Böcker i Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe-serien

Using events in Georgia as a case study, shows how competition between great powers can subvert authoritarianism and empower democracy in newly formed transitional regimes.

A profoundly original historical inquiry, this work offers a critical reflection on the silences of the past and the remembrance of the Holocaust.

Focusing 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 Snyder Timothy 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.

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 "e;silent majority"e; 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 "e;plebeian modernity,"e; 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.

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 "e;high treason,"e; 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.

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 "e;colonists,"e; 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 sweepingwealth 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 wellas to those who study forced migration, population exchange, and inter-ethnic relations. LESLIE WATERS is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso.

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.

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 thelegacies of the past and current policy mistakes, but demonstrates how structural reforms and gradual institutional building have enabled some postsocialist 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].

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.

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.

This volume introduces a novel treatment of Polish cinema by discussing its international reception, performance, co-productions, and subversive emigre auteurs, such as Andrzej Zulawski and Walerian Borowczyk.

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.

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.

Interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature to expand our understanding of the significance of this important Lithuanian writer.

Essays provide current interpretations of Germany's military, economic, racial, and diplomatic policies in 1941.

An examination of how the Polish state and its people worked together to ethnically cleanse and colonize eastern Germany after 1945.

A comparison between Russian and Polish texts of travels to the Orient in the Nineteenth-Century.

A comparison of two schools of literary criticism, showing how the Polish Formalist School modified and transcended the original ideas of Russian Formalism.

A postcolonial study of Polish literature from Romanticism to the twenty-first century

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.

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.

Offers a complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism under the fascist government of wartime Croatia.

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.

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.