New Books in Eastern European Studies

"The Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history," writes Serhii Plokhy at the end of The Russo-Ukrainian War (Norton, 2023).But that's not all, says the man acclaimed by the Financial Times as “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine” - author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, and Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis."Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space".Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university's Ukrainian Research Institute.*The author's own book recommendations are The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale (Hurst, 2022) and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer (Allen Lane, 2023)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

Throughout centuries of persecution and marginalization, the Roma and Adivasi have been viewed as both victims and fighters, as royals and paupers, beasts and gods, and lately have been challenging the political and social order by defying the status quo. In Power on the Move: Adivasi and Roma Accessing Social Justice (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), author Cristina-Ioana Dragomir traces the struggle for social justice in Roma and Adivasi communities based on intensive ethnographic work in Romania and India conducted over six years.Different from commonly held suppositions that assume most marginalized and mobile communities typically resist the state and engage in hostile acts to undermine its authority, Power on the Move shows how these groups are willing to become full members. By utilizing different means, such as protests, sit-ins and grassroots organizing, they aim to gain the attention of the state (national and international), hoping to reach inclusion and access social justice.Dr. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir is an immigrant and scholar of Social Justice and Human Rights, working on migration, gender, and environment. She is Clinical Assistant Professor in Global Liberal Studies at New York University. Previously she taught at Queen Mary University of London, Columbia University, Institute for the Study of Human Rights; she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at SUNY Oswego, and was a Center for Advanced Study of India 2016-2018 Visiting Scholar at University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. She also consults with the United Nations, GIZ, and IOM. She is also the author of Making the Immigrant Soldier: How Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender Intersect in the US Military (University of Illinois Press, 2023).Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (U Toronto Press, 2022) argues that nineteenth-century Russian writers actively engaged with narrative models borrowed from European gothic fiction to articulate experiences such as fear, dread, and anxiety in realist literature. By examining a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address issue such as urban life, the women question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family, Katherine Bowers reveals the myriad ways in which political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism.Katherine Bowers is an Associate Professor within the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an expert in Russian literature and culture, and her research interests include genre, narrative, environmental humanities, imagined geography, and digital humanities. She is also actively involved in the field of Dostoevsky studies and is a co-editor of A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (2018) and Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity (2021).Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. 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 twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich.Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life.In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton, 2023), Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa―the last traces of his vanished world―into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Mark Galeotti's book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then president of Russia, from the First Chechen War to the two military incursions into Georgia, the annexation of Crimea and the eventual invasion of Ukraine itself. But it also looks more broadly at Putin's recreation of Russian military power and its expansion to include a range of new capabilities, from mercenaries to operatives in a relentless information war against Western powers. This is an engrossing strategic overview of a rejuvenated Russian military and the successes and failures on the battlefield. Thanks to Dr Galeotti's wide-ranging contacts throughout Russia, it is also peppered with anecdotes of military life, personal snapshots of conflicts, and an extraordinary collection of first-hand accounts from serving and retired Russian officers.Russia continues to dominate the news cycle throughout the Western world. There is no better time to understand how and why Putin has involved his armed forces in a variety of conflicts for over two decades. There is no author better placed to demystify the capabilities of the Russian military and give a glimpse into what the future may hold.Putin's Wars is an engaging and important history of a reawakened Russian bear and how it currently operates both at home and abroad to ensure Russia is front and centre on the world stage.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's pugnacious president, is now the country's longest-serving leader. On his way to the top, he has fought many wars. This book tells the story of those battles against domestic enemies through the lens of the Syrian conflict, which has become part and parcel of Erdoğan's fight to remain in power.In Erdoğan's War: A Stongman's Struggle at Home and in Syria (Oxford University Press, 2022), Turkey expert Gönül Tol traces Erdoğan's ideological evolution from a conservative democrat to an Islamist and a Turkish nationalist, and explores how this progression has come to shape his Syria policy, changing the course of the war. She paints a vivid picture of the president's constantly shifting strategy to consolidate his rule, showing that these shifts have transformed Turkey's role in post-uprising Syria from an advocate of democracy, to a power fanning the flames of civil war, to an occupier.From the first days of Erdoğan's rule through the failed coup against him, via the Kurdish peace process, the Arab uprisings and the refugee crisis, this compelling, authoritative book tells the story of one man's quest to remain in power--tying together the fates of two countries, and changing them both forever.Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. 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 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Successive UN Security Council resolutions highlighted the need to include more women in peace processes, the perpetration of gender-based violence during war, the underrepresentation of women as peacekeepers, and the need for greater diversity at all levels of governance to respond to international security challenges. These norms seemed clear, feminist, and ambitious. Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky’s new book, Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operation (Oxford UP, 2022), argues that these WPS norms were distorted during the implementation process. NATO, a predominantly male organizations experimented with gender mainstreaming but instead of serving general equality goals, the Women, Peace, and Security norms served operational effectiveness. Women on the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq were seen as a military asset – because they were able to interact with local women and children or more effectively get information from male inhabitants. The ambitious Women, Peace, and Security global norms ultimately left military culture untouched.Deploying Feminism provides a detailed account of the changes made within the NATO military due to WPS norms. Using comparative case studies, interviews, and feminist I.R. scholarship, Dr. von Hlatky examines why norm distortion occurs and how the military carries it out. She recommends ways that the military might implement gender norms without distortion. distorting it.Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky is an Associate professor of political studies and Canada Research Chair on Gender, Security, and the Armed Forces at Queen’s University. She is also fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). She is the author of American Allies in Times of War: The Great Asymmetry (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Going to War?: Trends in Military Interventions (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016).Daniella Campos served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. 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 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 2017 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI, 2022) create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.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

Evert van der Zweerde in his 2022 book Russian Philosophy: Anarchy, Authority, Autocracy (Edinburgh University Press) details a through history of political thought from the very beginning of the Rus' up to the 21st century.Political philosophy in Russia has always sought, and sometimes found, a middle way between embracing anarchy and searching for authority. Political philosophy in Russia has never before been the subject of a scholarly monograph. While historical factors make this understandable, the topic deserves our attention more than ever, now that Russia, after a short Soviet century, has regained self-assurance as a world power. Its unique historical trajectory, and the specific role of philosophy in it, are of interest to many fields of research and, beyond that, broader audiences. A focus on political philosophy as it existed and exists in Russia despite periods of marginalisation and suppression, allows us to understand its specific character, importance and relevance, and to realise that, in trying to think philosophically, critically, and reflectively about the political reality that shapes them, Russian thinkers are not essentially different from philosophers elsewhere. Hence, many lessons that can be learned from this subject. 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 Sugarland: The Transformation of the Countryside in Communist Albania (Central European UP, 2023), Artan Hoxha discusses the ambitious development project in state socialist Albania that turned a swampland into a site of sugar production after 1945. The author seeks to free the history of Albanian communism from the stereotypes that still circulate about it with stigmas of an aberration, paranoia, extreme nationalism, and xenophobia. This micro-history of the agricultural and industrial transformation of a zone in southeastern Albania, explores a wide range of issues including modernization, development, and social, cultural, and economic policies. In addition to analyzing the collectivization of agriculture, Hoxha shows how communism affected the lives of ordinary rural people. As elsewhere in the Communist Bloc, the Albanian regime borrowed developmental projects from the past and implemented them using social mobilization and a command economy. The abundant archival resources along with interviews in the field attest to the authorities' efforts to increase consumption and to radically transform people's tastes. But the book argues that despite the repressive environment, people involved in the sugar project were not simply passive receivers of models from the nation's capital. The author also describes that—in defiance of Cold War bipolarity—technological requirements and social policy considerations required a degree of engagement with the broader world.Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies