New Books in Eastern European Studies

A year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and nine years since its annexation of Crimea and occupation of Ukraine’s far east, why are so many Russians still behind this brutal and disastrous project? Where are the mass protests? Why is President Vladimir Putin still apparently popular and secure?In Russia's War (Polity Press, 2023), Jade McGlynn uses a decade of research into Russia’s politics of memory and propaganda and close to 60 post-invasion interviews with prominent Russians to explain why: "historical nationalism" and an autocratic method that breeds a special form of apathy. “The risk and pointlessness sit on people's resolve like a sediment, deliberately laid and carefully layered over the years," she writes.Jade McGlynn is a Leverhulme Early Career Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. A frequent contributor to the BBC, Deutsche Welle, The Telegraph and The Spectator her next book – Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia – will be published by Bloomsbury Press in June.*Her own book recommendations are The Naked Year by Boris Pilnyak (Ardis, 2013 - translated by Alexander Tulloch, first published in Russian in 1922) and The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker (OUP, 2018).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Today I talked to the translators of Marianna Kiyanovska's The Voices of Babyn Yar (HURI, 2022), Max Rosochinsky and Oksana Maksymchuk.With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). 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 World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters, ' and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the Jews in the Lódź, Warsaw, and Kraków ghettos as they struggled to survive the deadly Nazi ghetto and, in particular, the genocidal famine conditions. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. In this book, Helene Sinnreich explores their story, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Dr. Ari Joskowicz, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023). Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world has not recognized their destruction equally. In postwar decades, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignored. Dr. Joskowicz tells the story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering. Rain of Ash recounts the entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for justice, challenges us to rethink the way we remember the Holocaust, and probes the means by which historical narratives are made and transmitted.Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt 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

With the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as well the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's place in the world is a matter of fierce debate among world leaders and analysts. For decades it was regarded as irrelevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Vladimir Putin came to power with the intent of improving Russian influence on the world stage. How does the Russian leadership intend to achieve this goal of relevancy on the world stage? Keir Giles addresses these issues in Russia's War on Everybody: And What it Means for You (‎Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).Keir Giles is Senior Consulting Fellow for the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre. He has spent three decades explaining Russia, for the BBC, the UK Ministry of Defence, Chatham House, NATO and in the private sector. His previous publications include Russia's 'New' Tools for Confronting the West (2016), the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (2016) and Moscow Rules (2019).Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. 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 courageous young woman escaping Nazi Germany, with no choice other than to leave her family behind...Roma Talasiewicz-Eibuszyc was born in Warsaw near the end of World War I, the youngest of six children. Little Roma grows up to become a striking, opinionated woman, but her life in its current form is about to change completely. The first shots in World War II are fired when Hitler and Nazi Germany invade Poland, turning all the Jews of Europe into their targets. In a decision full of resourcefulness and courage, Roma escapes Poland and leaves for Soviet Russia, in order to save her life. At first, she believes she will be reunited with her family within a few weeks, but reality proves different. As time goes by, her flight broadens Eastward. And with it, the feelings of guilt and regret that would haunt her for the rest of her life, for having left her siblings behind.Suzanna Eibuszyc's book Memory Is Our Home (Ibidem, 2022) is a powerful historical memoir and a gripping true-life story, a first-hand account, about love and loss, hopes and dreams for a better world and a rich, living testimony of Jewish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Wolfgang Marx's I Don't Belong Anywhere: Gyorgy Ligeti At 100 (Brepols Publishers, 2022) commemorates the centenary of Gyorgy Ligeti's birth. The volume consists of twelve contributions that consists of new investigations of many aspects of Legeti's career. 2023 marks the centenary of Ligeti's birth, an appropriate moment to take stock of the relevance this composer has in the contemporary world, to assess where he "belongs" today and how our views of his uvre and our understanding of his position in musical and cultural history have evolved. What do Ligeti and his music have to say to us in our post-postmodernist age? Why do his works still fascinate us so much? This book offers new readings of core compositions such as "Aventures", "Lontano", "Le Grand Macabre", the "Holderlin Fantasies" and "Galamb borong". It also reassesses the context and reception of Ligeti's works, including the influence of Romanian music (not least in his childhood), musical life in Hungary between 1945 and 1956, the ways in which his thinking was influenced by his experience of different soundscapes, yet also the surprisingly widespread use of his music in film and TV (beyond the usual suspect). Finally it presents new sources discovered or made available only recently: letters exchanged between Ligeti and Aliute Mecys in 1972, the correspondence between the composer and his publisher Schott, and an extended BBC interview from 1997. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

This episode of How To Be Wrong is a conversation with Mariia Shuvalova, a lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Fulbright Scholar (Harriman Institute, Columbia University in the city of New York, 2019–2020) and co-founder and head of the non-governmental organization New Ukrainian Academic Community. Joining us from Kyiv, Mariia talks about her experiences of the Russian invasion, imperialism, and Ukrainian identity, as well as her thoughts on anger and humility in the face of war. It’s an inspiring conversation.John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. 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 How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine (Ibidem, 2022), Oleksandra Keudel proposes a novel explanation for why some local governments in hybrid regimes enable citizen participation while others restrict it. She argues that mechanisms for citizen participation are by-products of political dynamics of informal business-political (patronal) networks that seek domination over local governments. Against the backdrop of either competition or coordination between patronal networks in their localities, municipal leaders cherry-pick citizen participation mechanisms as a tactic to sustain their own access to resources and functions of local governments. This argument is based on an in-depth comparative analysis of patronal network arrangements and the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms in five urban municipalities in Ukraine during 2015-2019: Chernivtsi, Kharkiv, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, and Odesa. Fifty-seven interviews with citizen participation experts, local politicians and officials, representatives of civil society and the media, as well as utilization of secondary analytical sources, official government data, and media reports provide a rich basis for an investigation of context-specific choices of municipal leaders that result in varying mechanisms for citizen participation.John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is finishing a dissertation that examines the aftermath of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor). 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 fourth century AD, a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But how did a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations become a mass movement centrally directed from Rome? As Peter Heather shows in this illuminating new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise and eventual dominance.From Constantine the Great's pivotal conversion to Christianity to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire--which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction--to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe.Authoritative, vivid, and filled with new insights, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (Knopf, 2023) is an unparalleled history of early Christianity.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies