New Books in Eastern European Studies

Wendy Z. GoldmanView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Book in Russian and Eurasian Studies] A period of mass repression and terror swept through the Soviet Union between the years of 1936-39. Following the shocking Kirov assassination and show trials of alleged factory saboteurs, paranoia gripped the nation and culminated in the execution and imprisonment of millions of Soviet citizens. The state's and Stalin's role in the terror cannot be understated. However, to pin the terror entirely on the state would be incorrect. In Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Wendy Z. Goldman writes about the terror as carried out from below. While the support for mass purges came from above, its execution was often carried out by average citizens. As news of domestic enemies dominated the press, workers on factory and textile shop floors increasingly began to see their co-workers as potential enemies, wreckers, spies, and faulty communists. Suspicion, and later formal denunciation of such workers, spiraled out of control. Any slip-up was subject to interpretation as an act against the state. Workers were on their toes as their actions, and even their past, came under intense scrutiny. Despite little-to-no evidence to support suspicions of wrong doing, paranoia prevailed. Dr. Goldman's research takes us through the historiography of the subject and into the shop floors to show the terror in action which came to dominate worker and family relations. This is a powerful and marvelous addition to Soviet scholarship sure to revolutionize the way historians interpret Soviet power.

Luuk van MiddelaarView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in European Studies] At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have changed its ways. It had spent the second half of the century building a system of shared sovereignty that was set to expand not just into the countries of the former Soviet bloc, but into what used to be the USSR itself. In the words of one author, Europe (or at least its model) was about to run the  21st century. Things look different now, of course, thanks to the impact of the financial crisis on the single currency, the euro. However  the European Union (as the project is currently named) has managed to burnish its image in some areas – for instance it now covers 28 countries, and even managed to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize (somewhat controversially, although after the first half of the 20th century its role in keeping Europe largely at peace is certainly laudable). The project that lies at the heart of this is the subject of Luuk van Middelaar's The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union (Yale University Press, 2013). It's not a history book as such, but more a book of political philosophy, that knits together a series of concepts, challenges, and constructs, that together have formed something that in the dark days of the immediate post-War period seemed a long, long way away. As such, it's rather an important book. The continent and the European project have both been riven by crises over the last half decade, and some of the achievements Brussels can point to are now seriously threatened. Luuk – who has had a ringside seat of the crisis as the speechwriter for President Herman van Rompuy – has a look at the underpinnings that go beyond the immediate debates, and the insights this provides will no doubt play a role in shaping the European project (whatever it becomes) in decades to come. Enjoy the interview!

Christopher BrowningView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide Studies] Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies.  He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field:  the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when, why and how the Germans decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe, and the question of why individual perpetrators killed. His new book, then, seems like something of a departure.  Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (W. W. Norton, 2010), examines the labor camp at Starachowice, Poland.  Starting before the Nazi invasion, Browning tracks the members of the Jewish community in the region throughout the war, from their  initial encounters with Nazi presence through their deportation to Auschwitz  to their eventual return (or not) to their homes after the war.   The book engages deeply questions of survival, resistance and community and family in the life of the Jewish captives. But, as Browning suggests during the interview, the book is really a continuation of his previous strategy of using case studies to shed light on questions of broad significance.  This time, by studying a labor camp, Browning is able to examine both the captives and those wo held them prisoner.  The result is  every bit as rich as his previous work. Browning speaks as carefully and thoughtfully as he writes.  We talked both about the story he tells in the book and some of the methodological issues he confronted in writing it.   There's more in the book than we could get to in an hour.  I hope you'll listen to the interview and then go out and read the book.

Paul MojzesView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide Studies] I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence.  Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in the US about the region.  Yet I was just as surprised as anyone else at the scale of the hatred and violence that erupted.  With the part of the world I studied enduring atrocity after atrocity, I spent quite a bit of time wondering if graduate study in history was really the best profession to pursue.  And I spent a lot of time devouring various accounts to try to understand how such violence could come out of what seemed like nowhere. Paul Mojzes' new book Balkan Genocides:  Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)ably addresses the second concern.   A native of the region, Paul brings a deep understanding of the long-term roots of Balkan violence that many of the initial responses lacked.  At the same time, he recognizes the significant changes that accompanied the twentieth century.  Moreover, he brings an even-handedness that is rare in discussions of the region. The result is careful, even-handed examination of history of mass violence in the Balkans.  It treats widely-discussed incidents with sensitivity and draws attention to other, little-known persecutions.  And it does so with a sensitivity drawn from Paul's long engagement in interfaith dialogue.   While the book clearly functions within the norms of a scholarly work, Paul's ethical sensibility lies behind it and illuminates his discussion.  All in all, his book is a fine contribution to the literature on the subject. My interview with Paul was just as interesting as his book.  I hope you enjoy it.

Richard RashkeView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] You may have heard of a fellow named Ivan or John Demjanuik. He made the news–repeatedly over a 30 year period– because he was, as many people probably remember, a Nazi war criminal nick-named "Ivan the Terrible" for his brutal treatment of Jews (and others) in the Sobibor death camp. The trouble is, as Richard Rashke points out in his new book Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America's Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals (Delphinium, 2013), Demjanuik was not a Nazi, was not "Ivan the Terrible," and, though he was certainly a guard at Sobibor, it's not entirely clear what he did (though it was likely very bad). Again and again he was brought to trial for his alleged crimes. Again and again the courts failed to agree on what he had done. Demjaniuk was and remains something of a mystery, a vital mystery that we badly want to solve but cannot. After all, we need to know who is a war criminal and who is not. What's most interesting about Demjaniuk–at least to this reader–is the moral complexity of his story. As Rashke shows, he was repeatedly compelled to make life and death choices as he tried to stay survive in Stalinist Russia, in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, and even after the war. He had options, but they were almost always bad ones, and often deadly ones. He was a "collaborator" to be sure. But, Rashke asks, what exactly is a "collaborator"? Could he have chosen differently and hoped to survive? Could he have acted "morally" in the context within which he found himself? Rashke says "yes." Listen in and find out why.

Eric LohrView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it's said they don't much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr's new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2012), this reputation is at once deserved and undeserved.  It's true that at various moments in Russian history, foreigners have not been permitted to enter Russia, let alone become citizens (or, in an earlier period, "subjects") of the state. But, intermittently, the Russian state actively recruited foreigners, and especially foreign experts and capital, to aid in economic development. In the period after the Great Reforms, for example, the Russian state actively encouraged foreign investment and immigration. Late Imperial Russia seemed to be on a kind of glide path to a modern notion of citizenship. As Eric explains, all that ended with the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 (with catastrophic economic results). Listen in.

R. M. DouglasView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, of course, were catastrophic. Fewer listeners are probably well informed about the Allied effort after the War to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling massive numbers of Germans. The results, as R. M. Douglas demonstrates in his well-researched, even-handed book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2012), were catastrophic. As many as 14 million Germans were displaced and somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million parished. Of course the Nazi and Allied "ethnic cleansings" (if that's the right word) were not equivalent, a point that Douglas goes to great pains to emphasis. But the one is well known and the other is not. Until now. I urge you to read this book and find out what happened in this largely forgotten (and very disturbing) episode in the history of the Second World War and its aftermath.

William RischView on AmazonDuring the Cold War few Westerners gave much thought to Western Ukraine, and its main city, Lviv.  It was what happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg that really mattered, and so if one looked on a map one found city as Lvov, the Russian transliteration, rather than the Ukrainian that was native to the region.  Consequently, beyond emigre circles the way in which Lviv became a center for an alternative way of looking at the world was largely ignored until the Soviet regime was falling apart. William Risch's fascinating book The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Harvard UP, 2011) explores how Soviet rule was imposed in Lviv and Western Ukraine, and how despite Soviet ambitions, Lviv acquired its own identity that affected not just locals indigenous to the region but also people who moved to the city after it came under Soviet rule at the end of World War II.  Drawing heavily on oral interviews, Risch tells an intriguing story of the unintended consequences of Soviet rule, and the way in which Lviv became not just a city in the geographical west of the Soviet Union, but became a kind of outpost of a western perspective within the Soviet Union. In an act of full disclosure, Risch's book has special interest to my own research has centered on that city during the period it was under Austrian rule.  Further, my wife was one of Risch's many interview subjects.  Be that as it may, if you are already familiar with Lviv, or still unfamiliar with its charms, I invite you to listen to my conversation with Risch about Lviv and his book.

Mary FulbrookView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] The question of how "ordinary Germans" managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It's been well studied and so it's hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrator in "the East", Udo Klusa, in minute detail day by day, week by week, month by month while the Germans were improvising what became known as the "Holocaust." Klausa was not a big wig; he was a functionary, a part of a (particularly awful) colonial machine. He believed in the Nazi mission to "Germanize" Poland, but he was by no means a "fanatical" Nazi. He followed orders (by our standards horrendous ones), but he did not do so mindlessly. He wanted to build a career, but he was not–apparently–willing to do anything to do so. Fullbrook investigates just how far Klausa was willing to go, what he found acceptable and what he found (or seemed to find) objectionable. It's a tricky subject because Klausa himself tried to cover his tracks after the war. He seems to have seen that policies he once found quite sensible were, after the war, not so. Fullbrook does a masterful job of using archival sources to show where Klausa's memory becomes particularly selective. Though it would be too much to call Fullbrook's portrait of Klausa "sympathetic," it is certainly both historically and psychologically nuanced and therefore helps us understand his mentality both during the war and after.

Pieter JudsonView on AmazonWhat if much of what we think we know about nationalism and the spread of the national identity over the course of the nineteenth century were wrong?  This view is so widely accepted and ingrained in how we talk about the relationship between modernization and national identity that a different account is hard to imagine.  Yet Pieter Judson has made a convincing case in Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard University Press, 2006) that national conflict was not inexorably spreading from urban areas to the countryside.  Indeed, he shows that villagers in mixed areas stubbornly resisted nationalist efforts to make them declare themselves once and for all as Germans, Czechs, Slovenes, or Italians depending on the region.  The fact that we have thought otherwise stands as a triumph of nationalist propaganda, when nationalists began turning their attention to the  countryside in 1880s, and made schoolhouses, rural demographic decline, and nationally oriented tourism a keystone of their efforts to make national identity of people's lives.  In so doing Judson offers a valuable corrective and shows how enduring historical narratives are not always right because they are accurate.  I had a wonderful tim speaking with him and learning more about what really was going on when nationalists focused their attention on ethnically mixed rural areas.

Alexander MaxwellView on AmazonOn 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation.  According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roughly thousand year struggle.  Alexander Maxwell argues quite differently in his book Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009).   Although focused primarily on the long nineteenth century and concluding with the interwar period, he shows just how much Slovak nationalism owes to unlikely contingencies, especially the dismantling of greater Hungary at the end of World War I. In so doing, he pays special attention to debates that shaped the standardization of Slovak, showing them to be far more complicated and more amorphous than has previously understood.  Further, far from aspiring to independence, many of the steps that have since been portrayed as demonstrative of Slovak nationalist will in fact reflected Slovak intellectuals efforts to create a culturally pluralist Hungary.  I enjoyed talking with Maxwell about his arguments and their significance recently, and invite you to listen in.

Melissa CaldwellView on AmazonRussians' dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of the former Soviet Union have visited dachas.  Yet, just as Russians themselves treat dachas as an escape, outsiders tend to treat them as peripheral.  Melissa Caldwell has stood that view on its head in her book Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia's Countryside (University of California Press, 2010) by showing how even as dachas are a refuge from city life, they are central to Russian life.  Not only do we learn about dachas and activities that fill days at the dacha like berry picking and mushrooming, we get a glimpse of Russian ideas of authenticity and the role of nature, as well as how the end of communism is changing Russian life.  It is an engaging book, and it was a pleasure to speak with Melissa about dachas.

Francis TaponView on AmazonMost of the specialists in Eastern Europe I know first got truly interested in the region after  a trip, which then triggered applications to grad school, years spent reading books, and a year or two in the particular country or region of choice researching a dissertation.  Francis Tapon's story is different.  While he visited Prague in the late 1990s, it did not trigger an academic obsession.  Still, he got interested enough in the region and the fact that he knew so little about it that he decided to devote several years traveling to every country to get to know the people.  The result is The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us (WanderLearn, 2012), which is a travelogue tracking his travels starting in Finland and down through the Baltic states and Central Europe, and then the Balkans, and ultimately into the European Russia.  He has some great stories, and if what he learns may not surprise specialists, his view is always fresh.  Consequently I was happy to talk to him about his journeys and what he learned recently, and I invite you to listen to our conversation.

View on AmazonWe all know socialism failed in Eastern Europe and that failure reflected two great shortcomings: a lack of democracy and an economic system that consistently fell short in providing its ostensible benefactors, the workers, with consumer goods from housing to fashion.   Yet paradoxically the more ingrained these truths become the more obscure the complexities of life under socialism become.  It is all fine and good to point to rational irrationality of the planned economy, and the lack of space for individual entrepreneurship, but that tells us only part of the story.  Until their collapse socialist societies shaped how everyone from architects to vacationers lived their lives, and our ability to understand socialism, as well as how and why it ultimately failed so miserably, depends not just on understanding the great events, but also every day lives. Over a decade ago David Crowley and Susan Reid invited scholars to explore issues concerned with everyday life in post-war socialism.  The result has been three edited volumes that have been widely acclaimed.  The first Style and Socialism (2000) considered issues of design ranging from the how the Khrushchev Thaw changed ideas about shopping in Poland to the embrace of plastics in the German Democratic Republic.  The second, Socialist Spaces (2002) looked at different aspects of how space was conceived and used during the same period including articles about the negotiation involved in the rebuilding of Sevastopol after World War II, on dachas and apartments, as well as monuments.  With Pleasures in Socialism:Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Block (Northwestern University Press, 2010), they have concluded their trilogy by looking at the topic of luxury and leisure, which affords us a new glimpse at the dilemmas posed by high fashion, the use of tobacco and alcohol, erotica, and fur and automobile ownership among other things.  It was a pleasure to speak to them on those subjects as well as collaborative work process that brought these three books to fruition.

View on AmazonEastern Europe has never had the draw for scholars or tourists of France, Italy, Germany, or Great Britain, and within eastern Europe Bulgaria has invariably been overshadowed by Poland and the former Habsburg territories in the north and the more volatile region of former Yugoslavia. Just because Bulgarian history has not been at the center of European events, however, does not mean its history is any less interesting or valuable for understanding how humans deal with change. Indeed, at a time when western Europe wonders how to deal with its immigrant Muslim minority, the experience of Bulgaria's indigenous Muslim population offers a valuable perspective on how ideas about modernity and otherness get negotiated without necessarily leading to an all out clash of civilizations. Mary Neuburger demonstrates this well in her book The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press), which originally appeared in 2004 but is now available in paperback.