Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe – serie

This book tells the story of one of the largest and most multinational communist parties in interwar Europe: the Czechoslovak communist party. Rather than telling a story rooted in later divisions between East and West, Molly Pucci considers the party in a Central European context, shaped by the common experiences of postwar displacement, imperial collapse, economic and social upheaval, grassroots violence, and the uncertain power of revolution. Starting with the party's unique approach to socialism, derived from its Austro-Marxist heritage, she discusses its diverse Czech, Slovak, Jewish, Hungarian, Ruthenian, Polish, and German national groups and unique role in fostering radical emigre communities from across the region. Pucci offers a vibrant new history of how the party's artists, novelists, poets, photographers, lawyers, and journalists made sense of, and sought inspiration from, the socialist experiment in the East. Placing the party's history in a regional, transnational, and global perspective, she provides a multinational, multilingual perspective on early communist ideas, networks, and culture in Central Europe.

Winner of the 2010 George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.The struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly over Transylvania's future, and Germany and Italy were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what "Europe" means. Tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new perspective.

We can often learn as much from political movements that failed as from those that achieved their goals. Nationalists Who Feared the Nation looks at one such frustrated movement: a group of community leaders and writers in Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s who proposed the creation of a multinational zone surrounding the Adriatic Sea. At the time, the lands of the Adriatic formed a maritime community whose people spoke different languages and practiced different faiths but identified themselves as belonging to a single region of the Hapsburg Empire. While these activists hoped that nationhood could be used to strengthen cultural bonds, they also feared nationalism's homogenizing effects and its potential for violence. This book demonstrates that not all nationalisms attempted to create homogeneous, single-language, -religion, or -ethnicity nations. Moreover, in treating the Adriatic lands as one unit, this book serves as a correction to "national" histories that impose our modern view of nationhood on what was a multinational region.

This book explores the political imagination of Eastern Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, when Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian intellectuals came to identify themselves as belonging to communities known as nations or nationalities. Bilenky approaches this topic from a transnational perspective, revealing the ways in which modern Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationalities were formed and refashioned through the challenges they presented to one another, both as neighboring communities and as minorities within a given community. Further, all three nations defined themselves as a result of their interactions with the Russian and Austrian empires. Fueled by the Romantic search for national roots, they developed a number of separate yet often overlapping and inclusive senses of national identity, thereby producing myriad versions of Russianness, Polishness, and Ukrainianness.

The book brings together many of the best known commentators and scholars who write about former Yugoslavia. The essays focus on the post-Yugoslav cultural transition and try to answer questions about what has been gained and what has been lost since the dissolution of the common country. Most of the contributions can be seen as current attempts to make sense of the past and help cultures in transition, as well as to report on them.The volume is a mixture of personal essays and scholarly articles and that combination of genres makes the book both moving and informative. Its importance is unique. While many studies dwell on the causes of the demise of Yugoslavia, this collection touches upon these causes but goes beyond them to identify Yugoslavia's legacy in a comprehensive way. It brings topics and writers, usually treated separately, into fruitful dialog with one another.

Winner of the 2010 George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.The struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly over Transylvania's future, and Germany and Italy were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what "Europe" means. Tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new perspective.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.

The Habsburg Monarchy ruled over approximately one-third of Europe for almost 150 years. Previous books on the Habsburg Empire emphasize its slow decline in the face of the growth of neighboring nation-states. John Deak, instead, argues that the state was not in eternal decline, but actively sought not only to adapt, but also to modernize and build.Deak has spent years mastering the structure and practices of the Austrian public administration and has immersed himself in the minutiae of its codes, reforms, political maneuverings, and culture. He demonstrates how an early modern empire made up of disparate lands connected solely by the feudal ties of a ruling family was transformed into a relatively unitary, modern, semi-centralized bureaucratic continental empire. This process was only derailed by the state of emergency that accompanied the First World War. Consequently, Deak provides the reader with a new appreciation for the evolving architecture of one of Europe's Great Powers in the long nineteenth century.

Another Hungary tells the stories of eight remarkable individuals: an aristocrat, merchant, engineer, teacher, journalist, rabbi, tobacconist, and writer. All eight came from the same woebegone corner of prewar Hungary. Their biographies illuminate how the region's residents made sense of economic underdevelopment, ethnic diversity, and relations between Christians and Jews. Taken together, their stories create a unique picture of the troubled history of Eastern Europe, viewed not from the capital cities, but from the small towns and villages.Through these eight lives, Another Hungary investigates the wider processes that remade Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. It asks: How did people make sense of the dramatic changes, from the advent of the railroad to the outbreak of the First World War? How did they respond to the army of political ideologies that marched through this region: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, antisemitism, and Zionism? To what extent did people in the provinces not just react to, but influence what was happening in the centers of political power? This collective biography confirms that nineteenth-century Hungary was no earthly paradise. But it also shows that the provinces produced men and women with bold ideas on how to change their world.

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multireligious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of "foreignness" and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Genocide unfolded as a Hungarian policy, and Hungarian authorities committed mass robbery, deportations, and killings against all non-Magyar groups in their efforts to recast the region as part of an ethnonational "Greater Hungary."In considering the events that preceded the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, this book reorients our view of the Holocaust not simply as a German drive for continent-wide genocide, but as a truly international campaign of mass murder, related to violence against non-Jews unleashed by projects of state and nation building. Focusing on both state and society, Raz Segal shows how Hungary's genocidal attack on Subcarpathian Rus' obliterated not only tens of thousands of lives but also a diverse society and way of life that today, from the vantage point of our world of nation-states, we find difficult to imagine.

In the spring of 1898, thousands of peasants and townspeople in western Galicia rioted against their Jewish neighbors. Attacks took place in more than 400 communities in this northeastern province of the Habsburg Monarchy, in present-day Poland and Ukraine. Jewish-owned homes and businesses were ransacked and looted, and Jews were assaulted, threatened, and humiliated, though not killed. Emperor Franz Joseph signed off on a state of emergency in thirty-three counties and declared martial law in two. Over five thousand individuals—peasants, day-laborers, city council members, teachers, shopkeepers—were charged with myriad offenses.Seeking to make sense of this violence and its aftermath, The Plunder examines the circulation of antisemitic ideas within Galicia against the political backdrop of the Habsburg state. Daniel Unowsky sees the 1898 anti-Jewish riots as evidence not of Galician backwardness and barbarity, but of a late nineteenth-century Europe reeling from economic, cultural, and political transformations wrought by mass politics, literacy, industrialization, capitalist agriculture, and government expansion. Through its nuanced analysis of the riots as a form of "exclusionary violence," this book offers new insights into the upsurge of the antisemitism that accompanied the emergence of mass politics in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Berliners grappled with how to rebuild their devastated city. In East Berlin, where the historic core of the city lay, decisions made by the socialist leadership about what should be restored, reconstructed, or entirely reimagined would have a tremendous and lasting impact on the urban landscape. Risen from Ruins examines the cultural politics of the rebuilding of East Berlin from the end of World War II until the construction of the Berlin Wall, combining political analysis with spatial and architectural history to examine how the political agenda of East German elites and the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) played out in the built environment.Following the destruction of World War II, the center of Berlin could have been completely restored and preserved, or razed in favor of a sanitized, modern city. The reality fell somewhere in between, as decision makers balanced historic preservation against the opportunity to model the Socialist future and reject the example of the Nazi dictatorship through architecture and urban design. Paul Stangl's analysis expands our understanding of urban planning, historic preservation, modernism, and Socialist Realism in East Berlin, shedding light on how the contemporary shape of the city was influenced by ideology and politics.

Between Empire and Nation tells the story of the transformation of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. In 1878, the Ottoman empire relinquished large territories in the Balkans, with about 600,000 Muslims remaining in the newly-established Bulgarian state. Milena B. Methodieva explores how these former Ottoman subjects, now under Bulgarian rule, navigated between empire and nation-state, and sought to claim a place in the larger modern world. Following the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1878, a movement for cultural reform and political mobilization gained momentum within Bulgaria's sizable Muslim population. From 1878 until the 1908 Young Turk revolution, this reform movement emerged as part of a struggle to redefine Muslim collective identity while engaging with broader intellectual and political trends of the time. Using a wide array of primary sources and drawing on both Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies, Methodieva approaches the question of Balkan Muslims' engagement with modernity through a transnational lens, arguing that the experience of this Muslim minority provides new insight into the nature of nationalism, citizenship, and state formation.

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multireligious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of "foreignness" and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Genocide unfolded as a Hungarian policy, and Hungarian authorities committed mass robbery, deportations, and killings against all non-Magyar groups in their efforts to recast the region as part of an ethnonational "Greater Hungary."In considering the events that preceded the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, this book reorients our view of the Holocaust not simply as a German drive for continent-wide genocide, but as a truly international campaign of mass murder, related to violence against non-Jews unleashed by projects of state and nation building. Focusing on both state and society, Raz Segal shows how Hungary's genocidal attack on Subcarpathian Rus' obliterated not only tens of thousands of lives but also a diverse society and way of life that today, from the vantage point of our world of nation-states, we find difficult to imagine.

In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.

The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of Austria-Hungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular explores the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire during this period—an influence perpetuated by the efforts of the imperial state from afar, and by its former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina negotiating their new geopolitical reality. Muslims' endeavors to maintain their prominence and shape their organizations and institutions influenced imperial considerations and policies on occupation, sovereignty, minorities, and migration.This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.

The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. This book considers the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, offering a new history of the interrelation between state building and nongovernmental humanitarianism and philanthropy in the interwar period. Doina Anca Cretu argues that Romania was a laboratory for transnational intervention, as various state builders actively pursued, accessed, and often instrumentalized American assistance in order to accelerate reconstructive and modernizing projects after World War I. At its core, this is a study of how local views, ambitions, and practical agendas framed trajectories of humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors in postimperial Central and Eastern Europe. Conversely, it is a reflection on the ways that architects and practitioners of foreign aid sought to transfer notions of democracy, civilization, and modernity within shifting local and national contexts in the aftermath of the war and after the collapse of European empires. At the intersection of the history of interwar Europe and international philanthropy and humanitarianism, this book's innovative and explicitly transnational approach provides a new framework for understanding the contours of European nationalism in the twentieth century.

In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia—one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest—by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.

This book explores the establishment and development of a multi-ethnic frontier society on the Habsburg–Ottoman border, in the historic region of the Banat (today divided between Romania, Serbia, and Hungary). After it passed from Ottoman to Habsburg control in the early eighteenth century, the Habsburgs sought to settle the region with Western and Central European migrants, mainly though not exclusively German-speakers from the Holy Roman Empire. Historian Timothy Olin argues that this policy led to destabilizing demographic changes and laid the foundations for the ethno-religious tensions that characterized the region through the twentieth century and beyond.Imperial authorities used colonists as a means to ensure the loyalty and stability of the province and to prevent Hungarian–Ottoman collusion. Their settlement, beginning in the 1710s and lasting until the 1820s, led to government-sponsored displacement and resettlement of many local villages. In the process of narrating the history of the region, Olin argues that the land empires of Europe engaged in forms of settlement that fit the larger patterns of colonial rule in other parts of Europe and the world, and demonstrates that the movement of settlers and the culture they brought with them began a process of Europeanization in the borderlands of the continent and helped solidify Europe's boundaries.

The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of Austria-Hungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular explores the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire during this period—an influence perpetuated by the efforts of the imperial state from afar, and by its former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina negotiating their new geopolitical reality. Muslims' endeavors to maintain their prominence and shape their organizations and institutions influenced imperial considerations and policies on occupation, sovereignty, minorities, and migration.This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.

This book explores the social costs of urban change and the limits of modernity through a comparative study of two Balkan cities, Belgrade and Sofia. Between 1820 and 1920, both cities grew from small Ottoman towns into large national capitals, as their bourgeois elites envisioned new, urban societies on the European borderlands. This book traces the lofty ambitions and dire consequences of this project: situated on the periphery of global capital flows, elite-led attempts at remaking Balkan capitals into European cities relied on dispossession, brutal labor control, and real estate speculation, while failing to achieve their goals of exponential growth.Drawing on a rich array of archival sources, Miloš Jovanović considers the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Belgrade, municipal corruption in Sofia, anxieties over sex work and the regulation of intimacy, and attempts at creating docile workers through policing and prisons. Bringing working people to the forefront, he shows how the modernity envisioned by elites failed to transform their lives for the better, and how urban residents developed a nostalgia for the Ottoman city as a critique of their contemporary moment. Going beyond the limits of national frameworks, this book transforms our understanding of Balkan history, national modernization, and the role of fantasy in capitalist societies, offering keen insights for today's era of growing inequality.

This book explores the social costs of urban change and the limits of modernity through a comparative study of two Balkan cities, Belgrade and Sofia. Between 1820 and 1920, both cities grew from small Ottoman towns into large national capitals, as their bourgeois elites envisioned new, urban societies on the European borderlands. This book traces the lofty ambitions and dire consequences of this project: situated on the periphery of global capital flows, elite-led attempts at remaking Balkan capitals into European cities relied on dispossession, brutal labor control, and real estate speculation, while failing to achieve their goals of exponential growth.Drawing on a rich array of archival sources, Miloš Jovanović considers the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Belgrade, municipal corruption in Sofia, anxieties over sex work and the regulation of intimacy, and attempts at creating docile workers through policing and prisons. Bringing working people to the forefront, he shows how the modernity envisioned by elites failed to transform their lives for the better, and how urban residents developed a nostalgia for the Ottoman city as a critique of their contemporary moment. Going beyond the limits of national frameworks, this book transforms our understanding of Balkan history, national modernization, and the role of fantasy in capitalist societies, offering keen insights for today's era of growing inequality.

In an innovative cultural history across the Iron Curtain, this book explores how a divided nation used the cosmos – as both a technological reality and a field of imagination – to navigate the challenges of the Cold War and compete for the future. Smithsonian curator Colleen Anderson transforms the history of the Space Age by demonstrating that Germans were not just observers of the US-Soviet rivalry, but active participants who used spaceflight to redefine their place in the world.Connecting the technical and political history of space programs with space imaginations in popular culture, Anderson uncovers unexpected commonalities between two states otherwise opposed. Through vivid stories of street astronomers building telescopes from wartime rubble, the West German cult TV hit Space Patrol, and East German youth "training" for missions at the socialist equivalent of Space Camp, this book demonstrates how the unbounded cosmos offered a site for political and cultural maneuvering – and a canvas for imagining alternative futures – that was often impossible on Earth. From the 1978 mission of the first German in orbit to the international laboratory of Spacelab, Anderson reveals that for a divided people, technological dreams were not mere fantasies; they were essential tools for confronting a burdened past and forging a new future. Contributing to spaceflight history, Cold War scholarship, and German studies, this book speaks to the many ways technological dreams become instruments for negotiating memory, ideology, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.