New Books in Eastern European Studies

As COVID-19 disrupted maritime trade with China, the world was again reminded of the importance of shipping in global commerce. The roots of Nordic maritime trade relations with Asia go back centuries, and this history reveals interesting details about early Finnish interaction with China. For example, the Swedish East India Company’s 18th century trade voyages produced the first-ever Finnish acad...

Reccep Tayyib Erdogan is towering politician. He has dominated Turkey for 20 years and is now being compared to Ataturk as a man who has changed the direction of Turkish society. And he matters not only to Turkey but to the international community more generally partly because of Turkey’s geo-strategic position but also because he has the power to influence the future direction of political Islam...

With I Am Jugoslovenka!: Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester UP, 2022), Jasmina Tumbas examines forms of feminist political and artistic engagement in Yugoslavia and its successor nations. By bringing together a wide range of materials—from performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism, and press photos of female snipers...

This podcast is a recorded panel discussion on “War and Peace: America's Humane War and the Crisis in Ukraine.” The panel was part of the Annual Conference of the Connecticut/Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) held on May 12, 2022 at the University of Connecticut in Hartford.  The discussion considers the recent book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvent...

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows tha...

Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. This labor force was essential to creating the postwar German economic miracle. Employers fantasized that foreign "guest workers" would provide labor power in their prime productive years without having to pay for their education, pensions, or medica...

In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb histori...

The status of Russia as a world power has been fiercely debated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although often ignored, Russia came back into the international limelight in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and recently in 2022 with the war in Ukraine. However, what are the underlining precepts behind Russian behavior on the international stage, and how do Russian leaders perceive their c...

The status of Russia as a world power has been fiercely debated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although often ignored, Russia came back into the international limelight in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and recently in 2022 with the war in Ukraine. However, what are the underlining precepts behind Russian behavior on the international stage, and how do Russian leaders perceive their c...

Menachem Kaiser's book Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure (Mariner Books, 2021) is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as "The Killer." A...

Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) investigates the place and meaning of consumption in Jewish lives and the roles Jews played in different consumer cultures in modern Europe and North America. Drawing on innovative, original research into this new and challenging field, the volume brings Jewish studies and the history a...

Denisa Nesťáková and Katja Grosse-Sommer edited volumne If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, 2021) contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic fr...

In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (HarperCollins, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dyn...

After decades of rule by the National Liberal Party or one of its centre-right, mainstream rivals – usually either the Conservative Party or the National Peasant Party, – in December 1937 King Carol II appointed the antisemitic National Christian Party (PNC), led by Octavian Goga and A. C. Cuza to form a government, effectively ending the democratic consensus and Francophile orientation in Romania...

By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed overnight. Ralph Hope’s The Grey Men: Pursuing the...

This succinct history of Germany will take you on an incredible journey through time spanning from the 1500s to the present. Focusing on Germany in detail and in a global context, Jeremy Black uncovers the complexity of the country's past as well as the challenges and strengths of its future. The history of Germany is intricately woven. Threaded in time through its struggles and triumphs with reli...

In her book Great Power Competition and the Path to Democracy: The Case of Georgia, 1991-2020 (University of Rochester Press, 2022), Zarina Burkadze argues that great power competition may distribute political power in a way that causes a democratic regime to emerge, supporting her argument with evidence from an impressive array of archival sources as well as from sixty-six interviews with state o...

Contemporary Housing Struggles: A Structural Field of Contention Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) provides a comparative study of housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest in 2008-2021. The financialization of housing and the resulting inequalities, expulsions and social contention are a central characteristic of today’s capitalist crisis. These two East European cities that fall outside the...

Olga Bertelsen's In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022) focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milie...

Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau once gave a press conference while visiting Washington, during which he famously said: "Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." For many of the countries in eastern Europe, this must also ring true,...

In Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2022), Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish n...

"With the eurozone crisis going back to 2010, the refugee crisis that culminated in 2015, the crisis of the EU-Russia relationship going back to the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-14, to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the EU has struggled to live up to the expectations it raised both in relation to its own people and neighbouring countries. This is not an accident". Could this really be by desi...

The majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival (Academic Studies Press, 2021) tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or politic...

With the war in Ukraine showing no signs of stopping anytime soon, it was thought a worthwhile idea to have an informed discussion with four expert historians of 19th and 20th century European and Eastern European, diplomatic and military history. As you can readily see from the below biographies, this is a superior and award-winning panel. Please listen and enjoy. University of Exeter, Professor...

Olga Bertelsen’s timely book, In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s (Lexington Books, 2022), focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine—a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB “active measures” against what came to be known as...