New Books In Eastern European Studies

Belisarius and Antonina were titans in the Roman world some 1,500 years ago. Belisarius was the most well-known general of his age, victor over the Persians, conqueror of the Vandals and the Goths, and as if this were not enough, wealthy beyond imagination. His wife, Antonina, was an impressive person in her own right. She made a name for herself by traveling with Belisarius on his military campaigns, deposing a pope, and scheming to disgrace important Roman officials. Together, the pair were extremely influential, and arguably wielded more power in the late Roman world than anyone except the emperor Justinian and empress Theodora themselves. This unadulterated power and wealth did not mean that Belisarius and Antonina were universally successful in all that they undertook. They occasionally stumbled militarily, politically, and personally - in their marriage and with their children. These failures knock them from their lofty perch, humanize them, and make them even more relatable and intriguing to us today.

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials. The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, Agata Fijalkowski's Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial (Routledge, 2023) examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf we

In 1965, five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, one of his Mossad abductors was sent back to South America to kill another fugitive Nazi, the so-called “butcher of Riga,” Latvian Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was shot. On his corpse, the assassins left pages from the closing speech of the chief British prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: “After this ordeal to which mankind has been submitted, mankind itself . . . comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!’” Years later, the Latvian prosecutor general began investigating the possibility of redeeming Cukurs for his past actions. Researching the case, Dr. Linda Kinstler discovered that her grandfather, Boris, had served in Cukurs’s killing unit and was rumored to be a double agent for the KGB. The proceedings, which might have resulted in Cukurs’s pardon, threw into question supposed “facts” about the Holocaust at the precise moment its last living survivors—the last legal witnesses—were dy

An astonishing deep dive into the war in Ukraine - from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War - and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime - and Russia itself - at risk of destruction. Why?  Drawing on over 25 years' experience working in Moscow, journalist Owen Matthews provides the answer. He takes us inside the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of nationalist fantasy and bad information - and into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky. Using the testimonies of captured Russian conscripts and the last journalists in besieged Mariupol, Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine (Mudlark, 2022) uncovers what unfolded on the ground, while interviews with Putin's close network pull back the

During the Last Ice Age, Europe was a cold, dry place teeming with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, bison, cave bears, cave hyenas, and cave lions. It was also the home of people physically indistinguishable from humans today, commonly known as the Cro-Magnons. Our knowledge of them comes from either their skeletons or the tools, art, and debris they left behind. Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe (Columbia UP, 2023) tells the story of these dynamic and resilient people in light of recent scientific advances. Trenton Holliday-a paleoanthropologist who has studied the Cro-Magnons for decades-explores questions such as: Where and when did anatomically modern humans first emerge? When did they reach Europe, and via what routes? How extensive or frequent were their interactions with Neandertals? What did Cro-Magnons look like? What did they eat, and how did they acquire their food? What can we learn about their lives from studying their skeletons? How did they deal with the glacial

The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany's largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) by Dr. Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War's end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once-militarised border between East and West Germany into an extensive protected area. Yet as forests, meadows, and wetlands replace fences, minefields, and guard towers, ecological recovery must reckon with the pain of the borderlands' brutal past. The lessons gained by conservationists here, Pieck argues, have profound practical and ethical implications far beyond Germany. Can conservation help heal both ecological and societal wounds? How might conservation honor difficult socioecological pasts? Deeply researched and evocatively written, this beautiful, interdisciplinary investiga

In the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in paintings, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as iconoclasm. Over the following years, the emperors' zealous movement involved other acts that closely foreshadowed the Reformation movement that would sweep Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Like that later Reformation, iconoclasm marked an authentic revolution in religious sensibility, with all that implied for theology, culture, and visual perceptions of holiness. This was a pivotal moment in the definition of Christianity and its relationship to the material creation. It was also a time of critical encounters with the other Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam. With A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World (Baylor UP, 2023), Philip Jenkins offers a compellin

In two new books, Fabian Baumann and Lauren Stokes examine the past through the lens of family structures and relations. In Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023), Baumann investigates the origins of Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms through the story of the Shul’gin family (in Ukrainian, Shul’hyn). Baumann argues that becoming Russian or Ukrainian in tsarist-era Kyiv was a deliberate choice, and that family life was a crucible of nationalist socialization. Likewise, in Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford UP, 2022), Lauren Stokes demonstrates that guest workers from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere were savvy in challenging a division between work life and family life that the West German state crafted to limit family migration. Baumann is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg. Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University

How did the Soviet Union control the behaviour of its people? How did the people themselves engage with the official rules and the threat of violence in their lives? In Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish's book Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State (U Toronto Press, 2023), the contributors examine how social control developed under Stalin and Khrushchev. Drawing on deep archival research from across the former Soviet Union, they analyse the wide network of state institutions that were used for regulating individual behaviour and how Soviet citizens interacted with them. Together they show that social control in the Soviet Union was not entirely about the monolithic state imposing its vision with violent force. Instead, a wide range of institutions such as the police, the justice system, and party-sponsored structures in factories and farms tried to enforce control. The book highlights how the state leadership itself adjusted its policing strategies and moved away fro

In Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940-44 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Stefan C. Ionescu examines the process of economic Romanianization of Bucharest during the Antonescu regime that targeted the property, jobs, and businesses of local Jews and Roma/Gypsies and their legal resistance strategies to such an unjust policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In her sparkling and splendid new book The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina (Stanford University Press, 2023), Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular presents a thorough and deeply layered account of the relationship between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and Muslims of Bosnia Herzegovina leading to and beyond the Berlin Treaty of 1878. At the heart of Erdogdular’s project is an argument for taking seriously the significant continuities in the relationship between Ottoman imperial rule and the religious and political lives of Bosnian Muslims. This meticulously researched and beautifully written book makes a compelling and convincing case for disrupting the popular opinion that locates the beginning of modernity in Bosnia Herzegovina with the onset of Habsburg rule. It does so by showing the complex and fascinating histories and discourses on such critical questions as migration (hijra), the encounter of Islam and modernity, education, and the nation that highlight the important role and

Today I talked to Tom Gallagher about his new book Europe's Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950-2022 (Scotview, 2023). Representative democracy endured in Europe because its political leaders’ deviousness and self-advancement were balanced by altruism, fortitude and civic virtue. However, in this century, the reputation and calibre of politicians has slumped in country after country, as fads, image, process, triviality and spin are promoted over experience, prudence and long-term outcomes. National leadership roles are increasingly filled by inexperienced careerists, who are disconnected from the people on whose behalf they are supposed to rule. How can Europe remain mostly free and adequately governed, if this leadership famine drags on? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

"Within our mandate, the [European Central Bank] is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough". With those three words delivered in London on 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi - the ECB's president from 2011-2019 - stopped a contagious collapse of Europe's common currency after just one decade. Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale write in Mario Draghi: The True Story of the Man Who Saved the Euro (Rizzoli, 2019): “So simple a phrase, delivered at the right time in front of the right audience, it will hang on as a warning to investors when Draghi is long gone that central bankers in Europe are ready to defend their currency against speculative attacks brought on by people not quite aware of their resolve". Draghi, who went on to see Italy through the Covid pandemic as its prime minister from 2021-2022, has acquired mythical status. Who is he? What are the skills that allowed him to succeed where others may have failed? How did he manage the ECB's governing council in compar

In 1812 the French emperor Napoleon decided to invade Russia. For this purpose, he gathered an army of half a million men and women, consisting of soldiers from all nationalities, including French, German and Italian. Serving in this army was Carel Johannes Wagevier, an officer in the 125th Regiment of the Line, which was staffed by mostly Dutch soldiers. Full of confidence, they went to war and began the long journey to the East. What followed was a horrific expedition deep into the Russian interior, a chaotic retreat, and captivity. Just like his fellow soldiers, Wagevier endured the cold, the stresses of combat, and the hunger that besieged the army. After fighting at the battle of Berezina in November 1812, he was taken prisoner and transported all the way to the Russian interior. In 1814 he and his remaining fellow officers were released, and together they started the journey back home.  During his travels across Russia, he made notes of events that occurred or meetings that seemed memorable, including o

Valentina Marcella's Laughing Matters: Graphic Satire Reckoning with the 1980 Coup in Turkey (Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino 2022) focuses on the production of political cartoons in Turkey in the context of authoritarianism and repression that was brought about by the coup d’état of September 12 1980, and by the military rule that followed. It builds on theories of political satire as an active element of political culture. Political cartoons serve as the lens through which the evolution of the political space under the regime is explored. The analysis revolves around Gırgır, the satirical magazine that in the decade prior to the coup had already contributed to the emergence of a socially and politically critical field with its politically engaged columns and illustrations and that, during the regime, became the best-selling weekly at a national level. Two main issues are investigated. On the one hand, how Gırgır’s satire survived under a regime that, in its attempt to turn citizens into a homogeneous,

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action. Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these re

The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022) is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices. Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance. Gültan Kışanak is a longtime journalist, politician and anticolonial feminist activist for Kurdish liberation, who was elected to Parliament in 2007 as the MP f

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppo

If you are reading this, it’s probably hard—nearly impossible—to imagine a world without writing—without print, books, newspapers, signs, graffiti, advertisements, forms, letters, texts, internet memes, and New Books Network blogposts like this one. How would you do your work? How would you communicate with your friends and family? How would you learn about the world around you? The historians in this conversation have written path-breaking books that deepen our understanding of an age when the written word was still emerging as a feature in everyday life. These books focus on different places—Russia and the Netherlands—where writing and print emerged quite differently but they share a deep erudition and ambitious methodological creativity in endeavoring to account for the ephemeral. Simon Franklin is emeritus professor of Russian history at University of Cambridge, Clare College. His books include Writing Society and Culture in Early Rus, 950–1300 (2002), The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (1996), co-authored wi