New Books In Eastern European Studies

Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. "Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing," note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. "It includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West." The poems in In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) offer a startling look at the way language both affects and reflects the realities of war and extremity. This anthology is sure to become the classic text marking not only one of the darkest periods in Ukrainian history, but also a significant moment in the universal struggle for democracy and human rights. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic language

Today I talked to Elly Gotz, author of the memoir Flights of Spirit (Azrieli Foundation, 2018). Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving three years in the ghetto, where thousands from his community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis' next victims. But there is no escape from the ghetto's liquidation in the summer of 1944, and Elly and his family eventually surrender, only to be separated when he and his father are taken to the notorious Dachau concentration camp. There, Elly's skills as a locksmith and metal worker—learned in the ghetto trade school—literally save his life and that of his father's. But as the Allies fly over the camp and the end of the war looms, Elly’s father weakens, and Elly fears his father will not live to see the day of liberation. After the war, fleeing from Europe and their past, Elly fights to regain his lost youth and his

Where lay the fissures of Soviet power in Eastern Europe during the Cold War? Why did France fail in its postwar efforts to make its African colonies part of France itself? In two complementary books, Rachel Applebaum and Emily Marker explore the soft-power mechanisms of the Soviet and French empires after World War II. Their findings shed light on not only the distinctive characteristics of postwar empires, but on the reasons why Soviet internationalism and the unique French model of decolonization ultimately failed. Applebaum is author of Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell UP, 2019). Marker is the author of Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell UP, 2022). Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a p

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iai killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and massacres in and around Odessa. Overall, more than 300,000 Jews of Romanian and Soviet or Ukrainian origin were murdered in Romanian- controlled territories during the Second World War.  In Simon Geissbühler's edited volume Romania and the Holocaust: Events, Contexts, Aftermath (Ibidem Press, 2016), a number of renowned experts shed light on the events, the contexts, and the aftermath of this under-researched and lesser-known dimension of the Holocaust. 75 years on, this book gives much-needed impetus to research on the Holocaust in Romania and Romanian-controlled territories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me

"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

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 Drag

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 Comp

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

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

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

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 child

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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooks

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 tr

Dejan Djokić's book A Concise History of Serbia (Cambridge UP, 2023) covers the full span of Serbia's history – from the sixth-century Slav migrations through until the present day – in an effort to understand the country’s position at the crossroads of east and west. The book traces key developments surrounding the medieval and modern polities associated with Serbs, offering fresh interpretations and revealing a fascinating history of entanglements and communication between southeastern and wider Europe, which often had global implications. In structuring his inquiry around several recurring themes including migration, shifting borders, and the fate of small nations, Djokic challenges some of the prevailing stereotypes about Serbia and reveals the vitality of Serbian identity through the centuries. Dejan Djokić is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Founding Director of the Centre for the Study of the Balkans at Goldsmiths College, University of London. In June 2023, he will join the National Un

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 t

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2023) is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z--an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in the occupied Donbas after Russia's initial aggression in 2014. With elements of magical realism, Volodymyr Rafeyenko's novel combines a wicked sense of humor with political analysis, philosophy, poetry, and moral interrogation. Witty references to popular culture--Ukrainian and European--underline the international and transnational aspects of Ukrainian literature. The novel ends on the hopeful note that even death cannot have the final word: the resilient inhabitants of Z grow in power through reincarnation. This is an interview with The Length of Days' translator, Sibelan F

Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context. When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russia into the North Caucasus. Hoping to find safety, they came to a region the Soviets had struggled to pacify over the preceding 20 years of their rule. The Jewish refugees were in especially unfamiliar territory, as the North Caucasus had been mostly off-limits to Jews before the Soviets arrived, and most local Jewish communities were thus small. The region was not known as a hotbed of traditional antisemitism. Nevertheless, after occupying the North Caucasus in the summer and autumn of 1942, the Germans exterminated all

The war in Ukraine is entering what could well be its decisive phase as Kyiv prepares a counter-offensive and Russia announces plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus as early as the summer. More than ever before, this moves Belarus onto the front line of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its confrontation with NATO. Yet, for three decades, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka has tried to walk a tightrope between hugging Moscow close and clinging onto policy independence that is domestically popular and secures power for him, his family, and his allies. His increasing economic dependence and the war to his south have forced “Europe’s last dictator” to pick a side. In Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia–Ukraine War (Hurst, 2023), Paul Hansbury explains why Lukashenka had no choice but to buckle. He writes that "a 'quiet' annexation of Belarus to Russia is largely happening, even if many Belarusians are unaware of the fact" and “the outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war has argua

The collapse of the USSR was relatively bloodless. The Chechen Wars were not. A tiny nation on the edge of Russia, Chechnya brought one of the largest armies in the world to its knees. Elena Pedigo Clark, Trauma and Truth: Teaching Russian Literature on the Chechen Wars (Academic Studies Press, 2023) examines significant works about these wars by some of Russia’s leading contemporary war authors, including Anna Politkovskaya, Arkady Babchenko, and Zakhar Prilepin. Combining close reading of the texts with descriptions of the authors’ social and political activities and suggestions on how to teach these challenging authors and texts, Trauma and Truth traces the psychological effects of the wars on their participants, and concludes with a discussion of what this means for Russia today. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium mem

Anastasia Lysyvets’s memoir Tell us about a happy life … (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia …), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets’s testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do. In The Holodomor and the Origins of the Soviet Man: Reading the Testimony of Anastasia Lysyvets (Ibidem Press, 2022), Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets’s text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations. Learn more about your a