Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe – serie

Interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature to expand our understanding of the significance of this important Lithuanian writer.Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova is a book in the European tradition of works such as Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksander Wat's classic My Century. Taking the form of an extendedinterview with Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, the book interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature. Venclova, who personally knew Akhmatova, Pasternak, Milosz, Brodsky, and many others, was also one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, one of the first human rights organizations in Eastern Europe. Magnetic North provides an in-depth account of ethical choices and artistic resistance to totalitarianism over a half century. It also details Venclova's artistic work, expanding our understanding of the significance of this writer, whose books are central to contemporary European culture.The publication of this book was supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute.Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, writer, scholar, and translator. He is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Ellen Hinsey is the author of numerous works of poetry, essay, and literary translation. Her most recent book is Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism.

Globalization and post-communist transition are currently two of the most important economic issues. Kolodko considers the links between them, and the way forward for post-socialist economies.Kolodko, former finance minister of Poland, considers the links between issues of globalization and post-communist transition, the two most important economic features of the turn of the century. He discusses the pattern of economic growth and contraction of the past fifty years, and reviews the options for the next half century. He accounts for the severity of the transitional recession in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as a result of both the legacies of the past and current policy mistakes, but demonstrates how structural reforms and gradual institutional building have enabled some post-socialist economies to recover. He proposes that, within the wider context of globalization, several of these emerging market economies will be able to catch up with the more advanced industrial countries, but emphasizes the need for quality growth policies and continuing coordination between development strategies and efforts toward structural reform.Grzegorz W. Kolodko is John C. Evans Professor in European Studies at the University of Rochester, and Director of TIGER -- Transformation, Integration and Globalization Economic Research -- at the Leon Kozminski Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management [WSPiZ].

Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism interrogates the putative relationship between critical thought and society through an ethnographic study of civic discourse in post-1989 Slovakia.Critical thinking is the civic virtue of a liberal democracy. Citizens who think for themselves, cooperate, and can agree to disagree are the hallmark of a self-governing society. People from undemocratic societies, however, are often believed to lack this virtue, because authoritarian regimes smother critical discourse through fear and dull critical thought through the control of information and propaganda. After the end of Communist rule in 1989, Westernagents of democratization and educational development chided the residents of the former Czechoslovakia for this deficiency, claiming that the Slovaks' inability to think critically was the reason the nation struggled to integrate with Western Europe.Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism examines this putative relationship between critical thought and society through an ethnographic study of post-1989 Slovakia. Drawing on original fieldwork and anthropological theories of language and culture, Jonathan Larson uncovers patterns of social analysis and criticism in Slovak political discourse. He exposes ways in which these discursive practices have been misinterpreted and explains their underlying dynamics in Slovak society. This important volume, bringing together scholarship on East Central Europe, liberalism, education, and the public sphere, gives students of modern history, politics,and culture a fresh perspective on a skill essential to civil society.JONATHAN L. LARSON is Assistant Professor of Education at Grinnell College, IA.

This volume introduces a novel treatment of Polish cinema by discussing its international reception, performance, co-productions, and subversive émigré auteurs, such as Andrzej Zulawski and Walerian Borowczyk.The opening up of Poland economically and politically to global influences after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, coupled with the rise of transnational approaches to the study of film, presents ideal conditions for examiningPolish cinema from a transnational vantage point. Yet not only have studies of Polish cinema remained largely within a national framework but Polish cinema, as well as many other Eastern European cinemas, has been virtually excluded from new research in transnational cinema.Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context addresses this lacuna in film studies, offering extended analysis of this national cinema's global influence. Contributors assess the reception of Polish films in Europe and North America, Polish international coproductions, the presence of Polish performers in foreign films, and the works of subversive émigré auteurs like Andrzej Zulawski and Walerian Borowczyk. The collection presents familiar films and filmmakers in a new and revealing light, while also focusing on lesser-known filmmakers and aspects of Polish cinema. The resulting volume moves the discussion beyond the border of Polish national belonging.Contributors: Peter Hames, Darragh O'Donoghue, Helena Goscilo, Dorota Ostrowska, Charlotte Govaert, Eva Näripea, Izabela Kalinowska, Ewa Mazierska, Alison Smith, Lars Kristensen, Jonathan Owen,Michael Goddard, Robert Murphy, Kamila Kuc, Elzbieta OstrowskaEwa Mazierska is professor of film studies at the University of Central Lancashire. Michael Goddard is senior lecturer in media at the University of Salford.

Drawing on oral-history interviews and other sources, this work provides fascinating accounts of how Soviets, Jews, and Roma fared in the Russian city of Smolensk under the 26-month Nazi occupation.The 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union ("Operation Barbarossa") significantly altered the lives of the civilians in occupied Russian territories, yet these individuals' stories are overlooked by most scholarly treatments ofthe attack and its aftermath. This study, drawing on oral-history interviews and a broad range of archival sources, provides a fascinating and detailed account of the everyday life of Soviets, Jews, Roma, and Germans in the city of Smolensk during its twenty-six months under Nazi rule.Smolensk under the Nazis records the profound and painful effects of the invasion and occupation on the 30,000 civilian residents (out of a prewar population ofroughly 155,000) who remained in this border town. It also compares Nazi and Stalinist local propaganda efforts, as well as examining the stance of Russian civilians, thereby investigating what it meant to support -- or hinder --the new Nazi-German and collaborating Russian authorities. By underlining the human dimensions of the war and its often neglected long-term effects, Laurie Cohen promotes a more complex understanding of life under occupation. Smolensk under the Nazis thus complements recent works on everyday life in occupied Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States as well as on the siege of Leningrad.Laurie R. Cohen is Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Innsbruck and Klagenfurt.

Essays provide current interpretations of Germany's military, economic, racial, and diplomatic policies in 1941.Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and events on the Eastern Front that same year were pivotal to the history of World War II. It was during this year that the radicalization of Nazi policy -- through both anall-encompassing approach to warfare and the application of genocidal practices -- became most obvious. Germany's military aggression and overtly ideological conduct, culminating in genocide against Soviet Jewry and the decimation of the Soviet population through planned starvation and brutal antipartisan policies, distinguished Operation Barbarossa-the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union-from all previous military campaigns in modern European history.This collection of essays, written by young scholars of seven different nationalities, provides readers with the most current interpretations of Germany's military, economic, racial, and diplomatic policies in 1941. With its breadth and its thematic focus on total war, genocide, and radicalization, this volume fills a considerable gap in English-language literature on Germany's war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and theradicalization of World War II during this critical year.Alex J. Kay is the author of Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941 and is an independent contractor for the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences. Jeff Rutherford is assistant professor of history at Wheeling Jesuit University, where he teaches modern European history. David Stahel is the author of Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East and Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East.

Examines a selection of post-1989 coming-of-age novels authored by the generation of Polish writers whose transition from adolescence to adulthood coincided with Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy.2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitleThis volume is a study of approximately thirty coming-of-age Polish novels written by the so-called '89ers -- the generation who became adults just as Communist rule was ending. Narrating fictionalized childhoods in Poland in the 1970s and '80s and the transition to adulthood in the late '80s and early '90s, these novels depict the consequences of the fall of Communism for their protagonists' maturation process. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that the liminal aspects of these narratives, in which the protagonists' rites of passage remain suspended in important ways, reflect the effects of the cataclysmic events of the late 1980s as well as the ways in which, for the Polish '89ers, the clash with their predecessors did not produce the anticipated generational change in leadership. Instead, the elders refused to give up their leadership positions, whilethe young were stifled in their development and occupied marginal social spaces. In Vassileva-Karagyozova's fascinating account, these novels illuminate the authors' attempts to define themselves as a generation as well as to narrate the sociocultural shift in democratic Poland from collectivism to Western-style individualism.Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas.

Examines the 1980 Solidarity revolution in Poland, the government's subsequent establishment of martial law in response, in 1981, and the eventual transition to democracy in 1989.The 1980 general strike in Poland and the establishment of the independent Solidarity movement, which sought to create a state based on civic freedom, were symptoms of a crisis of the communist system. On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski on behalf of the ruling Communist Party imposed martial law, effectively quashing Solidarity. Jaruzelski won the battle, but Solidarity continued its revolution in secret and Poland remained politically destabilized. Elections held in June 1989 ended with the defeat of the Communists and the establishment in September of a coalition government in which half of the parliamentary seats went to Solidarity, whose representative was also appointed prime minister. The revolution inaugurated in 1980 by the dockworkers of Gdansk had come to fruition.Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980-1989: Solidarity, Martial Law, and the End of Communism inEurope recounts and analyzes the events of this formative decade in Polish history, with particular emphasis on the martial law period. Drawing on extensive archival research, Andrzej Paczkowski examines the origin and form of the Solidarity revolution, the course of the Communist counterrevolution, and the final victory won by Solidarity along with its international repercussions.Andrzej Paczkowski is professor of political studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Christina Manetti, PhD, is a translator and independent researcher of Polish history.

Offers a complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism under the fascist government of wartime Croatia.The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the politics of construction and destruction in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement. Bringing together established historians of the Ustasha regime and an emerging generation of younger historians, The Utopia of Terror explores various aspects of everyday life and death in the Ustasha state that untilnow have received peripheral attention from historians. The contributors argue for a more complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism in which the two are seen as part of the same process rather than asdiscrete phenomena. They aim to bring new perspectives, generate original thinking, and provide enhanced understanding of both the Ustasha regime's attempts to remake Croatian society and its campaign to destroy unwanted populations.Rory Yeomans is a fellow in history at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria.A fellowship from the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford in 2013 supported the research for and the writing and editing of this book.

Charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation and the returning Soviet rulers' efforts to retain political legitimacy.Kyiv as Regime City charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation, focusing on the efforts of returning Soviet rulers to regain legitimacy within a Moscow-centered regime still attending to the warfront. Beginning with the Ukrainian Communists' inability to both purge their capital city of "socially dangerous" people and prevent the arrival of "unorganized" evacuees from the rear, this book chronicles how a socially and ethnically diverse milieu of Kyivans reassembled after many years of violence and terror.While the Ukrainian Communists successfully guarded entry into their privileged, elite ranks and monitored the masses' mood toward their superiors in Moscow, the party failed to conscript a labor force and rebuild housing, leading the Stalin regime to adopt new tactics to legitimize itself among the large Ukrainian and Jewish populations who once again called the city home. Drawing on sources from the once-closed central, regional, and local archives of the former Soviet Union, this study is essential reading for those seeking to understand how the Kremlin reestablished its power in Kyiv, consolidating its regime as the Cold War with the United States began.Martin J. Blackwell is Visiting Professor of History at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.

Combining the intimacy of memoir and the precision of history, the story of psychologist Nicolae Margineanu's imprisonment and survival conveys in striking detail the corrosive impact of Communist rule in Romania.Nicolae Margineanu's journey started in 1905 in the village of Obreja in Transylvania and ended in 1980 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He began his life under Austro-Hungarian rule, was witness to the 1918 Union, lived under three kings(Ferdinand, Carol II, and Mihai), and survived all of Romania's dictatorships, from absolute monarchy to the Legionnaires' rebellion, the Antonescian dictatorship, and finally the years under Communist rule. Margineanu studied psychology at the University of Cluj and attended postgraduate courses in Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, and London. He was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that enabled him to do research for two years in the United States, at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Duke. He returned to Romania and became chair of the psychology department at the University of Cluj.In 1948, Margineanu was arrested on a charge of "high treason," based on his alleged membership in a resistance movement against Communist rule. He was sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment, of which he served sixteen, passing through the jails at Malmaison, Jilava, Pitesti,Aiud, and Gherla. This book, his autobiography, is a shocking testimony to the fate of the intellectual elite of Romania during the Communist dictatorship. It is a unique and invaluable addition to the literature in English on the experience of political prisoners, not only in Communist Romania but in authoritarian states in general. Nicolae Margineanu (1905-1980) was a Romanian psychologist and writer who was a political prisoner during theperiod of Communist rule. Dennis Deletant is the Visiting Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. Calin Cotoiu is a translator based in Bucharest, Romania.

Deciphers typical social practices as a hidden language of communication in urban plebeian societyCovering the interrevolutionary decade of 1906-16 in imperial Russia, this book tells the story of the "silent majority" of urban inhabitants in four major cities: Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania), Odessa (in today's Ukraine), Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod. Representatives of underprivileged social groups made up some ninety percent of city populations during this period, yet produced hardly one percent of the surviving written sources. These people, many ofthem migrants from the countryside, usually did not read newspapers, rarely authored written documents, and had little exposure to public discourse. They often did not even speak a common language.Our understanding of this population has until recently been based largely on interpretations by educated observers (journalists, legal experts, scholars), whose testimonies reflected the cultural stereotypes of the time. This book bypasses such mediation, arguing that we can come to know the authentic voices of urban commoners by reading their social practices as a nonverbal language. Toward that end, author Ilya Gerasimov closely examines newspaper criminal chronicles, policereports, and anonymous extortion letters, reconstructing typical social practices among this segment of Russian society. The resulting picture represents the distinctive phenomenon of a "plebeian modernity," one that helped shapethe outlook of early Soviet society.Ilya Gerasimov is a founding editor of Ab Imperio. He holds a PhD in Russian history from Rutgers University.

Examines the ideology of sacrifice in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, analyzing a range of fictional and real-life figures who became part of a pantheon of "heroes" primarily because of their victimhood.In Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin, Yuliya Minkova examines the language of canonization and vilification in Soviet and post-Soviet media, official literature, and popular culture. She argues that early Soviet narratives constructed stories of national heroes and villains alike as examples of uncovering a person's "true self." The official culture used such stories to encourage heroic self-fashioningamong Soviet youth and as a means of self-policing and censure. Later Soviet narratives maintained this sacrificial imagery in order to assert the continued hold of Soviet ideology on society, while post-Soviet discourses of victimhood appeal to nationalist nostalgia.Sacrificial mythology continues to maintain a persistent hold in contemporary culture, as evidenced most recently by the Russian intelligentsia's fascination with the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian media coverage of the war in Ukraine, laws against US adoption of Russian children and against the alleged propaganda of homosexuality aimed at minors, renewed national pride in wartime heroes, and the current usage of the words "sacred victim" in public discourse. In examining these various cases, the book traces the trajectory of sacrificial language from individual identity construction to its later function of lending personality and authority to the Soviet and post-Soviet state.Yuliya Minkova is Assistant Professor of Russian at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

WINNER: 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title AwardFocusing on state formation and the identity-geopolitics relationship, makes the case that the Balkans were at the forefront of European history in the century before World War IThis collection of essays places the Balkans at the center of European developments, not as a conflict-ridden problem zone, but rather as a full-fledged European region. Contrary to the commonly held perception, contributors to the volume argue, the Balkans did not lag behind the rest of European history, but rather anticipated many (West) European developments in the decades before and after 1900.In the second half of the nineteenth century,the Balkan states became fully independent nation-states. As they worked to consolidate their sovereignty, these countries looked beyond traditional state formation strategies to alternative visions rooted in militarism or national political economy, and not only succeeded on their own terms but changed Europe and the world beginning in 1912-14. As the Ottoman Empire weakened and ever more kinds of informal diplomacy were practiced on its territory by morepowerful states, relationships between identity and geopolitics were also transformed. The result, as the contributors demonstrate, was a phenomenon that would come to pervade the whole of Europe by the 1920s and 1930s: the creeping substitution of ideas of religion and ethnicity for the idea of state belonging or subjecthood.CONTRIBUTORS: Ulf Brunnbauer, Holly Case, Dessislava Lilova, John Paul Newman, Roumiana Preshlenova, Dominique KirchnerReill, Timothy SnyderTimothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. Katherine Younger is a research associate at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria.

Interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature to expand our understanding of the significance of this important Lithuanian writer.Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova is a book in the European tradition of works such as Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksander Wat's classic My Century. Taking the form of an extendedinterview with Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, the book interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature. Venclova, who personally knew Akhmatova, Pasternak, Milosz, Brodsky, and many others, was also one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, one of the first human rights organizations in Eastern Europe. Magnetic North provides an in-depth account of ethical choices and artistic resistance to totalitarianism over a half century. It also details Venclova's artistic work, expanding our understanding of the significance of this writer, whose books are central to contemporary European culture.The publication of this book was supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute.Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, writer, scholar, and translator. He is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Ellen Hinsey is the author of numerous works of poetry, essay, and literary translation. Her most recent book is Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism.

Hugh Gibson, US Minister to Poland from 1919 to 1924, recorded his involvement with the rocky first years of Polish statehood in this collection of official dispatches and personal letters.This book presents the writings of Hugh S. Gibson, who served from 1919 to 1924 as the first US Minister to the new Second Polish Republic. Crucially involved with world-shaping events, Gibson faithfully recorded his eyewitness impressions and interactions with the nascent Polish state, bickering Allies, and increasingly isolationist Americans. The selected material draws from both State Department dispatches and personal letters, most of it appearing in print for the first time. Editor Vivian Hux Reed, working with experts M. B. B. Biskupski, Jochen Böhler, and Jan-Roman Potocki, provides historical context through a comprehensive introduction and series of annotations. Reminiscences by Gibson's late son Michael Francis Gibson provide personal context.With a flair for pertinent analysis, Gibson records the rocky first years of Polish statehood. He advocated for American support of the young democracy and emphasized to both Polish and US government officials the need for a strong state to protect the rights of all Polish citizens. His words are prophetic, accurately assessing the need for strong state structures to protect all citizens and predicting the danger posed especially to minority groups should such structures fail.VIVIAN HUX REED has an MA in history from Western Oregon University. M. B. B. BISKUPSKI is professor of history, Central Connectictut State University. JOCHEN BÖHLER is a research associate, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena at Friedrich Schiller University. JAN-ROMAN POTOCKI has an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge University.

A postcolonial study of Polish literature from Romanticism to the twenty-first centuryFor nearly half a century East-Central Europe was part of the Soviet empire and was subject to its "civilizing" mission. Despite its colonial status, this part of the world has escaped the attention of most postcolonial critics and remains a blank spot in global studies of postcolonialism. Dariusz Skorczewski is among the first scholars to apply postcolonial thought to Polish realities, at the same time modifying the theoretical framework developed by other scholars of postcolonialism. Polish Literature and National Identity reveals how the experiences of foreign domination and the history of empire have shaped contemporary Polish culture and society.The book, newly translated from the Polish, introduces Anglophone audiences to the potential implications of postcolonial studies on an understanding of Poland's unique historical position within Europe. Skorczewski explores transformations of national identity as reflected in Polish literature and critical discourse from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. The narrative thus tackles questions surrounding Poland's postcolonial status in contemporary East-CentralEurope, a region where globalization and cosmopolitanism clash with resurgent national sentiments and where predictions about a speedy transition to a postnational era now seem premature.DARIUSZ SKORCZEWSKI is associate professor of Polish literature at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin.

Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal exile.This memoir by a prominent Ukrainian dissident, now in English translation, offers a unique account that spans the entire postwar period, from the author's childhood in newly Soviet western Ukraine and coming of age within the Communist system to the collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding with his reflections on culpability and justice in the post-Soviet context. Marynovych's description of the varied landscape of Ukrainian dissent in the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the emerging human rights movement, especially the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, of which he was a founding member. He vividly recounts his encounters with the Soviet repressive apparatus, including his arrest and trial, and offers a rich picture of daily life in a Siberian prison camp and his internal exile in Kazakhstan.Imbued with the author's deep Christian convictions, this memoir sheds light on the key role faith played for some participants in the Soviet human rights movement, a movement that has most often been seen as having a secular inflection. It also provides a fresh look at the complex place of Ukrainian dissidents within the broader Soviet human rights movement, as well as the interplay between human rights advocates and other dissident groups in Soviet Ukraine.

An examination of territorial changes between Czechoslovakia and Hungary and their effects on the local populations of the borderlands in the World War II eraThe movement of borders and people was a remarkably common experience for mid-twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europeans. Such was the case along the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where territory changed hands in1938 and again in 1945. During the intervening period and beyond, residents of the borderland were caught in a nearly continuous onslaught of ethnic cleansing - expulsion of Czech and Slovak "colonists," Jewish deportations during the Holocaust, and postwar population exchanges - that was meant to reshape the territory first in the desired image of the Hungarian state and later on in that of Czechoslovakia.Borders on the Move examines the impact of border changes and migrations on this region between 1938 and 1948. It investigates the everyday consequences of geopolitical events that are well-known from the perspective of international and national histories, but does so explicitly in the context of the borderland. Making skillful use of state and local archival sources in Hungary and Slovakia, author Leslie Waters illuminates the catastrophic effects of state action - including sweeping wealth redistribution and the expulsion of those perceived as enemies of the state - on individuals. This engagingly written and far-reaching work will be invaluable to scholars of the Holocaust and of East Central Europe as well as to those who study forced migration, population exchange, and inter-ethnic relations.

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 contextWhen 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 Jews they found - at least 30,000 - aided by local collaborators.While scholars have focused on local collaboration during the German occupation and on the subsequent Soviet deportations of entire North Caucasian ethnic groups, the region has largely escaped the attention of Holocaust researchers. This volume, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, addresses that gap. Contributors present richly documented essays on such topics as German killing operations, decision-making by Jewish refugees, local collaboration, rescue, and memory, taking care to integrate their findings into the broader contexts of Holocaust, North Caucasian, Russian, and Soviet history.

Essays by a founder of the Borderland Foundation in East-Central Europe explore the meanings of community in a fractured world.How do we build civil society? How does a society repair itself after violence? How do we live in a world with others different from ourselves? These questions lie at the heart of Krzysztof Czyzewski's writing and his work with Fundacja Pogranicze, the Borderland Foundation, at the border of Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus. Writing from the heartland of Europe's violence and creativity, Czyzewski seeks to explain how we can relate better to each other and to our diverse communities. Building on examples of places and people in East-Central Europe, Czyzewski's essays offer readers concepts such as the invisible bridge, the nejmar (the bridge-builder), and the xenopolis (the city of others), which create community throughout the world. The three sections of the book—concepts, places, and practices—show how this cultural work bridges the divide between concepts and practices and offers a new map of Europe. Ultimately, Czyzewski hopes we can all move toward xenopolis, toward the understanding that others are, in fact, ourselves. This book offers an introduction to Czyzewski's work, with framing essays by specialists in Central and East European history.

The thirst for post-World War II justice transcended the Cold War and mobilized diverse social groups. This is a story of their multilayered and at times conflictual interactions.In this edited collection, sixteen historians develop a new approach to the trials against persons accused of war crimes and mass murder in Europe during the ascendancy of Nazism and the Second World War (1933-1945). Focusing on the social aspects of the demand for justice and making use of previously underexploited local and international sources, contributors put to the test the notion of "show trials" and explore a range of judicial and political cultures from Germany to the Soviet Union. Essays uncover the expectations around accountability and forms of mobilization on the part of a range of citizens involved in the trials: survivors, witnesses, perpetrators, Nazi hunters, and civic activists. In addition to the perspective of these citizens, contributors invoke the expertise of reporters, filmmakers, historians, investigators, and prosecutors who shaped public representations of justice. These shaping efforts, the authors show, often supported the desire of political authorities to benefit from the publicity of the trials and to contain the spontaneous dissemination of information. The book's close examination of interactions between citizens and authorities thus demonstrates the extent and limits of what might be called a "coproduction" of justice, in the process shedding light on the interdependence between historical knowledge and legal prosecution of mass crimes.

A close examination of the competing influences of the West and Russia over the fate of democracy in Georgia and other former Soviet bloc nationsFollowing the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly formed transitional regimes took up the challenging task of democratization, a task that was complicated by competition between great world powers over the future of such regimes. This book explores the effects and implications of competition between Russia and Western nations, with specific reference to democratization in the case of Georgia. In doing so, it challenges the conventional wisdom that competition between promoters of democracy and autocracy reduces the effectiveness of efforts toward democracy. Using the compelling example of Georgia, author 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 officials, opposition leaders, foreign diplomats, media and nongovernmental representatives, and other experts. While the case study of Georgia is the central concern of the narrative, the book's final chapter provides an important cross-case comparison of democratization efforts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine.

How the Soviet Union reestablished power in a changed Kyiv following the retreat of Nazi forces, consolidating its regime as it headed into the Cold War.Kyiv as Regime City charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation, focusing on the efforts of returning Soviet rulers to regain legitimacy within a Moscow-centered regime still attending to the warfront. Beginning with the Ukrainian Communists' inability to both purge their capital city of "socially dangerous" people and prevent the arrival of "unorganized" evacuees from the rear, this book chronicles how a socially and ethnically diverse milieu of Kyivans reassembled after many years of violence and terror.While the Ukrainian Communists successfully guarded entry into their privileged, elite ranks and monitored the masses' mood toward their superiors in Moscow, the party failed to conscript a labor force and rebuild housing, leading the Stalin regime to adopt new tactics to legitimize itself among the large Ukrainian and Jewish populations who once again called the city home. Drawing on sources from the once-closed central, regional, and local archives of the former Soviet Union, this study is essential reading for those seeking to understand how the Kremlin reestablished its power in Kyiv, consolidating its regime as the Cold War with the United States began.Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC

Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal exile.This memoir by a prominent Ukrainian dissident, now in English translation, offers a unique account that spans the entire postwar period, from the author's childhood in newly Soviet western Ukraine and coming of age within the Communist system to the collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding with his reflections on culpability and justice in the post-Soviet context. Marynovych's description of the varied landscape of Ukrainian dissent in the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the emerging human rights movement, especially the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, of which he was a founding member. He vividly recounts his encounters with the Soviet repressive apparatus, including his arrest and trial, and offers a rich picture of daily life in a Siberian prison camp and his internal exile in Kazakhstan.Imbued with the author's deep Christian convictions, this memoir sheds light on the key role faith played for some participants in the Soviet human rights movement, a movement that has most often been seen as having a secular inflection. It also provides a fresh look at the complex place of Ukrainian dissidents within the broader Soviet human rights movement, as well as the interplay between human rights advocates and other dissident groups in Soviet Ukraine.Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC

A critical examination of the category of "Polishness" - that is, the formation, redefinition, and performance of various kinds of Polish identities - from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.Inspired by new research in the humanities and social sciences as well as recent scholarship on national identities, this volume offers a rigorous examination of the idea of Polishness. Offering a diversity of case studies and methodological-theoretical approaches, it demonstrates a profound connection between national and transnational processes and places the Polish case in a broader context. This broader context stretches from a larger Eastern European one, a usual frame of comparison, to the overseas immigrant communities. The authors, renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, thus demonstrate that an understanding of modern Polish identity means crossing not only historical but also geographical boundaries.Consequently, the narrative on Polish identity that unfolds in the volume is a personalized and multivocal one that presents the perspectives of a wide range of subjects: peasants, workers, migrants, ethnic and sexual minorities-that is, all those actors who have been absent in grand national narratives. As such, the examination of Polishness sheds light on the identity question more broadly, emphasizing the interplay of pluralizing and homogenizing tendencies, and fostering a reflection on national identity as encompassing both sameness and difference.

A fascinating story of the rise of individualism in the formerly German Western Territories of Poland after World War II and how this new culture powered Poland's democratic-capitalist development.What does it take for a traditional society based on the primacy of the group over the individual to change into one where the autonomous individual is the most valued actor? How does this individualism in turn shape the possibilities of democratic politics? In this provocative book, author Tomek Grabowski argues that for liberal democracy to be sustainable, a prior breakthrough to individualism is often necessary, but that individualist revolutions are among the rarest in history. They require an unlikely confluence of three distinct historical processes-a large-scale uprooting of society, a frontier experience, and a process of civic nation building-in order to succeed. Grabowski illustrates this logic of a cultural breakthrough by focusing on the fascinating case of Poland, a country that was transformed, in the span of seventy years, from an archaic and peripheral polity into a vital component of the liberal-democratic West. The little known but central building blocks of Poland's individualist revolution included the uprooting of populations induced by the World War II, the chaotic frontier conditions that accompanied mass resettlement of the formerly German Western Territories, and the subsequent civic-educational efforts by the Catholic Church among the Polish settlers in the region. Drawing on a wealth of sources, from settlers' memoirs to contemporary interviews, Individualism and the Rise of Democracy in Poland breaks new ground with respect to both Poland's recent history and a larger cultural history of the West.

CO-WINNER: John D. Bell 2024 Memorial Book PrizeA profoundly original historical inquiry, this work offers a critical reflection on the silences of the past and the remembrance of the Holocaust.During World War II, even though Bulgaria was an ally of the Third Reich, it never deported its Jewish community. Until recently, this image of Bulgaria as a European exception has prevailed—but at a cost. For it ignored the roundup of almost all the Jews living in the Yugoslav and Greek territories under Bulgarian occupation between 1941 and 1944, who were in fact deported to Poland, where they were murdered.In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgaria's past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a "rescue" to the river's south. She traces how individual merits were turned into "national" achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany. And she illuminates how discussions on the Holocaust in Bulgaria were held hostage to Cold War dynamics before 1989, only to yield to political and memorial struggles afterwards. Ultimately, she restores Jewish voices to the story of their own wartime suffering.On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Based on notes kept while incarcerated in the concentration camps and ghettos of Transnistria, Dr. Kessler's gripping Holocaust memoir tells a story of calculated murder, resistance, and survival.In the aftermath of the Romanian Holocaust, Transnistria, a little-known region north of Odessa, between the Dniester and Bug rivers, came to be known as "the forgotten cemetery." Between 1941 and 1944, an estimated 300,000 Jews were killed or died there from starvation and disease. This memoir by Dr. Arthur Kessler, based on daily notes he kept as a physician during his two-year imprisonment in Transnistria's Vapniarka concentration camp and Olgopol ghetto, provides a unique perspective of a Jewish medical doctor who witnessed murderous death as well as brave acts of resistance and survival.Introduced and annotated by historian Leo Spitzer and translated from German by the late Margaret Robinson, Dr. Kessler's memoir provides an engrossing account of his infamous discovery that Vapniarka's Romanian authorities routinely, and it seems knowingly, fed camp inmates a daily soup containing toxic chickling peas (Lathyrus sativus) that induced paralysis, kidney failure, and oftentimes death. It reveals the daring by which he, together with fellow inmate medical associates, saved hundreds of lives by organizing a hunger strike that resulted in the camp's dissolution and the prisoners' relocation to ghettos throughout Transnistria. Kessler's narrative continues with an account of privileges attainable by deportees with useful skills and provides illuminating details about informal systems and practices that enabled many to survive and to provide care to fellow victims of genocidal persecution.The memoir is illustrated with moving drawings produced by prisoners in the Vapniarka concentration camp and presented to Dr. Kessler in recognition of his brave work of healing.