New Books In Eastern European Studies

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. William Prigge analyzes how “nationalist” communists came to power in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic by taking advantage of Lavrentiy Beria’s attempts to build his own power base. Prigge then demonstrates how their fall from power was a sign of the forces that led to Khrushchev’s ouster within a few years. Bearslayers: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists(Peter Lang, 2015) delves into the lives and careers of leading Latvian communists and the networks of relationships with each other and the Soviet leadership in Moscow to explore not only their fate but the power struggles taking place in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953. William D. Prigge is associate professor and department head for the Department of History, Political Science, Philosophy, Religion at Sou

The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)is so interesting. Westermann teaches at Texas A & M University at San Antonio. Prior to this work, he wrote a well-regarded volume on the German police battalions on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Before joining the university world, he was an officer in the US military, and he brings his training and experience to a study of the strategy and tactics of the armies which fought in each space. In doing so, he sheds new light on how each army behaved. He’s particularly good at understanding how tactics and military culture drove the Ameri

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience. But the actual history of Hungary and the Holocaust remains opaque. Ferenc Laczo aims to change this. Laczo, an associate professor of history at Maastricht University, has produced a fascinating examination of a series of dialogues unfamiliar to most historians. His new book Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History (Brill, 2016) examines the Jewish community in Hungary and how their ideas of themselves and their place in Hungary changed during the war. He begins in the 1930s, with Jewish thinkers wrestling with traditional questions of identity and inclusion in the context of authoritarian government in Hungary and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. He then moves to a close reading of memories of the Holocaust in Hungary, taking advantage

Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of the 1940s. Piotr Kosicki’s edited volume, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), changes this story by profiling four Communist-run countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Drawing on extensive research in English-language scholarship and the national historiographies of the countries that it examines, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain offers an unparalleled glimpse into the vibrant and complicated politics of the Cold War period. Piotr Kosicki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supporti

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, complicates the traditional narrative of Jewish religious insularity within Imperial Russia in her new book on converts from Judaism. By exploring 19th century Russia’s multi-confessional landscape and the spaces in which Jewish men and women encountered those of other religious communities, Schainker uses the lens of conversion to explore Jewish and Russian Orthodox anxieties over group boundaries and the extent to which converts, far from being exiles within their Jewish communities, occupied sustained, liminal positions that attracted the interests of Jews, Christians, and Russian state officials. 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

Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime published by Northern Illinois University Press. He focuses on the 20 years after World War II when five to seven million Communists were disciplined by reprimand, demotion or expulsion. Cohn argues that Part leaders became less concerned about class background and ideological purity and more concerned about the needs of the state. As a result, corruption and abuse of position, along with moral degeneracy such as family relations and drunkenness, dominated internal investigations and disciplinary hearings. Cohn draws on a broad range of provincial case files in in Perm, Tver, Saratov, and Kiev, along with archives of the Commission of Party Control in Moscow, to reveal what the Party considered to appropriate behavior for those who carried the high title of Communist. Edward Co

In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World War II Lithuania, Davoliute demonstrates how cultural elites wove together nationalist and communist ideologies to shape the emerging Soviet Lithuania. She argues that writers Petras Vaiciunas and Justis Paleckis used a poetics of reconstruction to integrate Lithuania’s medieval past into a broader Soviet narrative of the future and that this engagement the development of indigenous pro-Soviet cultural elites. Davoliute then looks at the rustic turn in the 1970s and makes the case that cultural conservatives were able to provide an alternative aesthetic of authentic identity, not based on Soviet Lithuanian modernity but on a discourse of trauma and deracination. Her

Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlands, contacts between the empires, transportation networks, changing geographies of borders, ghost borders, countless border crossing and walls, and lack of geographical data, this book also provides numerous resources for historians, political scientists and other scholars. This book shesd light on an apparent “chaos” of the Balkan geography. 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

Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women played in the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. By placing gender and gender relations at the forefront of her analysis, Batinic provides insightful history of a unique phenomenon—guerrilla warfare in which tens of thousands of women took direct military roles. Based on vast amount of archival sources, Batinic demonstrated how gender was the main organising force of the Partisan movement. In this interview, we have talked about the main arguments of the book, particularly focusing on gender relations within the movement. Additionally, the interview will also introduce our listeners to the Balkan conflict during the Second World War and explore how and why the remarkable story of the Partisan women fell into oblivion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supporting

It’s been a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This anniversary marks a good occasion to ask a seemingly simple question: “What was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?” Was it Russia in a new wrapper? Or was it something new and unheralded in world history? Was it “Socialism in One Country?” Or was it a continent-sized vehicle for the spread of international communism? Was it ruled by a peculiar kind of “traditionalism?” Or was it a variation on a kind of typical “modernity?” In this thought-provoking collection of essays, the historian Michael David-Fox addresses these and other crucial questions about the USSR. Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) doesn’t offer simple answers. David-Fox shows again and again that easy dichotomies do little to capture the complexity of the Soviet experience. The USSR, he argues, is just not that easy to “boil down.” It was many things to many people, and continues to

In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political, and philosophical connections that were accompanying the history of the countries constituting the USSR. Mark Andryczyk’s research offers an insightful analysis of Ukrainian literature that was taking shape right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the emergence of Ukraine as an independent state. The Ukrainian literary scene of the 1990s was to some extent responding to a new political and social environment, revealing, and at times instigating, paradigmatic transformations. Becoming open to the West after almost seventy years of international isolation, Ukraine appeared to be building dialogues that involved identity and self-identification concerns locally and globally. In this process of awakened nationalconsciousness, which undoubtedly entailed a number of controv

Jessica Greenberg’s After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores a dual tension at work in Serbia in the early 2000s. She reveals young people’s disappointment in what they saw as a betrayal by their parents’ generation that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the failure of democracy in Serbia, as well as adults’ disappointment that young people did not live up to expectations of what student activists should be. This “politics of disappointment”opened up new understandings of democratic engagement on the part of Serbian students, resulting in activism that utilized “quality” protests, expertise in administrative reform, and procedural participation in politics. Greenberg draws on ethnographic research with three student groups to demonstrate young people’s frustration with the practicalities of life in Serbia and the consequence that student activists rejected utopias, “whether socialist, nationalist or revolutionary.” Alth

As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in understanding the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, both the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence over Polands politically tumultuous steps toward democratic revolution. In this groundbreaking history, Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), Gregory F. Domber (Professor of History, California State Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo) examines American policy toward Poland and its promotion of moderate voices within the opposition, while simultaneously addressing the Soviet and European influences on Poland’s revolution in 1989. With a cast including Reagan, Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II, Domber charts American support of anticommunist opposition groups–particularly Solidarity, the underground movement led by future president Lech Walesa–and highlights the transnation

Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Foteva applies postmodern geography, literary, and colonial theories to demonstrate the relationship between the development of national identity, the pull of Habsburg imperial identity, the shaping of Yugoslav identity, and the fracturing of the Balkans in the 1990s. In our podcast conversation, she discusses and challenges stereotypes of the Balkans as a region of perpetual conflict. Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe (Peter Lang, 20speaks to complex identiti

I don’t often have a chance to read books that focus solely on Belarus, which is exactly why I was intrigued by The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). Per Anders Rudling‘s study seeks to answer a basic question Why is there today an independent Belarus and how did this state appear? He begins by noting that Belarusian statehood was declared and re-declared no less than six times between 1918 and 1920, despite the fact that Belarusian territory was occupied by Germany during World War I and then divided between the Soviet Union and Poland in 1920. Rudling traces the activities of few hundred intellectuals as they attempted to shape a Belarusian national identity and political state. At the same time, he demonstrates the extent to which the these nationalists cultural and political achievements were dependent on the support of external powers Germany, the Soviet Union and Poland all of whom who saw Belarusian nationalism as a tool for undermining an opposi

In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming regional identities in East Germany and in a reunified Germany, and as a popular pastime. Although characterized by mediocrity compared to other sports in East Germany, McDougall demonstrates the ways in which football gave people a means of expressing identities that were separated from and even opposed to that endorsed by the state. At the same time, he argues, this was a “constrained autonomy,” one that was shaped by the tensions between Eigen-Sinn and conformity. The East German state has been viewed as a monolith, but recent scholarship – including this book – reveals its fractures. McDougall’s analysis exposes the limits and dysfunctionalities of the state and the communist party’s leadership. The People’s Game not only adds to our understanding of communist Eastern Europe, it also contributes to the growing field of s

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The book is an exceptionally rich account of the attitudes, politics, policies and actions of the Polish Underground regarding Polish Jews during the Second World War. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, spent years exploring archives, memoirs and secondary sources in preparing the book. Nearly every page of the book displays this research, with extensive quotes from newspapers, internal communications and leaders within the army. Zimmerman is well-aware of the historical and political stakes involved in his question. His answers are careful, nuanced and balanced. I can imagine pe

Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed description of the social practices, debates and discourses that were part of a transnational literary community created by tamizdat – literary works written in communist Europe but published in the West. Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Southeastern and Eastern Europe, University of Regensburg, demonstrates the permeability of the “Iron Curtain” through a study of the practicalities of book smuggling and publishing houses. More importantly, she reveals the motivations of non-conformist writers who sought publication in the West and the Western intellectuals, emigres and activists who facilitated publication – along with the tensions inherent in these relationships. Kind-Kovacs focuses as well as on how literary transmission between communist Europe and the West was shaped by and contributed to the human rights movement.

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disappearance of states that made all the difference in the way the Holocaust emerged over time. Because of our misunderstanding of the nature of the Holocaust, we’ve misunderstood the lessons that it should teach us. Because the world of our time rhymes with that of the Holocaust, this misunderstanding poses real threats to our world. It’s a tremendous book, fully worth of the extensive praise it has received. It will no doubt l

In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged Soviet rule. The leaders of each of these movements espoused nonviolent principles, but the capacity for violence was always there – especially as Soviet authorities engaged in violent repression. In The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution (University of Washington Press, 2015), Guntis Smidchens tackles the question “of whether it is possible to reconcile nonviolent principles with a pursuit of nationalist power” and his answer is yes. As evidence, Smidchens presents the events of 1988 to 1991 in the Baltic countries and their national song cultures, considering them through the lens of principles of nonviolence. Smidchens analyzes the role of choral, folk and rock music in the national movements, demonstrating that choral music provided mass discipline, folk songs pulled in people not already involved in song culture, and r