New Books In Eastern European Studies

In The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties (Indiana University Press, 2022), Anat Plocker examines the campaign of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that swept through Poland in 1967 and 1968, in the wake of the Six-Day War. Plocker offers a new framework for understanding how this anti-Semitic campaign was motivated by Polish fears of Jewish influence and international power. She sheds new light on the internal dynamics of the communist regime in Poland, stressing the importance of mid-level functionaries, whose dislike and fear of Jews had an unmistakable impact on the evolution of party policy. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland examines how Communist leader Władysław Gomułka’s anti-Zionist rhetoric spiraled out of hand and opened up a Pandora's box of old assertions that Jews controlled the communist Party, leading in turn to a revival of nationalist chauvinism and witch hunts in universities and workplaces that conjured up ugly memories of Nazi Germany. Piotr

This collection of articles, edited by Matthew Romaniello, Alison Smith,  Tricia Starks, takes up the history of material culture over the past several centuries of Russian history. Widely diverse objects such as maps, textiles, building materials, cigarette cases,fish guts (yes...), samovars, samizdat, and even the T-34 tank are viewed in light of their role in Russian society. Hence the collection's striking and unusual title: The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).   Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... 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

The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe were times of intense technological, social and political change and transformation, and so it’s no surprise that much of the art and literature of this period was equal in its innovative intensity, attempting to make sense of times that were radically out of joint. Traditional scholarship on this period has focused on the alienation and disassociation that can be experienced when trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of modern life. But is this what the artists and writers of the day were trying to communicate to their audience? Without discounting the alienating effects of modernity, Malika Maskarinec has stepped in with a fascinating monograph on the period, The Forces of Form in German Modernism (Northwestern UP, 2018), which challenges and complicates this reading, drawing our attention to other themes present in the work of the period. Turning to various archival sources to see what the artists and their peers were interested in, Maskarinec finds a col

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. In Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021), Rich Brownstein explores these trends--and many others--with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies.Recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films are included, along with an educational guide, a detailed listing of all films covered and a four-part index-glossary. The book also has a companion website, Holocaust Cinema Complete. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by

For the past 30 years, a group of Russian scholars have dedicated themselves to uncovering the crimes of Stalinism. Their organization, Memorial, has in that time made great strides in understanding the scale, nature and history of Stalin's repression. On 28 December 2021, Russia's highest court found that Memorial was in violation of the Russian Federation's law regarding "foreign agents" and ordered it to be closed.   In this interview, I talked with Benjamin Nathans about Memorial's history, work, and the reasons Putin decided to shut it down now. Nathans, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked with and for Memorial since the 1990s. For more about Memorial, go here.  Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. 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

When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv―today the second-largest city in Bulgaria―was thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989, and which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being much younger than them. Eastern Europe! (New Europe Books, 2021) is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history. Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognito, with a sign on the border declaring “Here be monsters.” Tomek Jankowski's book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has bee

The transfer of power is something every must state attend to (and preferably by peaceful means). Remarkably, this fundamental aspect of statecraft was governed by custom rather than law into the eighteenth century in Russia. In Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia: The Transfer of Power 1450-1725 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Paul Bushkovitch traces the history of how tsars (and earlier, grand princes) came to the Russian throne. Overturning generations of scholarship, Bushkovitch shows that there were various means by which a ruler came to govern Russia. Russian grand princes often designated their eldest sons to the throne in their lifetime, but primogeniture was neither codified nor the only option. The Russian elite on certain occasions elected the new tsar, and women multiple times found themselves at the pinnacle of state power. Deploying decades of erudition and archival sleuthing, Bushkovitch offers a thought-provoking front row view on the evolution of determining the heir and succession politics

Lucie Fremlova's book Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021) offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of queer Roma, which are very diverse regionally and otherwise, pose a fundamental challenge to one-dimensional, negative misrepresentations of Roma as homophobic and antithetical to European and Western modernity. The book platforms Romani agency and voices in an original and novel way. This enables the reader to feel the individuals behind the data, which detail stories of rejection by Romani families and communities, and non-Romani communities; and unfamiliar, ground-breaking stories of acceptance by Romani families and communities. Combining intersectionality with queer theory innovatively and applying it to Romani Studies, the author supports her arguments with data illustrating how the identities of queer Roma are shaped by antigypsyism and its intersections with homophobia and transphobia. Thanks to its theoretical and

The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell UP, 2021) is a fascinating study of a crucial early modern cadre of "go-betweens:" the Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans. Blending a creative mix of quantitative methods, prosopography, and the systematic close reading of texts produced or translated by the dragomans, the book shows how, far from being simple intermediaries, the dragomans actively engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire, refracting the knowledge thus acquired across Europe. The book takes a three-pronged approach: it first focuses on the dragomans themselves, exploring how, particularly Venetian dragomans, were recruited, trained, and eventually grew to create an influential cast of subordinate elites enmeshed in both Ottoman and Veneto-Habsburg patterns of representation and consumption. The book then delves into different texts translated or produced by dragomans (relationi, translations of Ottom

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... 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 International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy (Cornell UP, 2020) Andrew C. Gilbert, who is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert’s probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new compa

Bogdan Popa’s De-Centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (Manchester University Press, 2021) seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings. Louisa Hann recently att

Global thinker, public intellectual, and world-famous theorist of ‘liquid modernity’, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere.  Izabela Wagner's Bauman: A Biography (Polity Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of his life and work. Dr. Wagner, Professor of Sociology at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, returns to Bauman’s native Poland and recounts his childhood in an assimilated Polish-Jewish family and the school experiences shaped by anti-Semitism. Bauman’s life trajectory is typical of his generation and social group: the escape from Nazi occupation and Soviet secondary education, communist engagement, enrolment in the Polish Army as a political officer, participation in WWII, and the support for the new political regime in the post-war Poland. Dr. Wagner sheds new light on Bauman’s activity as a KBW political o

The fifteen contributors to Eagles Looking East and West: Dynasty, Ritual and Representation in Habsburg Hungary and Spain (Brepols, 2021) describe politics and representation in the Kingdom of Hungary from the sixteenth to the eighteen century. Hungary was part of Habsburg Europe under the banner of the double-headed eagle which flew from Spain to Austria and their many possessions. Coronations, funerals, patronage, diplomacy, and artwork reveal how the special relationship between Hungary and Spain functioned and appeared. In this interview, Tibor Martí explains the purpose, spirit, and achievement of the book, and he goes into depth about his own essay in the volume on the chivalric order of the Golden Fleece as an instrument of diplomacy between these great European Catholic monarchies in the Early Modern world. Tibor Martí is a Research Fellow in the Early Modern History Department at the Institute of History part of the Research Centre for the Humanities, in the Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners.  When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his family, tramped westward with the retreating German army. The Long Vacation is Alex Panasenko’s war memoir, remembering the formative, often harrowing experiences that shaped his character. In this conversation, Mr. Panasenko discusses the extremities of life, death, terror, lust, and hunger from a child’s perspective, and with a child’s canny reactions aimed at survival, even when the prospect seemed most unlikely. With things falling apart around him—laws, governments, the conventions of the adult world—Panasenko ca

In Civility in Uncivil Times: Kazimierz Moczarski’s Quiet Battle for Truth, from the Polish Underground to Stalinist Prison (Peter Lang, 2020), Anna Machcewicz offers a powerful case study in the ethics and logistics of bearing witness in response to the two forces that brutalized Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century: Nazism and Stalinism. Civility in Uncivil Times is a biography of Kazimierz Moczarski (1907-1975), a Polish lawyer, journalist, and political prisoner. A major figure in the Polish Underground State in the final months of World War II, Moczarski is nonetheless best known for sharing a postwar Stalinist prison cell with SS general Jürgen Stroop, liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto. After serving one of the longest prison terms in the history of communist Poland - eleven years - Moczarski reconstructed his conversations in forensic detail in a book published after his death under the title Conversations with an Executioner. Machcewicz’s book makes a major contribution to the scholarship on Stal

Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through the areas they study, seeing them as living places, interviewing inhabitants and marveling at the beauty and harshness of the environment they study. Join us as we talk with Nicolas Breyfogle, David Moon and Alexandra Bekasova about their journeys and research, how the two intertwined and how that granted them new perspectives on the Russian and Soviet environment. Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by beco

In Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika (Bloomsbury,, 2019), Barbara Martin traces the careers of four prominent figures: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research into these four authors, Martin provides a new account of dissident history writing in the Soviet Union from the post-Stalin Thaw through to the Brezhnev era and Perestroika. Dissident Histories illuminates the challenges associated with researching, writing and publishing Soviet history and the critical impact that this work had on intellectual life in the Soviet Union. Barbara Martin is a postdoctoral researcher within the Department of History at the University of Basel. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-s

The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in eighteenth-century thought. Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity into novel "racial" groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a vitriolic denunciat