Eastern European History Research Articles

Ein Kampf um Ordnung. Europa, die Steppe, die Leinwand und das Nichts

Analysing five Eastern European History films that in one way or another are set in the steppe, this essay suggests that there is an intricate connection between setting and narrative structure. The historical “Steppe” appears as a projection screen that invites a conversion of the historical material into myths of utopian, or dystopian, content. Thus, the steppe movies under scrutiny deal with “struggles for order” in a very basal sense: that is, for order as such versus existential nothingness. This mythopoetic potential of the steppe topos appears to rely on the established and densely connoted meta-narrative of East vs. West, while its actualisation seems to be provoked by an encompassing consciousness of historical discontinuity.

A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change by Robert Bideleux, Jan Jeffries (review)

A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change by Robert Bideleux, Jan Jeffries (review)

Ein Kampf um Ordnung. Europa, die Steppe, die Leinwand und das Nichts

Analysing five Eastern European History films that in one way or another are set in the steppe, this essay suggests that there is an intricate connection between setting and narrative structure. The historical “Steppe” appears as a projection screen that invites a conversion of the historical material into myths of utopian, or dystopian, content. Thus, the steppe movies under scrutiny deal with “struggles for order” in a very basal sense: that is, for order as such versus existential nothingness. This mythopoetic potential of the steppe topos appears to rely on the established and densely connoted meta-narrative of East vs. West, while its actualisation seems to be provoked by an encompassing consciousness of historical discontinuity.

The idea and the reality of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth-century

This paper would like to discuss some aspects of current trends in studies on eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. In the first part it addresses recent approaches devoted to the reconstruction of the conceptualization of Eastern Europe at the time of the Enlightenment, which have often been inspired by the work of Edward Said and Martin Bernal. These include Larry Woolf's Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). Michael Confino has provided a detailed critique of Woolf's approach. It can be argued that Woolf is in fact projecting Cold War divisions back into the eighteenth century. The article argues in favour of a less “Orientalising” approach to the history of Eastern Europe, by proving an alternative overview of the historical dimensions of the eastern (and northern) regions of Europe in the eighteenth century. Eastern Europe was inextricably connected to its western European neighbours. Without Eastern Europe, European history is incomplete and incomprehensible. In the third part the article argues that the interpretative framework of the “first crisis of the Old Regime”, which Franco Venturi outlined in his Settecento riformatore in the 19870s and 1980s represented a subtle rejection of the East/West dichotomy, and in fact foreshadowed the eventual reunification of Europe after the end of the Cold War.

The YIVO encyclopedia of Jews in eastern Europe

This unprecedented reference work systematically represents the history and culture of Eastern European Jews from their first settlement in the region to the present day. More than 1,800 alphabetical entries encompass a vast range of topics, including religion, folklore, politics, art, music, theater, language and literature, places, organizations, intellectual movements, and important figures. The two-volume set also features more than 1,000 illustrations and 55 maps. With original and up-to-date contributions from an international team of 450 distinguished scholars, the Encyclopedia covers the region between Germany and the Ural Mountains, from which more than 2.5 million Jews emigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1920. Even today the majority of Jewish immigrants to North America arrive from Eastern Europe. Engaging, wide-ranging, and authoritative, this work is a rich and essential reference for readers with interests in Jewish studies and Eastern European history and culture.

From the Editors

14 From the Editors From the EDITORS The idea to devote the thematic program of the journal in 2008 to the problem of “gardening empire” emerged from discussions during the seminar held inAugust 2007 in Kazan, Russia. The seminar was organized by the Ab Imperio editorial team and historians from Mainz University, Germany.An international group of scholars representing historical studies of empire from the Russian Federation, former Soviet Union countries, Europe and the US attended the event. Most participants were specialists in the history of Eastern Europe and the Russian empire, while the role of the seminar’s discussant was taken up by Ann Laura Stoler, an expert on colonialism and Western overseas empires. It was the discussant who drew the attention of the participants to the significant difference between the research agendas of the studies of Eastern European empires (at least as presented at the seminar) on the one hand, and colonial empires, on the other. This critical commentary triggered a fruitful discussion of “exceptionalism ,” both as a mode of self-description of imperial regimes and as a persistent modus operandi of historical understanding of empires. Since the age of classical antiquity until today empires or composite polities have been founded on some idea of their own uniqueness and exceptional historical path. This conception was dialectically transformed into a strategic vision of imperial universalism that prioritized imperial loyalties over regional, ethnic, confessional, and social identities and relegated the latter to the domain of the local and particular. While this 15 Ab Imperio, 1/2008 perception of exceptionalism can be found in many different schools of historiographic thought about empire, it is in the history of Russia that it is often expressed most visibly due to historical context. The relative absence in Russian studies of such phenomena (traditional for the studies of colonial empires) as marginalization, power operation in the domain of the intimate, and “carnal knowledge” surprised the seminar participants. This situation naturally invites a conclusion about the exceptional nature of Russian imperial experience and exceptionalism as a mode of history writing about empire. A series of questions emerged from the encounter between different academic traditions in studies of empire. Should historians aspire for a meta-interpretative framework that would account for peculiarities of that imperial experience from the view point of an external observer? Or, alternatively, should they reproduce and creatively re-work the trope of exceptionalism provided to us by languages of self-description or historiography (looking at exceptionalism as a norm and the way in which imperial political and social spaces function)? It appears obvious that those practices explored by post-colonial studies – manipulation of power, drawing of boundaries between categories of citizens, sanitary projects of “cleansing” societies from “infected” or “polluted” elements – are all characteristics of modern colonialism. A lack or presence of these lines of inquiry in the research agenda is taken to be a proof of the archaic or modernizing imperium. At the same time, the question can be reversed: is the conclusion about the archaic nature of the Russian Imperium an outcome of peculiar historical experiences, or is it a result of historiographic inertia and uncritical reading of the reification of imperial archaism in the languages of self-description and political contestation? The “Theory and Methodology” section in the current issue addresses these questions. In particular, Nicholas Breyfogle demonstrates that contemporary historiography exhibits the coexistence of different interpretative paradigms: from “modernizing” to those that reproduce the “archaism” and “exceptionalism” of Russian imperial experience. Is this historiographic polyphony a reflection of multiple layers and vectors of the real historical time in empire? (In this case, a proper research agenda is always determined by the choice of a particular set of individual imperial situations and contexts.) Can this be taken as the ultimate reflection of imperial exceptionalism? An empire that Ann Stoler missed in the papers of colleagues dealing with Eastern Europe may be called the “gardening empire” – an analog 16 From the Editors to the “gardening state” of Zygmunt Bauman. This notion presupposes the existence of the interventionist state whose power is based on modern scientific knowledge pertaining to nature, society, and politics. This knowledge entails practices of governance for “cultivation,” rationalization...

A History of Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages, Emil Niederhauser (Boulder: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, 2003), x, 555 pp.

A History of Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages, Emil Niederhauser (Boulder: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, 2003), x, 555 pp.

History derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century

Ivan T. Berend. History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xix, 330 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $39.95, hardcover.This synthesis of nineteenth-century Central and Eastern European history by Ivan T. Berend complements his two other works on the history of this region in the twentieth century and thus provides us with the complete authorial vision of the region's modern history. The value of this book is increased by the fact that, in comparison with a few general works dealing with the region in the twentieth century, there had been a definite lack of generalizing narratives about the area's nineteenth century. This wonderfully written book is the first synthetic work on East Central Europe's nineteenth century that has managed equally successfully to integrate social, cultural and political aspects of the region's history.Since the task of this book was to give the region its proper nineteenth-century history, the author avoids wading into hot discussions on the region's discursive construction and its political implications. Berend does believe that there are some objective features shared by all parts of the region and allowing one to speak about Central Eastern Europe. In his opinion, the countries of this region faced similar economic, social and political problems-all deriving from the developmental lag between them and Western Europe, they designed similar responses to these problems, and they faced similar consequences. Berend's Central and Eastern Europe consists of Austria-Hungary (usually excluding Austria proper), the Balkans (usually excluding Greece), and Poland.The book starts with an explanation of how the basis for the distinctiveness of the region was laid down in the early modern period. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the region's leading intellectuals were well aware of their own countries' backwardness. Just as for these intellectuals, for Berend the most important distinctive features of the region can be revealed through comparing it with the Western European core. Every chapter begins with a brief outline of the developments in Western Europe against which trends in Eastern and Central Europe are discerned and measured.First the author looks at culture. Here the differences between Eastern and Western Europe seem less unbridgeable than in social or political structures. Local thinkers were part of European intellectual life. At the centre of Berend's story is the epoch of Romanticism, which, he believes, in the ease of Central Eastern Europe was conflated with Enlightenment. This particular intellectual blend gave birth to the phenomenon crucial for understanding most of the region's developments throughout the modern period, namely-to nationalism. The author believes that romanticism left its imprint not only on this nationalism but on the totality of the region's mental pattern throughout the whole long nineteenth century.Nationalism was the intellectual movement guiding political responses in theregion to the challenges of the West. Despite the fact that the author is well aware of difficulties in distinguishing between good civic and bad ethnic nationalisms, he believes that because of their belatedness and the specific social structure of the region, the local nationalisms differed significantly from the civic and democratic nationalisms of the West. …

In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity in Romanian Studies, 1990-2000

This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of local intellectual discourses to the international “market of ideas” had a powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the Western scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian historiography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditionalist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceauşescu regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that relativizes the traditional dichotomy between “Westernizers” and “autochthonists,” accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from social-political narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the historical research on Eastern Europe.

The Best (and the Worst) of Several Worlds: The Shifting Historiographical Concept of Northeastern Europe

This article deals with various concepts of space–time constellations related to the countries around the Baltic Sea, in German and Finnish historiography known as ‘Northeastern Europe’. Rooted in German national and historical thinking of the middle of the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘Northeastern Europe’ first emerged in the framework of German spatial perceptions of the southern borderlands of the Baltic Sea. This area was perceived as being dominated by the Germans in terms of culture, politics and economy. After the Second World War, such perceptions ceased to be politically correct and vanished from the agenda of policy makers and historical thinkers. In the 1970s, the German historian Klaus Zernack revitalised the subject, i.e. historical research on the Baltic Sea area, but not the earlier concept. In fact, the Baltic Sea area as a whole became a topic of historical thinking within the framework of Zernack's concept of the spatial divisions in the overall history of Eastern Europe. ‘Northeastern Europe’ now appeared as a synonym for the Baltic Sea area in general, including Russia and Poland as decisive historical factors. In the late 1980s, historical research on the Baltic Sea area became a topic of research also in Great Britain and the Nordic countries. Opening up politically after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Baltic Sea area became a favourite object of research even in Poland and the Baltic states. Since then, whether there is something like ‘Northeastern Europe’ at all is a much debated question. But despite related concepts and notions the contents of ‘Northeastern Europe’ seem to become more and more congruent with the Baltic Sea area either as such or as a definite part of it.

Sten Berglund and Frank Aarebrot. The Political History of Eastern Europe in the 20th Century: The Struggle Between Democracy and Dictatorship. Lyme, NH: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 1997. xii, 181 pp. $70.00.

Sten Berglund and Frank Aarebrot. The Political History of Eastern Europe in the 20th Century: The Struggle Between Democracy and Dictatorship. Lyme, NH: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 1997. xii, 181 pp. $70.00.

New Central and East-European Cinema

UNE NOUVELLE EUROPE: THE DOUBLE QUEST OF NEW CENTRAL AND EAST-EUROPEAN CINEMA The Berlin Wall collapsed some eight years ago, along with the repressive totalitarian Communist regimes it came to symbolise, thus neatly wrapping up half a century in the history of Eastern Europe. Little has reached our shores, however, about the effects on everyday life of this unprecedented change, brought about by mostly "velvet" revolutions across the region. In March of this year Cinémathèque Québécoise launched Une Nouvelle Europe: A Panorama of Central and Eastern European Cinema, featuring 28 feature and 5 short films from 8 countries.(1) The selection was also presented in Toronto (Cinematheque Ontario, April 4-May 1, 1997) and in Vancouver (Pacific Cinematheque, March 22-May 1), under the title A New Europe: Reeling After The Fall. The organisation of the event was an arduous and time consuming task. It took more than a year and a...

Three eras of political change in Eastern Europe

The revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe made it possible for people who had always considered themselves part of the European mainstream to reemerge from two generations of Communist separation. At the same time, however, the war in the former Yugoslavia threw doubt on the stability of the region. In Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe, Gale Stokes, a noted specialist on the history of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, covers a broad range of topics, including the revolutions of 1989. The first section of the text describes the historical sources of the regions distinctiveness. Part two illuminates the background of the 1990s crisis in Yugoslavia and the final section discusses the conditions of Eastern Europe after 1945. Because the text is broken into three interrelated parts, instructors are able to choose the sections that are most appropriate for their courses. Stokes discusses the social determinants of East European politics, but argues that ideas were more important in the revolutions of 1989. These interpretations, along with his optimistic assessment of the regions future, are sure to provoke debate. Clear and concise, these articles are both wide-ranging and cross-cultural, giving students not only an overall historical view of the region, but also a glimpse into more recent events as well. The scope and penetration of the essays, along with their challenging viewpoints, are sure to engage undergraduates and scholars studying Eastern European history and international politics.

A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change

A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change

Socijalna dimenzija krize "centralno"- istočne Evrope posle 1989. godine

This paper deals with specific aspects of the crisis of social policy on the "central"-eastem European region, after the onset of political changes that commenced in 1989 with the so-called ..anti-communist revolutions", especially in "central" European countries. The period that began then has been characterised by fast political "transition" and restructuralisation of the economy and political institutions. It has brought with it the excitements of the "capitalisation" of the economy and society, greater individual liberties and rights. However, it has also inflicted on the region a social crisis of apocalyptic dimensions, which is truly unprecedent in this century's history of eastern Europe. The paper explores some particular elements of this social crisis, both statistically and qualitatively. These aspects of the crisis are interpreted, and in its concluding section the paper purports to suggest that any institutional and political change tends to have its more or less devastating social price, which in the case of most countries of "central"-eastern Europe could be have been lower if the reform had progressed at a more moderate and better planned pace.

Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930.

Since the fall of the Ceausescu regime, Romanian politics have been haunted by unresolved issues of the past. In a book that will be essential for those concerned with the problem of nationalism in the contemporary world, Irina Livezeanu examines a critical chapter in Eastern European history - the trajectory of the aggressive nationalism that dominated Romania between the world wars. At the conclusion of World War I, Romania's annexation of territories of mixed population marked the beginning of a turbulent process of nation building. Drawing on original archival research, Livezeanu shows how the Bucharest government attempted, through dramatic reforms, to Romanize the newly annexed regions of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. In these areas, the educated urban elites were substantially non-Romanian, and often Jewish. Although Romanian nationalists had previously tended to think of their peasant majority as a revolutionary menace, they now hailed the peasants as the key to their sweeping program of cultural integration. Focusing on the new educational system, Livezeanu examines the effects of nationalist strategies for transforming peasants into middle-class Romanians who could replace the foreigners as educated urban elites. Tracing events from region to region across Romania, Livezeanu demonstrates how this approach to nation building, and the integralist ideology that drove it, gave rise to an anti-urban, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic nationalism that bred the Romanian fascism of the 1930s. She devotes particular attention to the role of the so-called generation of 1922, the radical nationalist students who came to form the core of the fascist Iron Guard movement. As sheexplores the consequences of assertive nationalist policies for interwar Romanian society, Livezeanu helps us to understand the dilemmas confronting those who today seek to build stable democratic institutions in the formerly communist countries of Central and Balkan Europe.

95/06720 History of Eastern Europe: A few landmarks

95/06720 History of Eastern Europe: A few landmarks

Chronology of 20th-century Eastern European history

Chronology of 20th-century Eastern European history

Piotr S. Wandycz. The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. xv, 330 pp. $37.50. Georges Castellan. History of the Balkans from Mohammed the Congueror to Stalin. Translated by Nicholas Bradley. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1992. vii, 493 pp. $56.00. Distributed by Columbia University

Piotr S. Wandycz. The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. xv, 330 pp. $37.50. Georges Castellan. History of the Balkans from Mohammed the Congueror to Stalin. Translated by Nicholas Bradley. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1992. vii, 493 pp. $56.00. Distributed by Columbia University

Poles and Jews: a failed brotherhood

Poles and Jews draws upon a vast archive of Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, French, and Russian literary works and historical sources to examine Polish and Jewish perceptions of the Polish-Jewish rapprochement of the early 1860s. The idea of a Polish-Jewish developed during the wave of patriotic demonstrations that swept through Poland in 1861-1862 and culminated in the Polish national insurrection against Czarist Russia in 1863. With the revolution, Polish separatists appealed for Jewish support and promised full equality as a reward. Despite the Jewish tradition of loyalty to the Czar, many took active part in the anti-Russian underground and partisan war. The 1864 defeat transformed Polish attitudes from enthusiasm to ambivalence. The conflicting interpretations by Poles and Jews of the short-lived brotherhood of the 1860s remained at the center of Polish-Jewish relations through the remainder of the nineteenth century. Changing ideologies and political currents saw this tradition adapted to fit conflicting needs. While Jewish reflection on the past accelerated growth of Jewish nationalism, the Poles used their interpretation to score points for and against the integration of Jews into Polish society. The period covered in Poles and Jews sets the stage for the tragedies of 20th-century Central and Eastern European history. By examining and comparing Polish and Jewish literary reflections on the revolt, Opalski and Bartal illuminate an important period for all those interested in Jewish and Polish history and in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish literature.