New Books In Eastern European Studies

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into the nature of writing but also into the contextual environments that happen to shape writers’ reputations. Born and educated in Ukraine, Vynnycheko had to leave his homeland shortly after the emergence of the Soviet Union: his political vision considerably differed from the developments introduced and supported by the Soviet leaders. Extensively traveling across Europe, Vynnychenko was trying to maintain a fragile connection with his homeland: this connection was primarily constructed and nourished by the writers imagination. In spite of persecution, Vynnychenko ventured a few intermittent returns to Soviet Ukraine; however, he never had a chance to settle down in his home country again. France became one of the places where he attempted to develop a new sense

People study atrocities and mass violence for a variety of reasons. When asked, many offer thoughtful intellectual or political explanations for their choice. But in truth, the field is a practical response to a cry of the heart. How, people ask, how can people do this to one another? How can men and women do such terrible things? How can they do them to people they know? Max Bergholz asks these questions systematically in his terrific new book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016). The book is a careful, detailed description of the violence that exploded in a rural community in Croatia in 1941. Bergholz researched the book for a decade, poring through records from local archives and libraries all across the region. This allows Bergholz, Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, to answer questions about the history of ethnicity in the region, about the intersection of local agency and national leaders

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explores how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to use tourism and landscape planning to reshape East Germans’ definition of their homeland. He also demonstrates the messy boundaries between state and society, in which East Germans refused to change patterns of pre-World War II nature activities such as hiking and camping; conservationists and the regime found common ground on concepts of landscape management; and environmentalism resulted in a fundamental break between society and the state. The People’s Landscape contributes to our understanding of East Germany’s environmental history as well as to our understandin

In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O’Neill shows how the city’s homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O’Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to be performing during the protests led to her study of immigration, integration and identity in Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Indiana University Press, 2014). Through interviews with hip hop musicians and African immigrants in Ukraine, Helbig explores multi-valent racial imaginaries connected with U.S. hip hop and black identity construction through music. She also traces how Africans and Ukrainians both construct these identities by conducting research in Uganda, the home country of a number of African Ukrainian musicians. Multimedia resources for Hip Hop Ukraine are available through Indiana University Press Ethnomusicology Multimedia. Adriana Helbig is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. She directs the Carpathian Music Ensemble and is affiliated faculty

In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015), Geoffrey D. Claussen provides a thorough study of the life and work of one of the most influential figures in the history of Musar, the Jewish discipline for ethical development. Simḥah Zissel (1824-1898), also known as the Alter of Kelm, uniquely combined traditional Talmud study, contemplative exercises, Musar, and general studies curricula at his Talmud Torah in the Lithuanian town of Kelm. Professor Claussen, Lori and Eric Sklut Emerging Scholar in Jewish Studies, and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University, breaks new ground in tracing the development and legacy of one of Musar’s great masters. This book is a welcome and needed addition to the study of the Musar movement and its seminal figures. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cult

What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans? What kind of venues host punk shows? Punk musician and writer Franz Nicolay explores these questions and much more in his Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar(The New Press, 2016). The book chronicles his various tours through Eastern Europe between May 2012 and July 2014. Traveling by himself in a rental car or by train with his wife, Nicolay explores cities and towns with small but devoted punk scenes and describes what he sees in Soviet post-industrial towns. Along the way, he learns what Russian punks think about the Pussy Riot controversy and he experiences first-hand political turmoil in the Ukraine. Blending travel memoir, cultural criticism, and popular music studies, Nicolay’s writing explores the life of a touring musician, the people that they encounter on tour, and his response to what he se

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Modernist architects believed they could build a new city that would match the modernization goals of the new communist government. In Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) , Brigitte Le Normand reveals the ideals that under girded these architects plans for Belgrade, along with the postwar realities that thwarted their attempts to foster a new society through a modernist built environment. She analyzes the political, social, and ideological implications of urban planning and the built environment, demonstrating how modernist architects were able to mold their ideal cityscape to fit Yugoslavia’s third way after the Tito-Stalin split and how market socialism created expectations that undermined their visi

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation by exploring how imperial priorities shaped map-making of he dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and how these changed over the long century during which a fully independent Polish state did not exist. While focused primarily on Russian cartography is the primary focus of this work, Seegel places those developments in context with discussion of Polish nationalist map-making and a discussion of Habsburg map-making of the region as well. In so doing, he also offers intriguing portraits of the cartographers who ultimately made this research possible. It was a pleasure to interview him at last about this book and I invite you to listen to our discussion of his work

In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, gives us a compelling and complex account of the fundamental changes in Jewish Life set in motion by the Bolshevik revolution. Sloin has written a social history at the grassroots level of Jewish society in Belorussia focusing on the intersections between Jewish radicalism, race and identity formation and political economy. It’s a unique and fascinating contribution to this field of study and a highly readable and insightful account of the transformations in Belorussian Jewish life in this period Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars, with an emphasis on their discourses and activities regarding (sexual) war violence and on each other. Using a Bourdieu-based methodology supplemented by interviews, she challenges common assumptions that were not subject to scholarly debate before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Soviet Union under Stalin was very repressive. You could get sent to a GULAG (if not shot) for casually telling an “anti-Soviet” joke or pilfering ubiquitous “state property.” But, as James Heinzen points out in his excellent book The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953 (Yale University Press, 2016), official corruption–and bribery in particular–was rife. At every level of the Soviet system, top to bottom, and in every sector of the Soviet economy, ship building to medicine, people gave and took bribes. The Party knew about it, as did its judicial apparatus. Bribery was a fact of everyday Soviet life, even under Stalin. In The Art of the Bribe, Heinzen explains why bribery was intrinsic to Soviet culture, why bribery was an important and even necessary part of the Soviet system, and why the Party was more or less helpless to do anything about it even if it were interested in taking it on. The book is full of interesting and telling details–all based on first-ever archival research–that, t

In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow. William Prigge analyzes how “nationalist” communists came to power in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic by taking advantage of Lavrentiy Beria’s attempts to build his own power base. Prigge then demonstrates how their fall from power was a sign of the forces that led to Khrushchev’s ouster within a few years. Bearslayers: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists(Peter Lang, 2015) delves into the lives and careers of leading Latvian communists and the networks of relationships with each other and the Soviet leadership in Moscow to explore not only their fate but the power struggles taking place in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953. William D. Prigge is associate professor and department head for the Department of History, Political Science, Philosophy, Religion at Sou

The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)is so interesting. Westermann teaches at Texas A & M University at San Antonio. Prior to this work, he wrote a well-regarded volume on the German police battalions on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Before joining the university world, he was an officer in the US military, and he brings his training and experience to a study of the strategy and tactics of the armies which fought in each space. In doing so, he sheds new light on how each army behaved. He’s particularly good at understanding how tactics and military culture drove the Ameri

For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience. But the actual history of Hungary and the Holocaust remains opaque. Ferenc Laczo aims to change this. Laczo, an associate professor of history at Maastricht University, has produced a fascinating examination of a series of dialogues unfamiliar to most historians. His new book Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History (Brill, 2016) examines the Jewish community in Hungary and how their ideas of themselves and their place in Hungary changed during the war. He begins in the 1930s, with Jewish thinkers wrestling with traditional questions of identity and inclusion in the context of authoritarian government in Hungary and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. He then moves to a close reading of memories of the Holocaust in Hungary, taking advantage

Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of the 1940s. Piotr Kosicki’s edited volume, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), changes this story by profiling four Communist-run countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Drawing on extensive research in English-language scholarship and the national historiographies of the countries that it examines, Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain offers an unparalleled glimpse into the vibrant and complicated politics of the Cold War period. Piotr Kosicki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University, complicates the traditional narrative of Jewish religious insularity within Imperial Russia in her new book on converts from Judaism. By exploring 19th century Russia’s multi-confessional landscape and the spaces in which Jewish men and women encountered those of other religious communities, Schainker uses the lens of conversion to explore Jewish and Russian Orthodox anxieties over group boundaries and the extent to which converts, far from being exiles within their Jewish communities, occupied sustained, liminal positions that attracted the interests of Jews, Christians, and Russian state officials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime published by Northern Illinois University Press. He focuses on the 20 years after World War II when five to seven million Communists were disciplined by reprimand, demotion or expulsion. Cohn argues that Part leaders became less concerned about class background and ideological purity and more concerned about the needs of the state. As a result, corruption and abuse of position, along with moral degeneracy such as family relations and drunkenness, dominated internal investigations and disciplinary hearings. Cohn draws on a broad range of provincial case files in in Perm, Tver, Saratov, and Kiev, along with archives of the Commission of Party Control in Moscow, to reveal what the Party considered to appropriate behavior for those who carried the high title of Communist. Edward Co

In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and nation-building? As she traces the rushed and often violent process of modernization in post-World War II Lithuania, Davoliute demonstrates how cultural elites wove together nationalist and communist ideologies to shape the emerging Soviet Lithuania. She argues that writers Petras Vaiciunas and Justis Paleckis used a poetics of reconstruction to integrate Lithuania’s medieval past into a broader Soviet narrative of the future and that this engagement the development of indigenous pro-Soviet cultural elites. Davoliute then looks at the rustic turn in the 1970s and makes the case that cultural conservatives were able to provide an alternative aesthetic of authentic identity, not based on Soviet Lithuanian modernity but on a discourse of trauma and deracination. Her

Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlands, contacts between the empires, transportation networks, changing geographies of borders, ghost borders, countless border crossing and walls, and lack of geographical data, this book also provides numerous resources for historians, political scientists and other scholars. This book shesd light on an apparent “chaos” of the Balkan geography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices