New Books in Eastern European Studies

Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first chronological history of Soviet hippies, tracing their beginnings in the 1960s through the movement's maturity and ritualization in the 1970s. It is also a rich analysis of key aspects of Soviet hippiedom, including ideology, kaif, materiality, and madness - both enacted and imposed. Flowers Through Concrete uncovers, in particular, the lost history of women who participated in the Soviet hippie movement. Fürst makes a number of important arguments in Flowers Through Concrete. Despite obvious antagonisms, she argues that Soviet hippies and late Soviet socialist reality meshed so well that a stable symbiotic, although hostile, relationship emerged. She asserts that personal evidence, such as oral history, is "one of the most exciting historical sources, whose weaknesses sometimes work for rather than against the historian". She engages seriously with and makes visible the role of her own authorial self-reflection in historical analysis. And, last but not least, as Fürst herself says, the story of Soviet hippies is a really good story. Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Dr. Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilized airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernization. Part of this modernization involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s, stewardesses endured harsh objectification: High hemlines, tight uniforms, and raunchy marketing were touted as modern and liberated. These women, whether from the West, East, or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work. In Women and the Jet Age, Dr. Tiemeyer's global account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among stewardesses is one of the first histories to place such developments—political, economic, and feminist—in dialogue with each other. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Decolonizing Ukraine, by Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling, illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the lives of people who opposed Russia's Crimean operation, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. Via the narratives of people who traversed perilous geographies and world-altering events, Dr. Uehling traces the development of a new sense of social cohesion that encompasses diverse ethnic and religious groups. The result is a compelling story—one of resilience, transformation, and ultimately, the unwavering pursuit of freedom and autonomy for Ukraine, regardless of ethnicity or race. Decolonizing Ukraine: Indigenous People, Race, and the Pathway to Freedom demonstrates how understanding Crimea is essential to understanding Ukraine – and the war with Russia – today. Our guest is: Dr. Greta Uehling, who is an anthropologist specializing in the study of war, conflict, and population displacement. A Professor at the University of Michigan, she teaches seminars on human rights and humanitarianism for the Program in International and Comparative Studies. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a writing coach and developmental editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The First and Last King of Haiti We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance Living Resistance How We Show Up Reunited Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast I sat down with Dr Doina Anca Cretu to talk about her first book, Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania: In Quest of an Ideal, published by Stanford University Press. In the podcast we talk about Anca's academic background, how she came to research foreign aid in Romania, any surprises she encountered during her research, the nature of foreign aid in interwar Romania, and how to approach publishing a first monograph. The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We bring the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions. At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate. Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

This Nordic Asia Podcast episode explores how Estonia and Japan, two countries under demographic pressure with different immigration histories, are managing the integration of foreign labour. Despite Estonia's EU membership and Japan's more recent policy shifts, both nations face labour shortages due to rapidly ageing populations. Estonia maintains a controlled but gradually liberalised immigration policy, while Japan has adopted Technical Intern Training Program (TITP). The system that will be replaced in coming years with a new program aiming for better job mobility and stronger language requirements. A key theme throughout is the role of language as a structural barrier. In both countries, immigrants' language proficiency remains low: only 11% achieve fluency in Estonian, while Japan's pre-arrival language training often falls short of workplace demands. This barrier limits not only job mobility, but also social integration and emotional well-being. The dominance of local languages in workplace culture fosters exclusion, even when basic communication in English or Japanese is possible. Support systems also diverge. Estonia offers spouse integration programs and community-based language initiatives, whereas Japan restricts family migration under most visa categories. The discussion emphasises that language barriers are not simply logistical, they are also deeply embedded in social expectations and everyday interaction. In sum, while Estonia and Japan face similar demographic challenges, their tools, legal frameworks, and cultural attitudes toward foreign labour differ sharply. Estonia's EU-aligned policies and family-inclusive approach may offer valuable lessons to Japan. Conversely, Estonia could learn from Japan's structured pre-arrival preparation programs to improve early-stage immigrant adaptation. Ultimately, the episode argues that integration is not just a matter of policy, it is a broader societal test of inclusivity and resilience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

What would it feel like To Run the World? The Soviet rulers spent the Cold War trying desperately to find out. In To Run The World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power, Sergey Radchenko provides an unprecedented deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin's decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the United States and China reflected its irreconcilable ambitions as a self-proclaimed superpower and the leader of global revolution. This tension drove Soviet policies from Stalin's postwar scramble for territory to Khrushchev's reckless overseas adventurism and nuclear brinksmanship, Brezhnev's jockeying for influence in the third world, and Gorbachev's failed attempts to reinvent Moscow's claims to greatness. Perennial insecurities, delusions of grandeur, and desire for recognition propelled Moscow on a headlong quest for global power, with dire consequences and painful legacies that continue to shape our world. Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai). Professor Radchenko's books include To Run the World: the Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power (Cambridge UP, forthcoming in 2024), Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Wilson Center Press & Stanford UP, 2009), and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia (Oxford UP, 2014). Professor Radchenko is a native of Sakhalin Island, Russia, was educated in the US, Hong Kong, and the UK, where he received his PhD in 2005 (LSE). Before he joined SAIS, Professor Radchenko worked and lived in Mongolia, China, and Wales. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westan  The World of the Cold War by Vladislav Zubok Zhou Enlai: A Life by Chen Jian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine's national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who'd died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe's largest land war in seventy-five years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world witnessed the “creative, freewheeling, darkly humorous, and deeply resilient society” that is contemporary Ukraine. In this timely and original history, a bestseller in Ukraine, the historian Yaroslav Hrytsak tells the sweeping story of his nation through a meticulous examination of the major events, conflicts, and developments that have shaped it over the course of centuries. Hrytsak, is a Ukrainian historian and public intellectual. Professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Honorary Professor of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Hrytsak has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities and was a guest lecturer at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of many historical books, including several bestsellers and the recipient of numerous national and international awards. weaves a rich and detailed tapestry of a country in continual transformation. Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation (PublicAffairs, 2024) is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine's dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia's 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Year 2023 marked 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv (Lwów/Lemberg). This richly illustrated book is a tribute to its place in the once-vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital (Academic Studies Press, 2024) presents the hospital's history and its fascinating architecture, its doctors, and its founder, a prominent local Jewish philanthropist Maurycy Lazarus, with the background of the Jewish life in Lviv. The volume also details the history of medicine and medical education in Habsburg Galicia prior to the hospital's founding, Jewish access to the medical profession, and the impact of Jewish doctors on the path to modernity. It also shows the struggle of women to become doctors. A moving and timely book with contributions from leading historians, scholars, and medical professionals, Visionaries from Lviv is an ode to the once thriving Jewish community in Lviv and a testament to how one person's dream and commitment can impact the lives of so many. This publication was made possible with support from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and Gesher Galicia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Emotions in Yiddish Ghetto Diaries: Encountering Persecutors and Questioning Humanity (Routledge, 2024) uses an empathic reading of Yiddish diarists' feelings, evaluations, and assessments about persecutors in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna ghettos to present an emotional history of persecution in the Nazi ghettos. It re-centers the daily experiences of psychological and physical violence that made up ghetto life and that ultimately led victims to use their diaries as a place of agency to question and attempt to maintain their own beliefs in pre-war Jewish and Enlightenment ethics and morality. Holocaust scholars and students, as well as people interested in personal narratives, interpersonal relations, and the problem of dehumanization during the Holocaust will find this study particularly thought-provoking. Essentially, this book highlights the benefits of reading with empathy and paying attention to emotions for understanding the experiences of people in the past, especially those facing tragedy and trauma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The Nazi threat emerges from Germany 1933 and shatters the small town life in Krasnik south of Lublin in eastern Poland. The teenager Mischa Stahlhammer manages to escape from a German work camp and joins Polish partisans. He survives by becoming a specialist in arming and disarming mines, the most dangerous of all missions. After the war he ends up in Sweden, meets Sonja, who also lost her family and youth in German concentration camps. Their son Semmy, born in Eskilstuna, tells the story of what a boy, his family and friends had to live through in Poland before, during and after the Second World War, and how love gives him back the will to live – and the strength to create a new life in a foreign land. Semmy Stahlhammer was First Concertmaster at the Stockholm Royal Opera and Ballet for 25 years, and Artistic Director of Chamber Music at Stockholm Grand Hotel, and of the music festival in San Giovanni in Tuscany, Italy. He is now leader of Stahlhammer Klezmer Classic. In his violin ateljé in Stockholm he restores/repairs string instruments. Codename Barber is translated into Swedish, German, Russian, Hebrew and Chinese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States while smaller groups moved to other destinations, such as Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of Jews were permanently displaced across Eastern Europe. Migration restrictions that were imposed after 1914, especially in the United States, prevented most from reaching safe havens, and an unknown but substantial number of Jews perished during the Holocaust-as they had been displaced in Eastern Europe years before they were deported to ghettos and killing sites. Even after the Holocaust, tens of thousands of Jewish survivors were stranded in permanent transit for many years.Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe tells and contextualizes the stories of these Jewish migrants and refugees before and after the First World War. It explains how immigration laws in countries such as the United States influenced migration routes around the world. Using memoirs, letters, and accounts by investigative journalists and Jewish aid workers, Tobias Brinkmann sheds light on the experiences of individual migrants, some of whom laid the foundation for migration and refugee studies as a field of scholarship, even coining terms such as "displaced person," and contributing to its legal definition at the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. The stories of these migrants and refugees were used to propose a new future for the United States, reimagining it as a pluralistic society-one comprised of immigrants. Tobias Brinkmann is Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago. Geraldine Gudefin is a French-born modern Jewish historian researching Jewish family life, legal pluralism, and the migration experiences of Jews in France and the United States. She is currently a research fellow at the Hebrew University's Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. https://huji.academia.edu/GeraldineGudefin * Mentioned in the podcast: Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1899). Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mein Lebn (New York: Forverts, 1926-1931). Todd Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Semion Goldin, The Russian Army and the Jewish Population, 1914-17: Libel, Persecution, Reaction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Bernard Horwich, My First Eighty Years (Chicago: Argus Books, 1939). John D. Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Eugene Kulischer, Jewish Migrations: Past Experiences and Post- War Prospects (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1943). Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). Joel Perlmann, America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford: Littman, 2001). Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration since 1800 (Philadelphia: JPS, 1948). Polly Zavadivker, A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). 1921 cartoons in YIVO Library collection: “Nowhere Can One Set a Foot Down” and “If the statue of liberty were a living person.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Katarina Kušic takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in IR scholarship to rethink the very concept of “intervention” by paying close attention to how people actually experience and make sense of those efforts. In particular, the book offers a detailed engagement with ethnographic fieldwork in two policy areas in Serbia—agricultural policy and non-formal youth education. By engaging with subjects, the book not only enhances our understanding of intervention, but also uncovers the limitations of the concept. Dr. Kušić argues that the concept limits what we can observe and theorize, and it prevents researchers from engaging with the people living in spaces of intervention as coeval political subjects. As an alternative, she proposes to foreground improvement over “intervention.” This reorientation enables researchers to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy, expands fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves, and seriously considers the contradictions at the heart of liberalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

A detailed history of Nazi anti-partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler's Ostheer, his Eastern Army, would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought. Preparations for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union had included the drawing up of plans and allocation of resources to secure the newly conquered territories. These plans included the premeditated murder of many innocent civilians. Adolf Hitler said as much when in July 1941, shortly after Stalin ordered the formation of partisans, he told his Army High Command: 'This partisan war has some advantage for us; it enables us to eradicate everyone who opposes us.' Anticipating resistance to Nazi occupation and rule, Hitler instructed the Ostheer to act ruthlessly, not only on the front lines but in the rear areas as well. When, in July 1941, Stalin ordered partisan forces to be created, the stage was therefore set for the largest and most savage conflict ever waged between a modern military force and a guerrilla army. The scale of the partisan and anti-partisan war on the Eastern Front was as costly and bitterly fought as the struggle on the front lines themselves. Employing thousands of primary source documents and scouring eight separate state archives in six countries over a twenty-two-year period, Antonio J. Muñoz's Hitler's War Against the Partisans During Operation Barbarossa: June 1941 to the Spring of 1942 (Frontline Books, 2025) has produced what can be described as a definitive account of this part of the war behind the front lines in the East during the invasion of the Soviet Union. From the very beginning, the Nazis fought this war ruthlessly, by eliminating not only actual guerrillas, but a good portion of the civilian population. Employing dozens of wartime anti-partisan operational instructions, plus newly-created detailed battle maps and full orders of battle, Dr. Muñoz brings this little-known conflict behind the lines into focus for the very first time. The war behind the lines is detailed by district. This includes the Reichskommissariat Ostland region, which comprised the Generalbezirk Estland (Estonia), Generalbezirk Lettland (Latvia), Generalbezirk Litauen (Lithuania), Generalbezirk Bialystok (Northeastern Poland), and Generalbezirk Weißruthenien (Belarus). The book also covers the guerrilla and anti-partisan war in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Ukraine region) as well as in north, central and southern Russia. For Russia proper, anti-partisan operations against the guerrillas are broken down by army group area. Not only are the operations described, but the reader will also learn about guerrilla attacks and how the entire partisan movement grew from year to year, and region to region. Hitler's War Against the Partisans During Operation Barbarossa documents the whole of the beginning of the savage partisan war between June 1941 and the spring of 1942. Never before has every major, and some minor, anti-guerrilla operation been described in such detail.Dr Antonio J. Muñoz lives in New York City. He is a professor of history at Farmingdale State College in Long Island, New York. He is married, has two daughters and two grandchildren. His last work, published in 2018, covered the history of the German Secret Field Police in Greece, 1941-1944.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In early 2022, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine's border, Tom Mutch, a freelance war reporter, took a trip to Mariupol to take the temperature of this (then) culturally vibrant port on the Sea of Azov.  What stayed with him was the sound of the stray dogs and their "rhythmic and frantic barking, as if they were shouting a warning in unison". Within weeks, the city began a three-month siege and eventual fall but – to the surprise of many including Western powers – not just Kyiv but Mykolaiv, and Odesa held. Over the following months, resistance turned into reconquest and finally into a grinding artillery war of attrition reminiscent of the 1914-18 western front. In The Dogs of Mariupol: Russia's Invasion and the Forging of Ukraine's Iron Generation (Biteback, 2025), Tom Mutch tells the history of the war through members of the “iron generation” he met as a reporter and tells a darker tale of Ukrainian society since Bakhmut. *The author's book recommendations were Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine by Eugene Finkel (Basic Books, 2024) and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador, 2021). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes 242.news on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Who will defend Europe? The answer should be obvious: Europe should be able to defend itself. Yet, for decades, most of the continent enjoyed a defence holiday, outsourcing protection to the United States while banking an increasingly illusory ‘peace dividend'. Now, after three decades of reducing armed forces and drawing down defence industries, Europe finds itself close to unprotected—while Russia is intent on continuing its war of expansion, and the US is distracted and divided. In Who Will Defend Europe?: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent (Hurst & Co., 2024), Keir Giles lays out the stark choices facing leaders and societies as they confront the return of war in Europe. He explains how the West's unwillingness to confront Russia has nurtured the threat, and that Putin's ambition puts the whole continent at risk. He assesses the role and deficiencies of NATO as a guarantor of hard security, and whether the EU or coalitions of the willing can fill the gap. Above all, Giles emphasises the need for new leadership in defence of the free world after the US has stepped aside— and warns that the UK's brief moment of setting the pace for Europe has already been squandered. Keir Giles has advised governments worldwide on the Russian threat. A senior fellow with Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, and Director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, he is a regular commentator for the BBC and international media. His prescient books include What Deters Russia and Moscow Rules. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), anthropologist Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the lives of people who opposed Russia's Crimean operation, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. Via the narratives of people who traversed perilous geographies and world-altering events, Dr. Uehling traces the development of a new sense of social cohesion that encompasses diverse ethnic and religious groups. The result is a compelling story—one of resilience, transformation, and ultimately, the unwavering pursuit of freedom and autonomy for Ukraine, regardless of ethnicity or race. Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom demonstrates how understanding Crimea is essential to understanding Ukraine – and the war with Russia – today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema. Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results. Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

What many people don't realize is that Zionism is not a monolithic term. From its inception there were rigorous debates about the nature and direction of the movement? Thinkers had argued about some of the fundamental questions around Israel. Where would a future Jewish state be located? What language would they speak? Should Israel come about through a slow evolution or a radical revolution? In his book, Zionism and Jewish Culture: A Study in the Origins of a National Movement (Academic Studies Press, 2024), Yithak Conforti situates us in these debates, zeroing in on the leaders of what has become known as “cultural Zionism.” These group of thinkers stood across the aisle from more politically minded voices like Theodor Herzl. As Prof Yizhak Conforti explains, their approach was quite different, highlighting a more Jewish, more ethnic, more culturally centered Zionist vision. Zionism and Jewish Culture examines the history of Zionism from a new perspective, arguing that Zionism was not only a political project, but also a major cultural force in modern Jewish life. In exploring these topics, this book enables a deeper understanding of the forces that continue to shape Zionism and Israel today. Prof. Yitzhak Conforti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, specializing in modern Jewish history, Jewish nationalism, and Zionist historiography. In addition to Zionism and Jewish Culture, se is the author of several influential works, including Past Tense: Zionist Historiography and the Shaping of the Zionist Memory and Shaping a Nation: The Cultural Origins of Zionism, 1882–1948. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is most recently the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Today I interviewed Charles Hecker about Zero Sum. The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025). Hecker, a journalist and business consultant, speaks with dozens of Western business executives, bankers, and financiers who reaped immense profits for themselves and their companies in the Russian market, which suddenly opened to foreigners after decades of state planning and economic autarky. These “riskophile” Westerners recall the early post-Soviet Russia as an unchartered territory where business “had a body count” and “violence was cheap, routine and almost casual”. In the 2000s Russia, now stabilized by Putin, offered unparalleled opportunities for those who had learnt to navigate its murky, gray environment. While some expressed concern over the unchallenged primacy of the supreme ruler presiding over arbitrary redistribution of property in favor of his cronies and the rapid consolidation of state ownership, the squeamish were far outnumbered by the opportunistic. Following Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent imposition of sweeping Western sanctions forced most Westerners to flee, often selling their companies for a fraction of their value and, in some cases, even giving it for free to their Russian partners. Looking back some regret “looking the other way” at the rampant corruption and lawlessness, while others admit that enrichment in Russia was always destined to be short-lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian crisis by our border. And there is a tiny minority of local and non-local activists who sacrifice themselves and who give help to the people that are dying in the forests, especially during the wintertime. And there are people who live nearby and live day to day-by-day helping the helping the people crossing even and crossing the border and they're harassed and victims of police brutality. And then I had a very strange thought that now I can understand what happened during the during the war and during the Holocaust where exactly this where exactly this happened. And people who deal with Holocaust history and Holocaust memory had the same association, same analogy, that this is somehow and gruesomely very, very similar. And it struck me, the thought that now I understand because as if I was not entirely sure or not entirely certain if I believed it and in the first place. My book is about denial and disavowal. Knowing something and not knowing at the same time." – Jan Borowicz from the interview Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe's foremost source on Ottoman Greece. Yet as Richard Calis reveals, Crusius's massive—and largely untapped—archive has much more to tell us about how early modern Europeans negotiated cultural and religious difference. In particular, Crusius's work illuminates Western European views of the religious “other” within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign. Many Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Ottoman rule. Crusius's records, however, reveal in exceptional detail how such stories developed. His interactions with his Greek Orthodox visitors, and with a vast network of correspondents, show that Greeks' own narratives of hardship entwined in complex ways with Western Europeans' orientalist views of the Ottoman world. They also reflect the religious tensions that undergirded these exchanges, fueled by Crusius's fervent desire to spread Lutheran belief across Ottoman Greece and the wider world. A lively intellectual history drawn from a forgotten archive, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece (Harvard UP, 2025) is also a perceptive character study, in which Crusius takes his place in the history of ethnography, Lutheran reform, and European philhellenism. Richard Calis is an Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University, who specializes in the history of science and intellectual history Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years.  None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the democratic backsliders' playbook. To secure long-term power rather than short-term office, rulers must take over the institutions that check and balance majority rule and bend them to their will. Trump has tamed Congress and inserted his people into the Supreme Court, law enforcement, intelligence, and competition regulation but - to his great frustration - the Federal Reserve is holding out. It was the same story in Hungary after Viktor Orbán returned to the premiership in 2010. Bound by EU law and the mandates of the governor and his deputies, Orbán had to wait three years to break the national bank. One of those deputy governors, Júlia Király, experienced state capture from the inside and resigned with a public protest at the loss of institutional independence. Now an associate professor of finance and monetary economics at the International Business School in Budapest, she began her career under socialism at the statistics and planning offices. As deputy governor, she was part of the team that managed the Hungarian economy through the post-2007 financial crisis – an experience she chronicles in Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Turbulences to a Global Hurricane (Springer, 2020). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts at www.242.news on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation. After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal suffering of the Soviet people during the war. Police dispersed unauthorized commemoration meetings of Jewish activists at Babyn Yar. A monument “for one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of the war” was erected in Babyn Yar in 1976, but the Holocaust was not mentioned in its inscription. With the collapse of communism, state anti-Semitism ended. Holocaust commemoration became an important part of national memory politics in independent Ukraine. In the last few decades, over thirty monuments have been built at Babyn Yar, which are dedicated to the memory of Jews, Roma, members of the resistance movement, and other people executed there. However, heated debates continue about the commemoration of the Babyn Yar massacre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and argues that the historical experience in Ukraine not only divided ethnic Ukrainians and Jews but also brought them together. The story of Jews and Ukrainians is presented in an impartial manner through twelve thematic chapters. Among the themes discussed are geography, history, economic life, traditional culture, religion, language and publications, literature and theater, architecture and art, music, the diaspora, and contemporary Ukraine. The book's easy-to-read narrative is enhanced by 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts that explain specific phenomena or address controversial issues. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-existence (U Toronto Press, 2018) provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in learning more about the fascinating land of Ukraine and two of its most historically significant peoples. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Spies In My Blood: A Polish Family's Secret Fight Against Nazis & Communists (Polestar-Media, 2025) is the true story of two brothers raised in New York by WWII exiles and their journey to Poland. Each takes a different path to infiltrate the Communist secret police on a mission to uncover the truth about their family of soldiers, spies, and assassins. Which brother would go into the family business?Alex Storozynski was the first in his family born in the United States, a new leaf on the family tree. When he set out to find his roots in Poland during the Cold War, his Mama stitched secret pockets into boxer shorts where he could hide his cash, passport, and important documents. Before he left to go behind the Iron Curtain, his mother warned him: “Be careful of your brother's friends.” His big brother George, a banker, told him, “Mama doesn't want you to go into the family business.”As an aspiring journalist, Storozynski interviewed Polish rock stars, filmmakers, and artists fighting censorship. He navigated the black market and learned to thrive in the surreal and repressive system. He persuaded the Communist government to give him a scholarship to write a doctoral dissertation about the most hated man in Poland, the military regime's press spokesman, Jerzy Urban. But he asked too many questions.Storozynski attended Urban's press conferences with American journalists and met underground Solidarity activists trying to overthrow the government. He translated interviews with opposition leaders like Lech Wałesa for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Boston Globe.There's a Polish saying, “You can't fool your genes; it's in your blood.” The Communist secret police (SB) stole Storozynski's visa and interrogated him. When Senator Ted Kennedy arrived in Warsaw to give The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award to Adam Michnik and the parents of martyred opposition priest Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, Storozynski spent time with the Kennedy clan and taught them to sing Sto Lat (May He Live 100 Years) to the opposition.The SB had enough. After investigating Alex Storozynski, they wrote: “The findings in the case show that he is familiar with the working methods of special services.” Storozynski was declared an “enemy of the state” and banned from Communist Poland.This is the true story of Alex Storozynski's quest to uncover the nitty-gritty of three generations of spies in his blood.Winston Churchill's words serve as a stark warning: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” With the Russian Army again trying to move the border between East and Western Europe, the dormant Cold War has reignited a hot war. Russia's invasion of sovereign nations and killing of Ukrainians is a grim reminder of the need to avoid repeating history. Motorized terror squads are once again murdering Jews, and civilian bombing deaths are written off as collateral damage. The gravity of the situation cannot be overstated. Alex Storozynski is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author, filmmaker, songwriter, and President Emeritus & Chairman of the Board of The Kosciuszko Foundation.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The Chelmno Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Press, 2019) is a comprehensive account of the Chelmno death camp. Chelmno was not only the first Nazi death camp, it also set a horrific example in establishing gas vans as the first mass use of poison gas to kill Jews. Chris Webb and Artur Hojan cover the construction and the development of the mass murder process as perfected by the Nazis. The story is painstakingly told from all sides, the Jewish inmates, some who survived the Holocaust, the perpetrators, the Polish Arbeitskommando, and others. A major part of this work is the Jewish Roll of Remembrance, which includes the few survivors and the Jews deported from the Reich, via the Litzmannstadt ghetto, to their deaths in the gas vans. The book is richly illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs and documents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941-46 (Brandeis UP, 2025) records the experiences of Greek Jews who returned to their native country after World War II, when many went into hiding, fought in combat, became refugees, or were deported, some to Nazi death camps. Though they wanted more than anything to survive and come home, those who returned to postwar Greece faced isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of a civil war. Their stories, which rarely feature in discussions of the Holocaust, raise important questions about its aftermath across Europe. Based on exhaustive archival research and new interviews with Holocaust survivors across several continents, Kateřina Králová's new book adds to our understanding of the genocide and its impact. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

What is the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people? Why is radical nationalism on the rise in Europe and throughout the world? In Living Right: Far Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton UP, 2024), Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Dr. Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications. In this episode we consider: the power of listening, locating and unpacking complexities, navigating field work, and handling difficult situations. Our guest is: Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka, who is a sociocultural anthropologist. Before joining the University of Montreal, she was a senior research fellow at the University of Vienna and held guest lecturer and guest professor positions at various universities: Central European University, University of Bayreuth, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. She is the author of Living right: far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe, published by Princeton University Press in 2024. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Dear Miss Perkins Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism Secret Harvests Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom Immigration Realities The Ungrateful Refugee Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Built on the shifting grounds of post-Yugoslav transformation, Staging the Promises examines how the residents of Bor — a Serbian copper-mining town marked by both socialist prosperity and post-socialist decline — became spectators to the staged enactments of promised futures. Deana Jovanović traces how local authorities and the copper-processing company theatrically projected visions of economic, infrastructural, environmental, urban, and post-industrial renewal. The book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present? Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized. Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town (Cornell UP, 2025) assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons. Deana Jovanović is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She ethnographically studies how people in late-industrial and post-socialist environments shape futures, interact with pipes and cables, and live with risks and airborne particles. She has published widely on these topics in internationally recognized journals. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden's “book club” secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers' luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden's books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War (Random House, 2025) is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In this episode, we focus on the often-overlooked geographies of Eurasian connectivity with Dr. Wojciech Kębłowski, whose research brings attention to the Polish border towns of Małaszewicze and Narevka, key yet rarely discussed nodes in global infrastructure networks. As Eurasia undergoes a dramatic reconfiguration—with initiatives like China's Belt and Road Initiative, the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, and numerous regional projects vying for influence—we discuss what happens at the edges. How are logistics nodes developed? Who lives in these nodes of connection, and how do they navigate the shifting tides of global ambition? Our conversation spans local politics, logistics, labor, railway connectivity, and geopolitics, offering a multidimensional view of border hubs where the global meets the local. These sites are not only shaped by supply chain logics but also by mounting geopolitical rivalries, as powers compete for infrastructural influence across continents. Dr. Kębłowski paints a vivid picture of Małaszewicze, once a booming railway town employing over 10,000 people, now economically depressed but still strategically vital. While geopolitical tensions—like the war in Ukraine—have disrupted trade flows, they haven't derailed Małaszewicze's importance. The town's traffic has rebounded, a testament to its logistical centrality. Dr. Kębłowski discussed the hopes of renewal spurred by the BRI and how local leaders have actively tried to position Małaszewicze on the global map—courting Chinese delegations, lobbying Warsaw, and crafting narratives of international relevance. He shares insights into how these symbolic and practical efforts illustrate both the ambitions and the limitations faced by peripheries striving to assert their place in global politics and connectivity networks. GUEST BIO: Wojciech Kębłowski is an urban researcher, photographer, and Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with affiliations at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He will begin a new professorship at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in June 2025. His research sits at the intersection of urban, transport, and political geography, and draws on critical social and decolonial theory. It spans three main areas: the political economy and governance of “sustainable” transport, the urban geography of Global China, and alternatives to capitalist urbanism, including circular economy and degrowth practices. Wojciech's research is global in scope, with fieldwork and collaborations in diverse cities in Western Europe (Aubagne, Brussels, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Madrid), Eastern Europe (Sopot, Wrocław, Tallinn), China (Chengdu) and Cuba (Santiago). He uses a range of qualitative methods and is interested in photography as a research tool and a creative practice. Wojciech is involved in several international research projects, including LiFT (on fare-related mobility transitions), CARIN-PT (on flexible and on-demand transport), and previously led PUTSPACE and CIRCITY, focused on public transport and circular economies, respectively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Michael David Fox's Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard UP, 2025) provides a local, close-up look at the everyday workings of Nazi and Soviet power, in a particular region. It discusses such themes as the Soviet Terror of the late 1930's and the trauma of the collectivization of agriculture, earlier in the decade, as well as the further traumas of Nazi occupation. Especially interesting is its focus on life-trajectories of specific individuals who had daily to navigate the intricate workings of power, in brutalized, violent circumstances. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloombury, 2024) is a unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus. The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Reconciliation between Europe's Protestants and Catholics led to a new era of Christian collaboration.  Why did these erstwhile foes end their schism and begin to make peace?  In this riveting study, Udi Greenberg shows that ecumenism grew out of a shared desire to protect against perceived threats to Christian life.  The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s (Harvard UP, 2025) overturns conventional wisdom about this revolutionary change by showing that the cause was not growing mutual tolerance but solidarity against the threats of socialism, feminism, and liberation movements. By working together Christians could defend their dominance in European life by maintaining and reinforcing the inequality inherent in Christian hierarchical order. Peacemaking between the confessions was accelerated by the rise of the Nazis, when Christian denominations debated their relations to each other and to nationalism, and was further pressed by the Cold War and decolonization, when Catholic and Protestant authorities formally declared each other "brethren in faith".  Working together, Catholics and Protestants designed Europe's economic policies, regulated its sexual practices, and shaped postwar relationships with the Global South. This coalition of Christians has grown more cohesive over time as they leveraged their alliance to maintain influence across a politically fractured Europe. Related:  Listen to the New Books Network interview with Udi Greenberg about The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War Author recommended reading: The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century by Dagmar Herzog Hosted by Meghan Cochran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin's Chef,” went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule. Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group's origins and operations, Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) by John Lechner-the only journalist to report across its many warzones-brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise-but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over. Featuring exclusive interviews with over thirty Wagner Group members, Death Is Our Business is the terrifying true tale of the renegade militia that proved global instability is nothing if not an opportunity. John Lechner is a journalist and an independent researcher and consultant to NGOs and other institutions working in Africa. He holds a master's degree in foreign service from Georgetown University. He speaks Russian, French, Turkish, Georgian, Chechen, Sango, and more. His reporting has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the BBC and published in Foreign Policy, Lawfare, and War on the Rocks, among others. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, he lives in Washington, D.C. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Memory and truth are malleable and nowhere more so than in the Soviet Union.  To be a writer in that country was to face an ongoing dilemma: conform to State-mandated topics and themes, or consign oneself to obscurity, writing only for “the desk drawer” or “without permission.” Vasily Grossman challenged that binary choice, creating some of the most compelling and uncompromising fiction and journalism of the century, but also enduring heartbreaking censorship. Her excellent new biography, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century (Yale University Press, 2019) brings the life and work of this often-overlooked writer into brilliant focus. Biography of a writer — particularly one with Grossman's output — can be tricky to pull off, but Popoff's extensive research is elegantly arranged into a very readable narrative, in which we follow Grossman through the harrowing experiences of witnessing first hand, famine in the 1920s, the Terror of the 1930s, the carnage of World War II, and the dull ache of censorship in the post-war Soviet Union. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England.  Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life.  She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of  Lenin Lives Next Door:  Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow.  Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more. Geoffrey Roberts is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin's General, and the acclaimed Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.  Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners' household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada. Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina's granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother's story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina's rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.” This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina's life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance (ECW Press, 2023) takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. In this eye-opening book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications. Required reading for anthropologists and anyone concerned about the resurgence of far-right militancy today, Living Right sheds necessary light on the forces that have made the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people one of the most alarming trends of our time. Agnieszka Pasieka is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal. * This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we're highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is a native of Kyiv. In this conversation, we discuss two books. Our Enemies Will Vanish (Penguin Press, 2024), is a nonfiction narrative chronicling Putin's invasion of Ukraine through the reporter Trofimov's eyes. No Country for Love (Abacus Books, 2024), is his novel tracing the path of a young woman, the character based on his grandmother, on an arduous journey starting in 1930s Soviet Ukraine. Both books, as different as they are, cast a revealing light on the oppressions visited on the diverse peoples of Ukraine. In our talk, Trofimov offers insights into the books and also a guide as to how the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war might be concluded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies