New Books In Eastern European Studies

In a century marked by totalitarian regimes, genocide, mass migrations, and shifting borders, the concept of memory in Eastern Europe is often synonymous with notions of trauma. In Ukraine, memory mechanisms were disrupted by political systems seeking to repress and control the past in order to form new national identities supportive of their own agendas. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, memory in Ukraine was released, creating alternate visions of the past, new national heroes, and new victims. This release of memories led to new conflicts and "memory wars." How does the past exist in contemporary Ukraine? The works collected in The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (Indiana UP, 2020), edited by Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, focus on commemorative practices, the politics of history, and the way memory influences Ukrainian politics, identity, and culture. The works explore contemporary memory culture in Ukraine and the ways in which it is being re

In January 2020, the UK became the first country to leave the European Union after a troubled 47-year membership. What was at the core of the country’s semi-detachment to the EU? Was the UK’s eventual inevitable or was it a tragedy of errors and misunderstandings borne of divergent political cultures? What does the future hold for the relationship? In his new book Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford UP, 2020), Stephen Wall provides unique insight with this narrative political history, having served in the foreign office from 1968, worked for two prime ministers, and ended his career as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU in Brussels then as head of the European policy for Tony Blair. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current century. And like many popular events it is filled with mis-understandings and mis-interpretations. Here to explicate and clarify this most important of events is master-historian and polymath, Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, CMG in his book, The Holocaust: History and Memory (Indiana University Press). The most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day, Professor Black is precisely the type of historian to bring some light and clarity to this darkest of events. Black’s book takes the reader from the 19th century to the present day, all the while endeavoring to explicate for the lay educated reader and the academic one, his take on the causation of the Holocaust. A book which without a doubt should be on the bookshelf of anyone who is seriously interested in this mos

For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, seen from the driver’s seat". Honohan is not just an accomplished monetary economist with a lot to say but he was also, from 2009 to 2015, the governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank. His book combines a monetary and financial history of Ireland since independence, theory and history around the formation of the Euro Area, an assessment of lessons learned from the crisis, and a behind-the-scenes memoir of how the crisis was fought. Tim Gwynn Jones is an econ

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2019) considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on "normal" citizens. Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of

At the end of the twentieth century, many believed the story of European political development had come to an end. Modern democracy began in Europe, but for hundreds of years it competed with various forms of dictatorship. Now, though, the entire continent was in the democratic camp for the first time in history. But within a decade, this story had already begun to unravel. Some of the continent's newer democracies slid back towards dictatorship, while citizens in many of its older democracies began questioning democracy's functioning and even its legitimacy. And of course it is not merely in Europe where democracy is under siege. Across the globe the immense optimism accompanying the post-Cold War democratic wave has been replaced by pessimism. Many new democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia began "backsliding," while the Arab Spring quickly turned into the Arab winter. The victory of Donald Trump led many to wonder if it represented a threat to the future of liberal democracy in the United States. I

David R. Marples' new book Understanding Ukraine and Belarus: A Memoir (E-International Relations, 2020) describes the author's academic journey from an undergraduate in London to his current research on Ukraine and Belarus as a History professor in Alberta, Canada. It highlights the dramatic changes of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, his travel stories, experiences, and the Stalinist legacy in both countries. It includes extended focus on his visits to Chernobyl and the contaminated zone in the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as a summer working with indigenous groups in eastern Siberia. Visiting Belarus more than 25 times since the 1990s, he was banned for seven years before the visa rules were relaxed in 2017. In the case of Ukraine, it chronicles a transition from a total outsider to one of the best-known scholars in Ukrainian studies, commenting on aspects of the coalescence of scholarship and politics, and the increasing role of social media and the Diaspora in the analysis of crucial events such

John Connelly’s new book – From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) – is an encyclopedic but lively narrative that captivates both those familiar with old stories about the region and novices who are seeking introduction to this vast laboratory of European modernity. Passionate, erudite, and insightful, the book pursues answers to the central question of Eastern European history: why does nationalism persist as the organizing principle of political life in a region where it has produced such tragedies? Connelly traces the rise of nationalism in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman lands; the creation of new states after the First World War and their later absorption by the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Bloc; the reemergence of democracy and separatist movements after the collapse of communism; and the recent surge of populist politics throughout the region. John Connelly is a Professor of History at the University of California Berkley who works in the fields of m

Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale University Press, 2020), offers the most thorough description and analysis of its subject to date. Austin describes the long and complex history of the two traditions, shows how both religions defined themselves in opposition to each other, and how competing confessional communities that emerged out of the European reformations adopted quite different attitudes to their Jewish neighbors. This outstanding work promises to revolutionize the ways in which future scholars will approach this complex and demanding subject. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 (University of Chicago Press) is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence betwee

Jovana Babović’s Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia (University of Pittsburgh Press) examines the ways in which middle-class Belgraders negotiated metropolitan modernity in the interwar era. Defying the historiographical conventions of its field, the book unearths leisure activities that captured the attention of Belgrade urbanites in the 1920s and 1930s. The capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade was gradually integrated into transnational entertainment networks, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad. Belgrade’s middle-class residents consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisure indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. As they

Marco Puleri’s Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2020) examines a complex process of identity formation in the context of exposure to a diversity of linguistic and cultural influences. Puleri zeroes in on contemporary Ukraine to explore the specificities of cultural overlapping and the power it exercises on the individual’s construction of self. As the title prompts, the emphasis is made on hybrid identities, which Puleri views from the perspective of epistemological multivalences. The discussion of the formation and function of hybrid identities is rooted not only in cultural and linguistic diversities, but also in complex historical and political processes. In Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian, Puleri attempts to unravel entangled clusters that signal identity hybridity: the book offers an ample collection of instances that manifest the overlapping and collaboration of multiple narratives that construct various iden

A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Rescue the Surviving Souls is the first book to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight, and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural, and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day. Teller pays particular attention to those thousands of Jews sent for sale on the slave markets of Istanbul and the extensive transregional Jewish economic network that coalesced to ransom them. He also explores how Jewish communities rallied to support the refugees in central and western Europe, as well as in Poland-Lithuania,

Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford University Press, 2020) tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe―from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and in

In his book From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), Will Smiley examines the emergence of rules of warfare surrounding captivity and slavery in the context of Ottoman-Russian military rivalry between 1700 and 1878. This remarkably well-researched and carefully argued monograph uncovers a vibrant inter-imperial legal regime, challenging many conventional narratives about the expansion of modern international law and the European states system. Its pages provide ample material with which we can rethink the supposed linear decline of Ottoman state power and the nature of pre-modern diplomacy, sovereignty, and governance in Eurasian empires. While traditional accounts of modern international law mainly focus on intellectual and political developments in the Western world, Smiley shows how two states on the European periphery worked out their own rules – their own international law governing the movement of captives, slaves, and prisoners

It’s been a difficult year in America. From plague, to protests, to politics, there have never been so many lives at stake, nor so many questions about the future of our country. Since his election in 2016, questions have been raised about president Trump’s too-close-for-comfort ties to Russian leadership and intelligence. Lately, his antagonism toward infectious disease science and CDC guidelines in addition to his deployment of federal troops into American cities to silence protestors have led many to compare the current regime to authoritarian governments of long ago wars. But the truth is, very little about these tactics are new. In other parts of the world, such as in Ukraine, citizens know them, resist them, and subvert them in a way Americans are just learning how to. In her striking debut, On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine (Mad Creek Books), author Sonya Bilocerkowycz speculates on the possibility of future revolutions built on the lessons of revolutions past—both big, and sm

Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Book, 2020). Although the German invasion was the cause of the outbreak of World War II, oddly there has not been much by way of English language treatments of this pivotal historical episode. With this fine and highly readable narrative history, Moorhouse more than makes up for this omission. Combing English, German and crucially Polish language sources, Moorhouse reveals to the reader the German campaign from start to finish. Along the way showing that stereotypical Western images of the Polish army: cavalry charging tanks, are mythological in nature and inaccurate. Moorhouse also details for the reader the shameful refusal of the British and French governments to assist their Polish ally. Equally well illustrated is the Soviet Union’s invasion of Eastern Poland. With the Soviet mythology that the invasion wa

The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), Diana T. Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial. Dr. Kudaibergenova is a political sociologist who

War in Europe: 1450 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) is a masterful overview of war and military development in Europe since 1450, bringing together the work of a renowned historian of modern European and military history in a single authoritative volume. Beginning with the impact of the Reformation and continuing up to the present day, Professor Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black discusses the following key theme in this truly splendid book:long-term military developments, notably in the way war is waged and battle conducted; the relationship between war and transformations in the European international system; the linkage between military requirements and state developments, the consequences of these requirements, and of the experience of war, for the nature of society Adopting a clear chronological approach, Professor Black weaves a rich and detailed narrative of the development of war in relation to transformations in the European international system, demonstrating the links between it

How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal  (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that Anglo-American dominated histories capture the moment while missing the story. Drawing upon secret archives open for a few brief years during Russia’s liberalization, Francine Hirsch takes readers behind the scenes to private parties and late-night deliberations where the Nuremberg Principles took shape. A vital corrective told through the messy and all too human negotiations behind a trial that changed everything and almost never happened. Francine Hirsch is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2005) received the Herbert Baxter Adams, Wayne S. Vucinich, and Council for European Studies book prizes. She specializes in Russian and