New Books in Eastern European Studies

The Tanya, a hugely influential 18thcentury work of Hasidic philosophy and spirituality, is at the foundation of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, indeed, written by the movement’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812). Join us as we discuss volume 3 of The Steinsaltz Tanya, featuring the late Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s translation and commentary of two self-contained sections o...

Dr. Emily Greble, Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021). Focusing on the Muslim inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and later Yugoslavia, as they repeatedly adjusted to shifting borders and modern state building projects between the 1870s and the 1...

Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California, and provides us with fascinating insights into medieval society. How did the First Crusade happen? What could have suddenly caused tens of thousands of knights, comm...

Dr. Leonidas Mylonakis (PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego) is the author of Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean (Bloomsbury, 2021). This captivating book is based on rich sets of Ottoman, Greek, and other archival sources. Dr. Mylonakis shows that far from ending with the introduction of European powers to the region aro...

In Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest (Indiana University Press, 2020), Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic account of Białowieża, Europe's last primeval forest. At Poland’s easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and comm...

In his new book International Courts and Mass atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Ivor Sokolić explores the effects of international and national transitional justice in Croatia, and in particular the consequences of the work of the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY. Sokolić casts a critical analytical gaze...

Between 1940 and 1946, thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. In Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2020), Eliyan...

Democratic Lessons: What the Greeks Can Teach Us is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Josiah Ober, Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. This extensive conversation includes topics such as the serendipitous factors that led him to study the classical world, the insight...

The image of the Ottoman Turks and their interaction with the Christian West, has undergone many changes in the past: from William Gladstone's famous comment that: “[The Turks] one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.” To the more recent revisionist views of the 'cultural exchange' school, who de-emphasize the military conquest, end...

One quarter of all Holocaust victims lived on the territory that now forms Ukraine, yet the Holocaust there has not received due attention. John-Paul Himka's Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA's Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944 (Ibidem Press, 2021) delineates the participation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force,...

Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, t...

In Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021), Dr. Turaeva and Dr. Urinboyev have brought together a number of studies which explore the daily survival strategies of people within the context of failed states, flourishing informal economies, legal uncertainty, increased mobility, and globalization. As they show, many people who are forced b...

This book is the story of one death among many in the war in eastern Ukraine. Its author is a historian of war whose brother was killed at the frontline in 2017 while serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Olesya Khromeychuk takes the point of view of a civilian and a woman, perspectives that tend to be neglected in war narratives, and focuses on the stories that play out far away from the warzone...

Patrice M. Dabrowski's book The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine (Northern Illinois UP, 2021) tells story of how the Tatras, Eastern Carpathians, and Bieszczady Mountains went from being terra incognita to becoming the popular tourist destinations they are today. It is a story of the encounter of Polish and Ukrainian lowlanders with the wild, sublime highlands and with...

Byzantium: Beyond the Cliché is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Maria Mavroudi, Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Maria Mavroudi specializes in the study of the Byzantine Empire and this wide-ranging conversation explores her extensive research on the Byzantine Empire and how it has repeatedly been undervalued by historians despite its having been a military a...

"One of the most enduring myths of history writing about Europe in the 20th century is that the century can be neatly divided into a tale of two halves, with the first half made up of episodes of war, revolution and mass violence while the second is a tale of relative peace and prosperity”. In Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe After the Second World War (Basic Books, 2021), Paul Betts challenges...

How does emigration affect those left behind? The fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s led citizens to look for a better, more stable life elsewhere. For the older generations, however, this wasn't an option. In this powerful and moving work, Ivana Bajic-Hajdukovic reveals the impact that waves of emigration from Serbia had on family relationships and, in particular, on elderly mothers who stayed. With...

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. The 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” heralded a tremendous transformation of Ukrainian politics and society that has continued to ripple and reverberate throughout the world. T...

Despite Britain's entering the 20th century as the dominant world power, its public discourses were imbued with cultural pessimism and rising social anxiety. Samuel Foster is a Visiting Academic at the University of East Anglia. His first monograph, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (Bloomsbury, 2021), explores how this changing domestic climate shaped perc...

Mark Baker is an American journalist and travel writer. In the 1980s, he lived in Vienna and reported on the former Eastern bloc for Business International and The Economist Group. In 1991, he moved to Prague, where he worked as an editor for The Prague Post and co-founded The Globe Bookstore & Coffeehouse. He’s written 30 travel guidebooks for publishers like Lonely Planet and Fodor's on countrie...

Today we are joined by Petr Roubal, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in the Czech Academy of Sciences, and author of Spartakiads: The Politics of Physical Culture in Communist Czechoslovakia (Karolinum Press/Institute of Contemporary History, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the genealogy of the Spartakiad gymnastics movement, the use of the Spartakiad during the...

Among Eastern Europe’s postwar socialist states, Yugoslavia was unique in allowing its citizens to seek work abroad in Western Europe’s liberal democracies. Brigitte Le Normand's book Citizens Without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe (U Toronto Press, 2021) charts the evolution of the relationship between Yugoslavia and its labour migrants who left to work in Western E...

When considering pivotal years in Russian history, one naturally thinks of 1861 (the Serf Emancipation), the 1905 Revolution, or the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Dr. Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia's Quiet Revolution (Oxford UP, 2021), invites us to reconsider that list of revolutionary years. Werth’s wide-ranging discussion analyzes such subjects as Pushkin’s death and Petr Chadaaev’s criticism of Russia...

Over the past decade, Poland and Hungary have become laboratories for a new kind of government: proto-authoritarian regimes that still have regular elections, vibrant oppositions and are externally constrained by EU law and potential loss of fiscal transfers. Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister since 2010, especially has generated a comprehensive academic literature attempting to understand the...

The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don't Need No Thought Control: Wester...