New Books in Eastern European Studies

Andrea Pető's book The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) analyses the actions, background, connections and the eventual trials of Hungarian female perpetrators in the Second World War through the concept of invisibility. It examines why and how far-right women in general and among them several Second World War perpetrators were made invisible by their fellow Arrow Cross Party members in the 1930s and during the war (1939-1945), and later by the Hungarian people's tribunals responsible for the purge of those guilty of war crimes (1945-1949). It argues that because of their 'invisibilization' the legacy of these women could remain alive throughout the years of state socialism and that, furthermore, this legacy has actively contributed to the recent insurgence of far-right politics in Hungary. This book therefore analyses how the invisibility of Second World War perpetrators is connected to twenty-first century memory politics and the present-day resurgence of far-right 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

In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks.In Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave, 2019), Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania's intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse.Cristina A. Bejan is a historian, theatre artist, and poet. A Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, she has had fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Wilson Center and Georgetown University. A playwright and spoken word artist, her creative work has appeared in the US, UK, Romania and Vanuatu. Bejan runs the arts and culture collective Bucharest Inside the Beltway (BiB), based in Denver, CO. Please visit www.cristinaabejan.com for more info. You can also follow her on social media: Cristina A. Bejan (Facebook); @CristinaABejan (Twitter); Cristina A. Bejan PhD (LinkedIn); & BiB at @BiBDenver (Facebook) and @bucharestinsidethebeltway (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

“Awareness of the EU's undeniable past and present importance can - and has - led to complacency and hubris. There is nothing inevitable about European integration".So writes Mark Gilbert in European Integration: A Political History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), a compact, narrative history of the European Communities and the European Union pitched at both political-science students and the general reader.Sympathetic to the integration process but critical of “Whig” histories of unstoppable federal progress, Gilbert makes a case for traditional “villains” – Charles De Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher – as simply advocates of alternative models of governance.Mark Gilbert is resident professor of international history at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Bologna and Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) analyzes the shaping of the commemorative space in the three post-Soviet countries that used to share commemorative practices and memorial space in general. For the reader outside of the Soviet space, “war,” which is mentioned in the title of the book, will most likely not evoke a specific historical event that the book, in fact, refers to—WWII. Moreover, for the contemporary, “non-Soviet” reader, the title will most likely refer to the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine. For readers, who are well familiar with Soviets’ past, the book will signal, first and foremost, the Second World War, the event which occupies an extensive memorial space for the majority of the post-Soviet countries and their peoples. The editors and the contributors of War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus analyze how the memory of the war shapes the historical, political, and cultural dimensions of the three countries. While during the USSR, this memory was shared by the Soviet republics, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, each of these republics appeared to undertake their own trajectories in terms of integrating the war narratives and memory about them into their independent post-Soviet memorial programs.The book nuances the mnemonic divergences that the three countries illustrate when they deal with how the Second World War can be and should be represented in commemorative practices of their nations. Interestingly, these divergencies are dictated to some extent by how each of these countries views their Soviet legacy. Russia presents itself as a main successor of the Soviet Union and this factor considerably shapes the way in which today’s Russia promotes the official historical narrative of WWII as one of the narratives that mobilizes and unites the Russians. While Belarus follows Russia’s steps in trying to use the war narrative to unite the Belarusians through the creation of some grand-narrative, Ukraine in many cases takes a different route. In Ukraine, there is an attempt to put the narrative and the memory of the Second World War not so much in the Soviet context, but in the European one. One of the signals in this regard is the adoption of the poppy flower emblem as a symbol of war remembrance. War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus delves into the complexities of memory politics, which help investigate the convergences and divergences of the memorial practices that the post-Soviet countries are currently engaging with. 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 Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large-format maps and a wealth of illustrations, charts, and tables, this one-of-a-kind atlas charts Hasidism’s emergence and expansion; its dynasties, courts, and prayer houses; its spread to the New World; the crisis of the two world wars and the Holocaust; and Hasidism’s remarkable postwar rebirth.This spatial history of a movement that has often been understood as aterritorial combines painstaking source work, cartographic skill, and inventive visualisations to create a masterful contribution to the history of Hasidism and the history of religion more broadly.Marcin Wodziński is Professor of Jewish History and Literature, and head of the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław (Poland).Waldemar Spallek is Assistant Professor of geographic information systems and cartography at the University of Wrocław (Poland).Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. 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 this episode, we meet Dr. Jill Massino, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina who is fascinated researching everyday life under dictatorships. We discuss her first book Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn, 2020). This book which is based on more than one hundred oral histories and extensive work with archival material, shows convincingly that people and societies are complex and elude clear-cut generalizations. The author looks through the prism of everyday life, following the cycle of growing up, marriage, parenthood, and also discussing the materiality that structures one’s life – the accessibility of consumer goods and the efforts going into procuring them when they are scarce. “For me the important thing about everyday life history is that […] it provides a fuller portrait of the politics, of the economic system, of the society you are focusing on and it allows to see how people were both effected by and responded to state policies,” Massino explains. People did suffer under the Eastern European socialist regimes, the author says, and not only in prison and labour camps, but also juggling careers and family responsibilities, witnessing the gulf between the state’s delusional propaganda and reality, queuing for hours in the cold or trying to find infant formula through connections. On the other hand, Massino shows that this was also a time of meaningful experiences – some people escaped poverty and explored their talents, pursued fulfilling careers, and spent their family vacations on the Black Sea. The focus of the book is on women’s experiences; the author looks at their inclusion in the labour force – simultaneously encouraged and failed by the state, their reproductive struggles, as well as the shifts but also the patriarchal residues in gender roles at the work place and in the family.Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser 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

In her book, The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press, 2018), Erica Marat provides an answer to a very important question: “What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force?” Marat looks as specific case studies – in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan – in order to identify and analyze instances where public mobilization challenged the conduct of police offers and their use of violence. In her analysis, she considers the legacies of Soviet policing, but also identifies important factors that led to policing’s reform. The book is valuable reading for those following contemporary issues in Central Asia and the post-Soviet space, as well those interested broadly in the problems of police violence and the challenge of police reform.Nicholas Seay is a PhD Student at The Ohio 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

Starting after the Second World War and taking the story through to the Brezhnev era, Yoram Gorlizski and Oleg Khlevniuk's Substate Dictatorship Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2020) charts the strategies of Soviet regional leaders, paying particular attention to the forging and evolution of local trust networks.Beginning with the late Stalinist period, Gorlizki and Khlevniuk describe and evaluates the relatively successful mechanisms Stalin used to keep regional networks and bosses (usually Obkom First Secretaries) in check while simultaneously devolving power to the regional governments. When Khrushchev came to power, following Stalin’s death, he removed many of these mechanisms which included oversight bodies such as the Party Control Commission and delegations from the Central Committee in an effort to reform the bureaucracy. This led to an unprecedented level of bureaucratic fraud, perpetrated primarily through family circle trust networks of regional bureaucrats who covered up each other’s malfeasance. The culmination of this trend was the Riazan scandal when the Obkom First Secretary engaged in a number of shady practices such as buying meat from markets in other regions, counting slaughtered animals twice and straight up fabrication to meet the massively unrealistic quotas Khrushchev had set as part of his Seven Year Plan. The resulting scandal undermined Khrushchev’s political capital and contributed to his downfall. Brezhnev took a different tact to managing regional governments by reducing the insane pressures to fulfill quotas they had faced under Stalin and Khurshchev and ending the rotational scheme Stalin had put in to place to try to make sure regional bosses could not develop their own nepotistic networks. Listen in to learn about how authoritarian regimes delegated power and how successful or unsuccessful these methods were and how they fundamentally shaped Soviet history.Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed 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

Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2020) illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of urban ingenuity amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall.Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings.Because such urban ingenuity was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?Andrew Demshuk is an Associate Professor of History at American University, in Washington, DC.Steven Seegel is professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado 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 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over three hundred young Jewish women from Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) fled their communities and sought refuge in a Kraków convent, where many converted to Catholicism.Relying on a wealth of archival documents, including court testimonies, letters, diaries, and press reports, in The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia (Princeton University Press, 2020), Rachel Manekin reconstructs the stories of three Jewish women runaways and reveals their struggles and innermost convictions. Unlike Orthodox Jewish boys, who attended "cheders," traditional schools where only Jewish subjects were taught, Orthodox Jewish girls were sent to Polish primary schools. When the time came for them to marry, many young women rebelled against the marriages arranged by their parents, with some wishing to pursue secondary and university education. After World War I, the crisis of the rebellious daughters in Kraków spurred the introduction of formal religious education for young Orthodox Jewish women in Poland, which later developed into a worldwide educational movement. Manekin chronicles the belated Orthodox response and argues that these educational innovations not only kept Orthodox Jewish women within the fold but also foreclosed their opportunities for higher education.Exploring the estrangement of young Jewish women from traditional Judaism in Habsburg Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century, The Rebellion of the Daughters brings to light a forgotten yet significant episode in Eastern European history.Rachel Manekin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. Her area of specialization is the social, political, and cultural history of Galician Jewry. She is also the author of The Jews of Galicia and the Austrian Constitution: The Beginning of Modern Jewish Politics (Jerusalem: Shazar Institute, 2015).Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies