New Books in Eastern European Studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

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. Douglasdemonstrates 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

During 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

What 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

On 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

When I first went to the Soviet Union (in all my ignorance), I was amazed that everyone in Moscow lived in what I called “housing projects.” The Russians called them “houses” (doma), but they weren’t houses as I understood them at all. They were huge, multi-story, cookie-cutter apartment blocks, one standing right next to the other for miles. “Why?” I asked myself. Kimberly Zarecor‘s wonderfulManufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (Pittsburgh UP, 2011) goes a long way in providing an answer, and it’s a surprising one. As she shows, socialism and architectural modernism were tightly linked even before the Second World War. This was true in the Soviet Union, of course, but it was also true throughout much of Europe–especially in Czechoslovakia. The avante guard of Czech architects were enthralled with modernism, just as they were (with some exceptions) enthralled with the promise of communism. They believed modernism provided a template for a truly socialist architecture, particularly in the sphere of housing. Once the communists came to power after the war, the Czech architects were given the opportunity to realize the dream of building that truly socialist built environment. The result was the “panel house”: pre-fab apartment blocks built in factories, transported to sites, and then assembled. They were strikingly modern in terms of design, construction techniques and materials. Over time, the panel-house vision was compromised: by Socialist Realism, by economic constraints, by corruption and politics. But if you travel to the Czech Republic today, you can still see excellent examples of modernist panel houses in more or less pure form. Let Kimberly Zarecor be you guide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Russians’ 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Most 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

We 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies