New Books In Eastern European Studies

Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian journalist and writer born in Donetsk, which at present remains occupied by Russia-backed militants. Sometime after the beginning of the occupation, he was captured for his political views by the militants of the occupied parts of the Donbas and sentenced to 15 years. On the eve of 2020, Aseyev was released in a prisoner exchange. Currently Stanislav Aseyev lives in Kyiv. Aseyev received a number of awards recognizing his active social and political position (including the Free Media Award (2020), the National Freedom of Expression Award (2020). He is also a recipient of the Shevchenko National Prize, the highest state prize of Ukraine for works of culture and arts. Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022; translated into English by Lidia Wolanskyj) helps understand a highly entangled and complicated background of the current Russo-Ukrainian war. This book—a chronological account of the events that started in

In Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability. Russia 2008–2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Regina Smyth reveals how much electoral competition matters to the Putin regime and how competition leaves Russia more vulnerable to opposition challenges than is perceived in the West. Using original data and analysis, Smyth demonstrates how even weak political opposition can force autocratic incumbents to rethink strategy and find compromises in order to win elections. Smyth challenges conventional notions about Putin's regime, highlighting the vast resources the Kremlin expends to maintain a permanent campaign to construct regime-friendly majorities. These tactics include disinformation as well as symbolic politics, social benefits, repression, and falsification. This book reveals the stresses and challenges of maintaining an electoral authoritarian regime and provides a roadmap to understand how seemingly stable authoritarian systems can fall quickly to popular challenges even when the oppositio

The Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books, 2021) by Professor Marc David Baer charts the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, not just dealing with its sultans and military expansion, but also a wide range of topics like the roles played by women and minorities in Ottoman society. In this interview, Marc and I talk about the Ottoman empire’s rise and “fall”—a term that may actually mischaracterize how the Ottoman Empire transformed after its heights under Selim and Suleiman. We also talk about its legacy, both for Europe and the wider world. Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Pol

Communism in Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021) is a groundbreaking new survey of the history of Eastern Europe since 1945. It examines how Communist governments came to Eastern Europe, how they changed their societies and the legacies that persisted after their fall. Written from the perspective of the 21st century, this book shows how Eastern Europe’s trajectory since 1989 fits into the longer history of its Communist past. Rather than focusing on high politics, Communism in Eastern Europe concentrates on the politics of daily life, melding political history with social, cultural and gender history. It tells the history of this complicated era through the voices and experiences of ordinary people. By focusing on the complex interactions of everyday life, Communism in Eastern Europe illuminates the world Communism made in Eastern Europe, its politics and culture, values and dreams, successes and failures. This book is an engaging introduction to the history of Communist Eastern Europe for any reader. It is ide

The labels of victim and perpetrator in the aftermath of genocide have shaped the stories of pain and reconstructions for many of the Bosnian and Rwandan Americans. The trauma created by the labels has not only affected the first generations but has had profound impacts on future generations. The younger generations in Diaspora have learned about their country and history through their communities' stories and had to deal with their communities' labeling of victims or perpetrators created by the accident of their ethnicity.  Claudine Kuradusenge-McLeod's book Narratives of Victimhood and Perpetration: The Struggle of Bosnian and Rwandan Diaspora Communities in the United States (Peter Lang, 2021) explores how these labels and their complicated national histories shape the newer generations sense of homeland and identity as well as their involvement in their homeland or host-country politics. The narratives presented in this book helps us understand how young people understand their identities, their communiti

Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, Lviv… The city, which is located in the western part of Ukraine, evokes a highly entangled past that contains references to a number of nations, ethnicities, empires, states, and communities. They have their own (hi)story and they claim their right to make this story visible.  Ola Hnatiuk’s Courage and Fear (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019) focuses on the crossroads of Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian dwellers that happened to share one geographical space that, however, was fragmentized and diversified, shared and contested at a time. In addition to these three communities, there is an overbearing shadow of both Soviet and Nazi occupants. The triangle of the knotty relations of Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian residents that makes one travel back in time in hopes to understand how contested legacy took shape and what influence it exercised on generations is further complicated by the arrival of forces whose status was hard to define. Hnatiuk delicately guides her readers into and thr

One of the world's largest sellers of footwear, the Bata Company of Zlín, Moravia has a remarkable history that touches on crucial aspects of what made the world modern. In the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, the company Americanized its production model while also trying to Americanize its workforce. It promised a technocratic form of governance in the chaos of postwar Czechoslovakia, and during the Roaring Twenties, it became synonymous with rationalization across Europe and thus a flashpoint for a continent-wide debate. While other companies contracted in response to the Great Depression, Bata did the opposite, becoming the first shoe company to unlock the potential of globalization. As Bata expanded worldwide, it became an example of corporate national indifference, where company personnel were trained to be able to slip into and out of national identifications with ease. Such indifference, however, was seriously challenged by the geopolitical crisis of the 1930s, and by the cusp of the Second World War,

Over 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, but the collective memory of the conflict remains potently present for the people of the Russian Federation. Professor David Hoffman, editor of a new collection of essays about war memory in “Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia” suggests that this is no accident. Together with an impressive, interdisciplinary roster of academic contributors, Hoffman examines how the current leadership of Russia has put war memory at the heart of national identity, and used it as a powerful unifying force. Professor Hoffman and his fellow contributors were inspired by the memory studies of Pierre Nora, and in the fifteen well-crafted essays that make up The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2021) they examine a wide range of what Nora called the “lieux de mémoire” or sites of memory, which includes textbooks, memorials, monuments, archives, and films. Hoffman’s choice of this international group of sch

Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II (Purdue UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full understanding of the Ukrainian Committee's ties with the occupation authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and Jews, in occupied Poland. Ukrainian nationalists' collaboration created an opportunity to neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Uk

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019) chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks t

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2021), Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other

In The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales (John Murray, 2022), Nick Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literature, they include a German apothecary's daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar. Following these and other unlikely protagonists, the book travels from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland. “This is how the history of fairy tales operates: stories splintering along zigzagging pathways, carrying long-sounding echoes that turn down narrative alleyways suggested elsewhere or replicate each other with astonishing exac

Two children stumble upon a mass grave in the forest outside of Minsk in Belarus where the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, buried tens of thousands of innocent victims of torture. The Singing Forest, by Judith McCormack (Biblioasis 2021) weaves the story of a low-rung enforcer of that torture in pre-WWII Belarus and a modern-day Canadian lawyer on the team prosecuting long-forgotten crimes. Stefan Drozd’s life from earliest childhood lacked anything resembling kindness, nurturing, or morality. He has no understanding of human interaction, never had a friend, and did whatever he had to do to survive, even when that required torturing, murder, or lying to get into Canada after the war. Years later, Drozd is in his nineties and doesn't understand why anyone is making a fuss about something that happened so long ago. Leah Jarvis, a somewhat timid and confused young lawyer from an eccentric family, is helping prosecute him for war crimes. Leah knows that Drozd is guilty, but she needs hard evidence. While working on

Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France--all without destroying itself in the process? In Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire (Pegasus Books, 2021), Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. This often startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval, and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He

The past decade has been pivotal in the development of the European Union. The single currency has been tested to the limits by successive crises in the financial system, public-debt sustainability and public health. A migration crisis stress-tested the EU's free-travel area and its under-developed refugee and asylum policies. The Hungarian and Polish governments are backsliding on the union's foundational commitments to democracy and rule of law and, for the first time in the Communities' six-decade history, a full member state has left altogether. The weaknesses of the EU’s part-federal, part-intergovernmental design have been exposed but so has its resilience through flexibility. Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Fairness, and Democracy (Bristol University Press, 2022) explores this design and its "demoicratic" (not democratic) nature. Differentiated integration, the co-writers conclude, is “not only functionally necessary but also normatively desirable given the ineliminable diversity and plura

Although largely unknown in the West, the Russian novelist and political essayist Konstantin Nikolaevich Leontiev (1831-1891) has left a strong legacy in his homeland. He has often been compared to Friedrich Nietzsche, yet his writings predate those of his German counterpart by several decades. Also, unlike his German counterpart came to embrace a very ascetic form of Orthodox Christian faith. For decades he bravely clashed with many of the greatest minds of 19th century Russia on subjects ranging from ethics, art, geopolitics, Russia's place in the world, the historical cycles of civilizations, and especially religious faith. Glenn Cronin's Disenchanted Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev (Northern Illinois University Press, 2021) is the first major English-language study in over fifty years on this enigmatic figure of Russian intellectual history. Glenn Cronin is a contributing author to Ideology in Russian Literature and holds a PhD in Russian studies from the University of London. Step

Romanian Germans, mainly from the Banat and Transylvania, have occupied a place at the very heart of major events in Europe in the twentieth century yet their history is largely unknown. This east-central European minority negotiated their standing in a difficult new European order after 1918, changing from uneasy supporters of Romania, to zealous Nazis, tepid Communists, and conciliatory Europeans.  Migrating Memories: Romanian Germans in Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive study in English of Romanian Germans and follows their stories as they move across borders and between regimes, revealing a very European experience of migration, minorities, and memories in modern Europe. After 1945, Romanian Germans struggled to make sense of their lives during the Cold War at a time when the community began to fracture and fragment. In this interview, James Koranyi talks about how although the revolutions of 1989 seemed to mark the end of the German community in Romania, but instead Romanian G

In his new book, The Symbolic State: Minority Recognition, Majority Backlash, and Secession in Multinational Countries (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), Karlo Basta argues that the nation-state is a double sleight of hand, naturalizing both the nation and the state encompassing it. No such naturalization is possible in multinational states. To explain why these states experience political crises that bring their very existence into question, standard accounts point to conflicts over resources, security, and power. This book turns the spotlight on institutional symbolism. When minority nations in multinational states press for more self-government, they are not only looking to protect their interests. They are asking to be recognized as political communities in their own right. Yet satisfying their demands for recognition threatens to provoke a reaction from members of majority nations who see such changes as a symbolic repudiation of their own vision of politics. Secessionist crises flare up when major

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order. In Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger--and specifically to the aspects of their thought tha

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (Indiana UP, 2021), Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confu