article argues that the movement was politically moderate due to a combination of reasons: the very specific historical experience of the Czech environmental movement, which inclines it to use dialogue rather than confrontations with power; the fear of political hostility and marginalization by the state; and the internal dynamics of the environmental milieu.

In the decades since the fall of socialism, political jokes seemed to have lost their significance in Slovenia. In order to confirm and understand this change, we collected a sample of 200 jokes from five of the most popular Slovenian Facebook groups and analyzed the jokes and their targets. The results show that political jokes have indeed largely disappeared from the Slovenian public sphere: only three of the jokes in the sample target politicians. In this article, we argue that this development indicates a different response to the social pressures of the market economy. Whereas during socialism the source of anxiety was more or less apparent (the communist elite) and consequently easier to ridicule, in post-socialist societies, sources of anxiety are more diverse and impersonal, making them more difficult to target in jokes.

This paper suggests that the different and sometimes contradictory public narratives of perestroika constitute an essential part of understanding the expectations of people regarding perestroika and their evaluation in the post-perestroika years. These narratives also underline the notion that post-Soviet governments have been unable to consolidate new constructs of memory with respect to perestroika. Historical construction regarding the pre-perestroika years of the Soviet administration in most of the post-Soviet Central Asian (CA) countries is conducted along the ideological lines associated with the post–independence years in each of the republics.