New Books in Eastern European Studies

As the horrors of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine unfold before our eyes, we have witnessed a massive wave of refugees absorbed by a range of Eastern European countries – with the most refugees so far remaining in Poland. This is a remarkably apt moment to talk about the lessons of an important new study by historian Jochen Lingelbach. In On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War (Berghahn, 2020), Lingelbach tells the story of just under 20,000 Polish refugees (many, from present-day Ukraine) who, initially deported into the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, found themselves in British hands after the USSR joined the Allies in 1941, and were transferred to the British-held colonies of East and Central Africa. On the Edges of Whiteness traces the complex relationships that developed among the Polish refugees, their British administrators, and their African neighbors in a story of survival and dramatic dislocation against the backdrop of war. Lingelbach’s book is an important and timely contribution to African history, Eastern European history, colonial history, and migration studies.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Poland in a Colonial World-Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939 (Routledge, 2021) is a study of the interwar Polish state and empire building project in a changing world of empires, nation-states, dominions, protectorates, mandates, and colonies.Drawing from a wide range of sources spanning two continents and five countries, Piotr Puchalski examines how Polish elites looked to expansion in South America and Africa as a solution to both real problems, such as industrial backwardness, and perceived issues, such as the supposed overrepresentation of Jews in "liberal professions." He charts how, in partnership with other European powers and international institutions such as the League of Nations, Polish leaders made attempts to channel emigration to South America, to establish direct trade with Africa, to expedite national minorities to far-away places, and to tap into colonial resources around the globe. Puchalski demonstrates the intersection between such national policies and larger processes taking place at the time, including the internationalist turn of colonialism and the global fascination with technocratic solutions.Carefully researched, the volume is key reading for scholars and advanced students of twentieth-century European history.Piotr Puchalski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of History and Archival Studies of the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. His academic interests include Polish, French, British, and American diplomacy, as well as Western colonialism, totalitarian regimes, and modern ideologies.Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. 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 sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2020) weaves scholarly commentary with never-before-published primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings. The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and Ukraine.Valerie A. Kivelson teaches at the University of Michigan, where she is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History. Christine D. Worobec is professor emerita at Northern Illinois University. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Ayse Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It uses that vast history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline. How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending - the Rise of the West and the decline of the East - into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result? 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

On Sunday April 3rd, Hungarians decide whether to elect Viktor Orbán and his special form of eurosceptical "illiberal democracy" to a fourth consecutive term in office as war rages on their northeastern border.Since he returned to power in 2010, Orbán has established a new style of government that is hard to capture with standard political vocabulary. In previous podcasts, András Körösényi opted for plebiscitary leader democracy, Gábor Scheiring for authoritarian capitalism, and Tímea Drinóczi and Agnieszka Bień-Kacała for illiberal constitutionalism. Whatever term best explains it, Orbánism has attracted a fan base among national-conservatives globally: most prominently Donald Trump's intellectual outriders and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.In his new edition of Orbanland: Why Viktor Orbán's Hungary Matters (New Europe Books, 2022), Lasse Skytt - a Danish journalist who has lived in provincial Hungary since 2013 - investigates what is uniquely Hungarian about Orbanism and what is just a more politically efficient channelling of the global reaction against liberalism and globalisation. He writes: "Through understanding what is going on in Hungary - and why - perhaps we will be able to predict how the current polarisation might shape the future of both sides of the Atlantic''.*The authors' own book recommendations are: After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (WH Allen, 2021).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Caroline Mezger's Forging Germans: Youth, Nation, and the National Socialist Mobilization of Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1918-1944 (Oxford UP, 2020) explores the nationalization and eventual National Socialist mobilization of ethnic German children and youth in interwar and World War II Yugoslavia, particularly in two of its multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderlands: the Western Banat and the Batschka. Drawing upon original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and historical press sources, the book uncovers the multifarious ways in which political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and military agents from Germany colluded with local nationalist activists to inculcate Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans with divergent notions of “Germanness.” As the book shows, even in the midst of Yugoslavia’s violent and shifting Axis occupation, children and youth not only remained the subjects, but became agents of nationalist activism, as they embraced, negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the “Germanness” ascribed to them. Forging Germans is conceptualized as a contribution to the study of National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, to the mid-twentieth-century history of Southeastern Europe and its relation to Germany, to studies of borderland nationalism and experiences of World War II occupation, and to the history of childhood and youth.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday 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

Within living memory, smallpox was a dreaded disease. Over human history, it has killed untold millions. In the eighteenth century, as epidemics swept Europe, the first rumours emerged of effective treatment: a mysterious method called inoculation.But a key problem remained: convincing people to accept the preventative remedy, the forerunner of vaccination. Arguments raged over risks and benefits, and public resistance ran high. As smallpox ravaged her empire and threatened her court, Catherine the Great took the momentous decision to summon the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale from Hertford to St Petersburg to carry out a secret mission that would transform both their lives. In The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus (ONEworld, 2022), Lucy Ward expertly unveils the extraordinary story of Enlightenment ideals, female leadership and the fight to promote science over superstition.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. 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 conclusion to Vanessa Rampton's new book on Russian liberalism, the author remarks that "the prospects for liberal development in countries such as Russia...seem as remote as ever." (185). Covering the period from Catherine the Great to the early 20th century, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2020) provides the reader with plentiful evidence that this is the case. Rampton argues that at the core of liberalism is an ongoing compromise between competing claims, as with the interplay between positive and negative liberty. As liberalism currently finds itself under attack from multiple sides, Rampton's case Russian case study is valuable. Russian soil's general hostility liberalism illuminates some of the ideas' strengths and weaknesses, and the historical conditions under which it is and is not likely to flourish.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. 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 Grow Up, the latest graphic nonfiction narrative from New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, is based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teenagers. These autobiographies, submitted in a writing contest, were hidden away at the outbreak of World War II, and were only discovered seven decades later. In When I Grow Up, the author brings these stories, their authors, and their entire world, to life.David Gottlieb is the Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019). 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 Tinatin Japaridze about her book Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism (Lexington Books, 2022).In this timely interview, Japaridze discusses not only the legacy of Stalin, but also her personal reflections in growing up in Georgia during the Cold War, and her experiences in the immediate drama of post Cold-War Moscow. To add to her both personal and professional reflections on legacy and nationalism, she attended an American school where she integrated into the west. Thus her reflections on McDonaldization and its fallout are both driven by an acute level of professional study as well as personal empathy for the individuals who live in the times we come to call historical. This same interest in both the human and the institutional informs her exploration of memory and particularly museums as sites of the construction of nostalgia and shame. In a compelling moment, Japaridze notices a brand new pair of boots in an exhibit that labeled them Stalin's. She takes us into our universe as the curator shares a secret: they were never worn by Stalin and surely stitched well after his death in 1953. Almost sixty years later, Stalin like these boots, are refashioned, imagined, and put into place as an observable reality for the next generation. And that next generation, her generation, peers through the glass and suspects they are not as they have been neatly labeled by curators of the past. With the Russian waging war in the Ukraine in a bid that seems driven by a macabre nationalism or fun-house of mirrors Stalinist nostalgia, Japaridze's book is more necessary than ever. What she felt was opaque is now in plain sight, no longer hiding. While Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and those who came after him, had an ideology, however manipulated, Japaridze draws the curtain back on today's empty-rhetoric old-fashioned land grab by Putin. Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International 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