New Books in 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

Eastern 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. 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 began my graduate history, virtually all my fellow apprentice historians of eastern Europe were captivated by nationalism and focused their research accordingly. Of particular interest was how people from nobles to peasants came to identify themselves as part of a common national identity as society modernized. Nathaniel Wood was as caught up in this trend as the rest of us, but as he began his research of the nascent boulevard press in Cracow, he discovered a quite different identity issue was of central concern, what it meant for Cracow and Cracovians that their city was becoming a metropolitan center. In Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010) Wood tells an engaging story about how Cracow, a city associated more with the glories of its medieval past adapted to modernity, expanding its geographical boundaries, adopted to new transportation technologies like the electric tram and the car, and came to be seen by its citizens as part of a larger community of large cities throughout Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

A couple of weeks ago I took a bus from Warsaw and travelled east across the River Bug. The border took a long time to cross, but then this was no ordinary border – it was the border between the Europe of the modern world, of the EU (with all of its problems) and liberal democracy, and the Europe of the Soviet era and authoritarian rulers. I crossed the border into Belarus. Belarus has been getting a bad press since the middle of the last decade, when Condoleeza Rice famously labelled President Lukashenka ‘Europe’s last dictator’. Every so often news squeaks out about repression aimed at opposition figures, of currency devaluations and of curiosities like secret pipelines in stream beds that are used for smuggling vodka out into EU neighbours. This is clearly a country with some serious explaining to do. Andrew Wilson‘s book, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship (Yale University Press, 2011), is timely. Some are predicting that Lukashenka’s time is finally coming to an end, and eyes in Minsk and Brest are nervously following economic troubles within the EU and the fallout of Vladimir Putin’s comeback over in Moscow. The economy of Belarus is clearly feeling the strain – the $5 in roubles that I took out of a cash point paid for dinner and beers, with enough left over to visit the museum in the staggering Brest Fortress. It feels like some sort of change may be in the air. Andrew’s book is very complete, starting with an entertaining run through of the country’s history, from Viking raids and werewolves through to the horrors of the Second World War and the fall of the USSR. At its heart are two questions: Is Belarus a real country? Why Lukashenka? I might have been less keen to read a book on Belarus if I hadn’t just thoroughly enjoyed a visit there. But that would have been a mistake, and my loss. Andrew’s book deserves a wider audience, and Belarus deserves more interest from the outside world. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Europe may currently be in crisis and riven with divisions, but at least it’s a Europe of independent states. It was not always so. The Soviets dominated Eastern Europe for nearly half a century following the defeat of the Nazis. And for most of that time it seemed Soviet domination would never end. Then, unexpectedly, the Berlin Wall was no more. Eastern European states that had limited experience with democracy and open society began feeling their way forward and aspiring to become full fledged members of Europe. Many now are. Gale Stokes first wrote about how this monumental transformation happened in the first edition of The Walls Came Tumbling Down in 1993. He has now updated that story (The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2011) to provide thorough and readable accounts of the brutal collapse of Yugoslavia and the coming of age of the former Soviet satellites and their accession to the European Union. By its nature, it is a complex story with many different perspectives, and Stokes tells it in a fashion that novices to the region can understand, but with insights that experts in the field will find stimulating. 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 hardest part of living in a foreign land is crossing that invisible divide between being an outsider and getting to know a country properly. An old foreign correspondent friend of mine said that the newspaper standard was that it always took at least two years and a lot of language learning. In reading Elizabeth Gowing‘s lovely and fascinating book it is obvious that she has found another way to cross that invisible divide and begin to really understand so much of what makes Kosovo and its people tick. Her secret is beekeeping. After her partner, Rob, gave her a beehive for her birthday, doors began to open into the recesses of Kosovan life – its connection to history, to tradition, to food and to the land. The result is Travels in Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo (Signal Books, 2011), which gets beyond the history books and allows us more insights into what is now Europe’s newest (disputed) country. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a far away land we know little about. He could have said it about any of the countries of east-central Europe. Yet, for the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany east-central Europe, was of prime importance in ways that would have horrible consequences for the people who made it their home, especially in the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics and western Russia. Timothy Snyder calls these areas “the Bloodlands,” and with good reason. In Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010) he explores how two regimes with quite different perspectives ended up perpetrating mass murder on an unprecedented level in that region. Comparisons of Stalinism and Nazism are hardly new, but Snyder’s book is not a classical comparative study. Rather, it is an attempt to understand how the leaders of the USSR and Nazi Germany thought about the future of the region, and why their visions–despite being very different–both necessitated mass murder. The resulting insights lead to new understanding of both the Great Terror and the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Some parts of the world seem to suffer from rather too much history. The Balkans, that mountainous peninsula situated between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, is most certainly one of them. Perhaps it’s because the Balkans stands on so many of Europe’s historical fault lines: Asia v. Europe; Eastern v. Western Roman Empires; Orthodox v. Catholic; Christianity v. Islam; Habsburg v. Ottoman; Axis v. Allied; Capitalism v. Communism. Whatever the reason, the Balkans’ surfeit of history has usually been painful and bloody. For the historian, of course, this makes the various countries of the Balkans a fascinating subject. Richard Hall‘s book The Modern Balkans: A History (Reaktion Books, 2011) does a fantastic job of plotting a clear course through that history stretching back over two millenia, all in a remarkably slim and readable volume. I had planned to keep the interview with Richard similarly slim, but the sheer weight of interesting material that his excellent book covers overtook us. It’s a bit of a breakneck jaunt, but both of us thoroughly enjoyed the interview, and I hope you do too! P.S. A couple of notes to add to the interview: 1. When I mention Serbian deaths in the First World War I gave the figure of 25% of males killed. The actual figure is a remarkable 37% of mobilised male Serbs, and 23% of all male Serbs between the ages of 15 and 49. The only other nations to suffer similar figures are also in the region: Turkey (27%), Romania and Bulgaria are the others to have lost over 20% of their mobilised men. 2. I mentioned that an English cricketer and footballer, CB Fry, had been offered the throne of Albania. This apparently happened in Geneva in 1920, although there is understandably still debate over whether or not this actually happened (among other things CB Fry was a terrific story teller). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies