New Books in Eastern European Studies

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. William Prigge analyzes how “nationalist” communists came to power in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic by taking advantage of Lavrentiy Beria’s attempts to build his own power base. Prigge then demonstrates how their fall from power was a sign of the forces that led to Khrushchev’s ouster within a few years. Bearslayers: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists(Peter Lang, 2015) delves into the lives and careers of leading Latvian communists and the networks of relationships with each other and the Soviet leadership in Moscow to explore not only their fate but the power struggles taking place in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953. William D. Prigge is associate professor and department head for the Department of History, Political Science, Philosophy, Religion at South Dakota State University. 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 intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)is so interesting. Westermann teaches at Texas A & M University at San Antonio. Prior to this work, he wrote a well-regarded volume on the German police battalions on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Before joining the university world, he was an officer in the US military, and he brings his training and experience to a study of the strategy and tactics of the armies which fought in each space. In doing so, he sheds new light on how each army behaved. He’s particularly good at understanding how tactics and military culture drove the American army to act in ways that killed women and children without that being their goal. But he’s also good at analyzing the broader cultural climate that informed policy makers in each society. His discussion of the regional splits in policy toward American Indians was noteworthy. It’s a book that made me think about the American west in a new light. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UN debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience. But the actual history of Hungary and the Holocaust remains opaque. Ferenc Laczo aims to change this. Laczo, an associate professor of history at Maastricht University, has produced a fascinating examination of a series of dialogues unfamiliar to most historians. His new book Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History (Brill, 2016) examines the Jewish community in Hungary and how their ideas of themselves and their place in Hungary changed during the war. He begins in the 1930s, with Jewish thinkers wrestling with traditional questions of identity and inclusion in the context of authoritarian government in Hungary and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. He then moves to a close reading of memories of the Holocaust in Hungary, taking advantage of sources unknown or unusable by scholars without Magyar. He concludes with a fascinating explanation of attempts in 1946 and 1947 by Jewish survivors in Hungary to explain and understand what they had just witnessed and experienced. The latter chapter alone offers a new perspective on immediate responses to the Holocaust. This book alone won’t satisfy your desire for a thorough understanding of Hungary and the Holocaust. For that, you’ll need to read the works of Randolph Braham, Tim Cole, Zoltan Vagi, Laszlo Csosz and others. But you’ll almost certainly understand the experience the efforts of Jewish thinkers to understand their own lives much better than you did before you read the book. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UNs debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 1994.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of the 1940s. Piotr Kosicki’s edited volume, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), changes this story by profiling four Communist-run countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Drawing on extensive research in English-language scholarship and the national historiographies of the countries that it examines, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain offers an unparalleled glimpse into the vibrant and complicated politics of the Cold War period. Piotr Kosicki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, complicates the traditional narrative of Jewish religious insularity within Imperial Russia in her new book on converts from Judaism. By exploring 19th century Russia’s multi-confessional landscape and the spaces in which Jewish men and women encountered those of other religious communities, Schainker uses the lens of conversion to explore Jewish and Russian Orthodox anxieties over group boundaries and the extent to which converts, far from being exiles within their Jewish communities, occupied sustained, liminal positions that attracted the interests of Jews, Christians, and Russian state officials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime published by Northern Illinois University Press. He focuses on the 20 years after World War II when five to seven million Communists were disciplined by reprimand, demotion or expulsion. Cohn argues that Part leaders became less concerned about class background and ideological purity and more concerned about the needs of the state. As a result, corruption and abuse of position, along with moral degeneracy such as family relations and drunkenness, dominated internal investigations and disciplinary hearings. Cohn draws on a broad range of provincial case files in in Perm, Tver, Saratov, and Kiev, along with archives of the Commission of Party Control in Moscow, to reveal what the Party considered to appropriate behavior for those who carried the high title of Communist. Edward Cohn is Associate Professor of History at Grinnell College and is the the chair of the Russian, Central, and Eastern European Studies concentration (RCEES). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World War II Lithuania, Davoliute demonstrates how cultural elites wove together nationalist and communist ideologies to shape the emerging Soviet Lithuania. She argues that writers Petras Vaiciunas and Justis Paleckis used a poetics of reconstruction to integrate Lithuania’s medieval past into a broader Soviet narrative of the future and that this engagement the development of indigenous pro-Soviet cultural elites. Davoliute then looks at the rustic turn in the 1970s and makes the case that cultural conservatives were able to provide an alternative aesthetic of authentic identity, not based on Soviet Lithuanian modernity but on a discourse of trauma and deracination. Her analysis ends with a look at the relationship between establishment intellectuals and deportees as exemplified by role of Justinas Marcinkevicius in the publication of Dalia Grinkeviciutes memoirs of deportation to Siberia at age 14. Violeta Davoliute is a Senior Researcher in the Faculty of History at Vilnius University and the Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute. She was the 2015-2016 Joseph P. Kazickas Associate Research Scholar at Yale University. Davoliute has also been a Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Ethnography, where she worked on mass population displacements and deportations from Lithuania to the Soviet gulag. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2004. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlands, contacts between the empires, transportation networks, changing geographies of borders, ghost borders, countless border crossing and walls, and lack of geographical data, this book also provides numerous resources for historians, political scientists and other scholars. This book shesd light on an apparent “chaos” of the Balkan geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women played in the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. By placing gender and gender relations at the forefront of her analysis, Batinic provides insightful history of a unique phenomenon—guerrilla warfare in which tens of thousands of women took direct military roles. Based on vast amount of archival sources, Batinic demonstrated how gender was the main organising force of the Partisan movement. In this interview, we have talked about the main arguments of the book, particularly focusing on gender relations within the movement. Additionally, the interview will also introduce our listeners to the Balkan conflict during the Second World War and explore how and why the remarkable story of the Partisan women fell into oblivion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

It’s been a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This anniversary marks a good occasion to ask a seemingly simple question: “What was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?” Was it Russia in a new wrapper? Or was it something new and unheralded in world history? Was it “Socialism in One Country?” Or was it a continent-sized vehicle for the spread of international communism? Was it ruled by a peculiar kind of “traditionalism?” Or was it a variation on a kind of typical “modernity?” In this thought-provoking collection of essays, the historian Michael David-Fox addresses these and other crucial questions about the USSR. Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) doesn’t offer simple answers. David-Fox shows again and again that easy dichotomies do little to capture the complexity of the Soviet experience. The USSR, he argues, is just not that easy to “boil down.” It was many things to many people, and continues to be so today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies