Eastern European Studies: History

Tomasz Blusiewicz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by W.L. Blackwood, volume 6, pp. 39903991, 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

This article is a brief survey of the current state of and trends in academic historical scholarship on Eastern Europe, mainly in
North America, but also in Europe. It presents several traditional methods of dening Eastern Europe, discusses main features
of its historiography and some of its recent research directions. The article offers both a chronological and thematic narratives
concerning the elds origins, its major developments and shifts as well as a reference guide for further research and reading.

The eld of Eastern European historical scholarship has
undergone dramatic changes since the collapse of communist
regimes in 1989. Eastern Europe as a distinct geopolitical
region has never been more sharply delineated than between
the late 1940s and 1989, when its primary reference was
essentially synonymous with the term Soviet Block. In the
West, Eastern Europe as an intellectual concept had its origins
in the Enlightenment vision of the world; it referred to a tran-
sitory space between the civilized West and the exotic Orient
(Wolff, 1994). As a scholarly discipline it began to emerge only
in the interwar period it dealt with the newly organized space
that appeared on the map as a result of the fall of four empires:
Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian. It was the
Cold War and its geopolitical pressures, however, that led to the
emergence of Eastern European studies as an institution well-
established in the academic world. Many historians of the
region were migrs and as they were collectively labeled in
the West dissidents, who through their research, writing,
teaching, and not infrequently government advising, were
involved in the process of liberating Eastern Europe from the
Soviet domination (Brzezinski, 1956; Pipes, 1954). Contrib-
uting to the Cold War confrontation was not the only preoc-
cupation of historians of Eastern Europe, but nonetheless the
eld has been faced with a need to reinvent its basic framework
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Many scholars, including the author of the previous article
in this encyclopedia (Blackwood, 2001), predicted that such
a redenition would be extremely difcult and the eld would
eventually dissolve and/or integrate with the broader Euro-
pean narrative. This process is far from complete and while
the eld has been shifting in that direction, it still retains its
specicity and can be approached as a separate unit. This
article focuses on two related themes. First, it examines what
criteria are used by historians to dene what counts and what
does not count as Eastern European history. Second, it
surveys new work in the eld, outlines how it is related to
older historiography and how it communicates with new
trends in historical scholarship. In conclusion, it offers several
reections on what kind of light some recent geopolitical
shifts such as the EU enlargement (in the 2000s) and the
Ukrainian crisis (201314) shed on Eastern Europe as
a concept and what they portend about its future.
The chief difculty facing historians who insist on the val-
idity of Eastern Europe as a historical term is the lack of Eastern
European identity among the peoples of the region. This
obstacle is much less pronounced for nation-state (German,
Polish, Hungarian, etc.) or imperial (British, Soviet, Habsburg,
etc.) historians where the domain of study is much more clearly
dened through subjective identities and/or political bound-
aries. Eastern Europeans rarely think of themselves as Eastern
Europeans per se; all studies show that this identity is either
nonexistent or insignicant in comparison with national, reli-
gious, or pan-European identities. In this sense, the eld of
Eastern European historical studies can be seen as inorganic
its origins are rooted in global conditions largely beyond
Eastern Europes control (imperial rivalries, World Wars, the
Cold War, etc.). In other words, the eld owes its existence
largely thanks to an outsider gaze cast upon the region.
One of the most authoritative surveys of the regions
twentieth-century history (Rothschild and Wingeld, 2008) is
entitled Return to Diversity. The title unequivocally implies that
the region has returned to its historical norm (diversity) after
half a century of forced convergence in the Soviet Block.
Eastern European return to diversity is tied with one of the
original lenses through which the region has been perceived
the allegory of a bridge between East and West, a place where
cultures meet and give birth to numerous mixed formations.
The validity of the return to diversity thesis is implicitly
conrmed by recent developments in political science and in
the new subeld of transitology in particular; one of tran-
sitologys chief aims is to explain the diverging trajectories of
states that seemed so similar politically prior to 1989. Many
scholars search for deeper historical causes such as early
modern democratic experiences to account for this phenom-
enon. What are the main features amid this newly reconstituted
diversity that form the common denominators large enough to
validate speaking of a common regional history?
Perhaps the oldest division line separating Western and
Eastern Europe is of a religious nature. Starting with the split
of the Roman Empire into two halves, through Byzantine-
Greek Christianization of much of the Balkans or the Kievan
Rus, the Great Schism of 1054 or the Muscovite Third Rome
ambitions, the rift between Latin and Greek Europe has always
been noticeable and usually deep. In 1983, the Hungarian
historian JenT Sz} ucs suggested that parts of what was then
known as Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary)
were miscategorized. These areas have always been, he argued,
a part of the Western civilizational sphere since their adoption
of Christianity from Rome and not from Constantinople. The
Orthodox faith and administration, the Cyrillic alphabet or the

810 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 6 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.10127-8

absence/weakness of Protestant Reformation are thus posited
as the original and decisive factors explaining the differences
between the two parts of the continent. In Poland and Hun-
gary, the image of these two countries being the bulwarks of
Christian faith containing the Orthodox and (more typically)
Islamic element has become a part of national consciousness in
the early modern period. In general, this basic distinction is
rarely questioned, but there is little new scholarship that would
operate within religiously dened frameworks, especially after
the atheistic communism cast aside what had been earlier
perceived as a dening feature of Russianness Orthodox
religiosity.
Another frequently drawn and almost as old a distinction is
of economic character. The Iron Curtain ultimately did not fall
between the ports of Stettin and Trieste as Winston Churchill
announced in 1946, but closer to the ports of Lbeck in Ger-
many and Burgas in Bulgaria. This seemingly incidental detail
of geography must have intrigued many historians. The border
between West and East Germany eventually materialized very
close to the Elbe River one of the major fault lines drawn by
economic historians. It separates the world of nascent
commercialization of agriculture in Western and the second
wave of feudalism in Eastern early modern Europe. Naturally,
the nal course of the border between East and West Germany
had nothing to do with economic history and a lot to do with
where the Allied and Red Armies met in 1945. Still, the next
four decades made the Elbe River divide, already bleak in 1945,
plainly visible again. Eastern Europe, besides being popularly
and somewhat stereotypically viewed as Western Europes poor
relative, is understood by some economic historians to be
a region where the second wave of feudalization and deurba-
nization took place just when Western Europe began to
urbanize and ready itself for the industrial revolution. Both
the forced Soviet-style industrialization and the current
EUintegration are sometimes framed as attempts to close this
old gap. The initial advancements achieved by the Soviet Block
economies between 1945 and mid-1970s have been inter-
preted by a prominent historian of the region, Ivan Berend, as
the regions temporary detour from periphery, a detour brief
in its promise since the region returned to its point of departure
after the stagnation and collapse of the 1980s (Berend, 1996).
JenT Sz} ucs has also pointed to the spread of civil and
municipal liberties in the late Middle Ages, exemplied, for
instance, by urban settlement based on the German (Magde-
burg) law as a factor with momentous political consequences
for where the border between Western and Eastern Europe
eventually crystallized in political terms. The substantial
experiences with (qualied) democracy, civil rights, and the
rule of law in, e.g., the early modern Habsburg Empire or the
PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, were occasionally cited by
Cold War era historians as features distinguishing democratic
and Central European parts of the Soviet Block from the
despotic territories traditionally administered from Moscow
and Istanbul. In this context, the stable Czechoslovak democ-
racy of the interwar period was frequently seen as evidence that
this state was rmly in the Western sphere while all the other
children of Versailles, who eventually drifted toward various
forms of authoritarianism, were truly in Eastern Europe
(Seton-Watson, 1945). This way of viewing Europe became
more popular especially after the suppressed prodemocratic
Eastern European Studies: History 811
unrest in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (1956, 1968,
1970, 1980) and after the successful democratization in those
countries and problematic democratization in Belarus,
Ukraine, or Russia after 1989/91.
Religious, economic, or political are merely three among
numerous other macro lines according to which the map of
Europe can be divided. As Larry Wolff reminds us, before Peter
the Greats introduction of Russia onto the European diplo-
matic scene, the division of Europe into north and south of the
Alps had been much more rmly embedded in the European
mind (Wolff, 1994). All lines of this type are of course arbitrary
and depend on the kinds of questions asked and the historical
period studied; no serious historian argues that one can dene
what Eastern Europe is and what its borders are precisely and
conclusively. Nevertheless, the regions entanglement with
communism in the twentieth century is a part of its heritage of
that cannot be overestimated. Judging by volume alone, the
twentieth century communist experience, with all of its exten-
sive and complex tropes, is currently the main subject of study
for historians of the region. This experience is strongly inter-
twined with more pan-European topics such as totalitarianism,
World Wars, and superpower confrontation. If one adds the
Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced population transfers, and
all other terrible things that happened in the twentieth
century, what emerges is singlehandedly the most extensive
subject of the regions historical research and the cornerstone of
its historical memory.
Before surveying some of the major trends in historiog-
raphy, it is worth mentioning that Eastern Europe borders with
several well-established regions of historical scholarship:
Russian/Soviet, Ottoman/Middle Eastern, German, Italian,
Scandinavian, etc. The borders between them will never be
rigid and the very impossibility of drawing even tentative lines
in some areas lead to a new subeld of scholarship which
focuses precisely on these mixed, ambiguous, and contradic-
tory areas often called borderlands. This eld is of course not
limited to Eastern Europe, but some of its provinces such as
Galicia (Frank, 2005), Transylvania (Case, 2009) and towns
such as Lvov (Amar, 2011) or Salonica (Mazower, 2005), due
to their ethnic, religious, or cultural diversity, have by now
become recognized as exemplary cases demonstrating just how
immensely complex and difcult to disentangle borderland
territories can be. It has to be kept in mind, however, that what
might be described as a typical Eastern European borderland
by an outsider might be considered to be an integral element of
a core ethnic area by a local nationalist (Transylvania for some
Hungarians or Romanians, Galicia for Poles and Ukrainians).
While historians rarely argue about whether a given region
or topic belongs to, for example, Eastern European or Russian
studies, what did emerge as an important contender for Eastern
European studies is the idea of Central Europe and the schol-
arly movement it inspired. This term has its roots in the
imperial German concept of Mitteleuropa, but it reemerged in
a different context half a century later. It was reinvented and
refashioned by anticommunist dissidents such as Milan Kun-
dera, Czes1aw Mi1osz, and Danilo Kis. Kunderas essay The
Tragedy of Central Europe (1984) is often perceived as the
moment when the idea was reborn. In essence, the argument
was that Central Europe (by which Czechoslovakia, Poland,
and Hungary were usually meant) has always belonged to
812 Eastern European Studies: History
Western Europe in civilizational terms, but has been
kidnapped and politically imprisoned in the Eastern Euro-
pean sphere by the Soviet power. While the political implica-
tions of this intellectual movement became largely irrelevant
after 1989 and certainly after the EU extension in 2004 and
2007, a new wave of scholarship inspired by them emerged
and found institutionalization in, e.g., the Central European
History Journal.
This new Central European wave is located in an inter-
mediate position between the old German and the dissident
ideas; the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its cosmopolitan
and culturally vibrant cities of Vienna, Prague, Budapest, or
Cracow, are painted as archetypically Central European sites.
Scholars who identify themselves as Central Europeanists come
from various backgrounds; not infrequently they are historians
of German-speaking lands who reach out to areas that had
a rich record of contact with German culture and administra-
tion. While this eld does not compete with Eastern Europe in
any direct sense, its position has been steadily ascending vis--
vis its neighbor for several reasons. The late Habsburg Empire
has enjoyed a remarkable reputational renaissance, largely
because its many imperfections do not stand a comparison
with all the tragic events that befell the region after the Empire
disintegrated. The Empire has been portrayed as a kind of
a proto-EU project where many ethnicities and languages
coexisted in relatively peace within one political unit for
centuries (Oscar Jszi, 1929). Furthermore, n-de-sicle Vienna
or Prague with world-class artists and intellectuals such as
Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, or Kafka are commonly seen as
manifestations of European cultural vibrancy at its best
(Schorske, 1979). But most importantly, the inhabitants of
Prague or Cracow virtually universally prefer being spoken of as
Central Europeans rather than Eastern Europeans. The success
of the Central European University in Budapest shows that
there is plenty of willingness to cooperate and produce
knowledge under a common Central European banner.
Central European scholars such as Pieter Judson or Rogers
Brubaker have been at the forefront of the study of nationalities
and nationalism a traditional Eastern European topic and
the late Austro-Hungarian Empire has been one of the main
case studies used to address issues such as national identity
formation, national cohesion and indifference, bilingualism,
or mixed families (Judson, 2006; Brubaker, 1996). Following
Eugene Webers groundbreaking book Peasants into Frenchmen
(1976), historians of the Austro-Hungarian Empire demon-
strated how a nineteenth-century region inhabited largely by
villagers and small town folk with local (geographical, tribal,
familial) or religious identities turned into region as we know it
today inhabited by Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, or Croats
(King, 2002). One of the leading questions still to be answered
is when (and why) nationalism began to hate i.e., how an
initially progressive ideology of intellectuals intent on helping
the small peoples suffering under oppressive imperial
government transformed itself into one of the main sources of
conict in twentieth-century Europe (Porter, 2000). In this
context, the transatlantic gaze of outsiders and the multiethnic
composition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire helped to avoid
the trap into which many native nation-state historians fell
writing biased national histories favoring one particular
ethnicity and contributing to keeping the ame of nationalism
alive. This type of approach to the study of nationalism has
seen fruitful application to the Soviet area as well. Terry
Martins Afrmative Action Empire (2001) demonstrates how
illusory was the Soviet (and global) conviction that the so-
called nationalities question had been solved in the border-
lands of the Soviet Union and why this issue came back with
a vengeance in the late 1980s as the Union disintegrated along
its ethnically dened internal borders.
How the relationship between Eastern and Central Euro-
pean elds is going to evolve is impossible to predict; both are
products of a unique set of circumstances and both are likely to
nd their place within a larger European or global framework.
Immediately after 1989, the traditional Eastern European (and
to some extent Soviet) eld was supplied with new materials
accessible at the local archives. The rst wave of research
focused on the early period (194556) around the theme of
communist takeover and Stalinization (Kenney, 1997;
Connelly, 2000). The current consensus on the subject has been
well summarized by Joseph Rothschild and Nancy Wingeld:
Today we recognize that many of the Western academic analyses of
the 1950s and 1960s subscribed to exaggerated images of a rigid
blueprint that supposedly guided Moscow and the local East Central
European Communists in implementing the procedures and
arrangement that Stalin eventually selected to give effect to his
perception of Soviet hegemonial requirements. But while correcting
this early presumptions, we should not throw out the baby with the
bath water. For though there probably never was a rigid uniform
Stalinist plan to be imposed in cookie-cutter fashion on every state
and society of East Central Europe without regard to diverse national
histories, institutions and complexities, the general overall similar-
ities in Soviet and local Communist behavior throughout the area in
the rst decade after World War II strongly suggests a unied
conceptual framework more exible at the beginning than toward
the close of that decade, never entirely absent yet also never abso-
lutely rigid.
Rothschild and Wingeld, 2008: 7576
A lot had been known about Stalinist terror and crimes, but
new evidence allowed scholars to present detailed ndings and
provide more accurate statistics (Naimark, 1995). Document-
ing and making sure the memory of various types of trans-
gressions committed by the Soviet and puppet regimes does
not disappear became the main preoccupation of many locally
based historians (Applebaum, 2012; Kusnierz, 2013); special
national institutes (e.g., the Institute of National Remembrance
in Poland) were established precisely with that goal in mind.
The same observations apply to issues such as Nazi occupation
and the Holocaust, most of which had been if not explicitly
suppressed, then not very thoroughly explored by historians
under communism, especially the period between September
1939 and June 1941, when Hitler and Stalin were allies
(Gross, 1988). Continuing the tradition inaugurated by
Czes1aw Mi1osz (1953), intellectual historians maintained their
interest in the strength of communisms Hegelian bite trying
to understand why Marxism appealed to so many Eastern
European (and not only) intellectuals and what was their
relation with the regime and its ideology (Shore, 2006).
One aspect of the Stalinist period in Eastern Europe (1945
53) in particular that could not have been explored earlier was
the issue of forced population transfers and deportations.

While historians in the West could argue to what extent these
transfers were voluntary or not, historians in Eastern Europe
had to accept the ofcial party line that spoke of their voluntary
nature. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany were in an
ambivalent position due to the way the Germans were depor-
ted (194548) on the one hand and due to the alliance of
brotherly nations that was now imposed on them by their
Soviet supervisors on the other. Hence the spike in research on
this topic after 1989 (Ther and Siljak, 2001). Overall, the
ndings show that the scale and brutality of post-1945
deportations have been much greater than it had been sus-
pected. The ironically disturbing conclusion is that it was
eventually Joseph Stalin who helped to bring the old nation-
alist fantasy of ethnically pure states to fruition while where no
clear ethnic separation took place (e.g., Eastern Ukraine,
Southern Slovakia) tensions are still high today, not unlike in
the interwar period.
The semblance of uniformity within the Soviet Block did
not fool too many observers. Already in the 1950s, the term
national communism was coined to capture the develop-
ments in Yugoslavia and then it was aptly transferred to
describe post-1956 Poland, Hungary, and Ceausescus Romania
in particular (Verdery, 1991). Not unlike the varieties of
capitalism literature in the West, experts on Eastern Europe
were quick to discern the characteristics of each national
communist system. Hungary became known for its relatively
open and prosperous economy, Poland for its mild censorship,
East Germany for the secret police, Romania for its familial
nepotism. After 1989, historians could start examining how
much of block there really was in the Soviet Block beyond
prima facie political, military, or economic ties and similarities;
the more research is carried out, the less the appearances seem
to correspond to the underlying reality.
With the Cold War still in full swing in the 1980s, it was
difcult for the scholars of the region to avoid a bipolar divi-
sion of the eld into anti- and procommunist camps; often one
could not escape being labeled either a cold warrior or a revi-
sionist with cryptocommunist sympathies. This characteriza-
tion is no longer valid. The revolutions of 1989 were
immediately followed by a wave of scholarship that sought to
understand why the system collapsed so quickly. The history of
the present written by Timothy Garton Ash immediately after
the events of 1989 (Garton Ash, 1990) has addressed many
puzzles and new equally insightful research soon followed
(Maier, 1997). But after the initial astonishment subsided,
scholars reversed the question and asked: what made the
system survive for so long despite its seeming incompatibility
with the regions societies? Thus the earlier scholarship on the
establishment of communist power (194548) was recently
complemented by studies of the Brezhnev era of zastoy (stag-
nation) and looked for deeper sources of the regimes stability.
Many young historians study the patterns of consumption
(both material and cultural) in communist societies and arrive
at intriguing ndings highlighting just how little was under-
stood about how the system worked internally on an everyday
basis (Mazurek, 2010). Various polls conducted after 1989
consistently show that there exists a large amount of nostalgia
for the bygone days, which suggests that the regimes must have
enjoyed some real support. Studies of the gray economy
demonstrate that reliance on ofcial gures on the planned
Eastern European Studies: History 813
economy can be misleading as they capture merely one aspect
of a more dynamic and complex economic reality.
Already in the eighteenth century, the image of Eastern
Europe was often associated with backwardness. Poor sanitary
conditions, underdeveloped infrastructure, general poverty,
and disorder were impressions often conveyed by eighteenth
century Enlightened travelers. In German vocabulary, the term
Polnische Wirtschaft became synonymous with a badly managed
economy. But it was also, among others, Eastern European
migr scholars who were instrumental in developing
a comparative method of developmental studies, sometimes
given an overall heading of modernization theory. The acute
awareness of their countrys industrial weakness was one of the
factors that propelled the Soviet leadership, and Stalin in
particular, to launch a program of rapid state-sponsored
industrialization in the 1930s. This method of economic
development has then been transplanted onto Eastern Europe,
especially between 1948 and 1956. There has been an ongoing
debate among historians as to what extent the communist
experience can be understood as a modernization process.
There is no consensus, but certainly an agreement that any
evaluation depends on the country underdeveloped countries
such as Bulgaria or Romania beneting more, more developed,
as Czechoslovakia, less and the eld of human endeavor
(culture, gender relations, economic, politics, etc.) in question.
Many historians do agree that the dramatic socioeconomic
transformation of the 1950s and 1960s could be characterized
as a breakthrough in areas such as public education, social
security and welfare, gender equality, urbanization, industri-
alization, etc. The debate continues whether the human cost of
these transformations was acceptable while some historians
reject the modernization framework altogether. Especially
those inuenced by postmodern critiques of the moderniza-
tion paradigm, such as Maria Todorova (1997) or Kate Brown
(2004), argue that it is in the often self-serving eye of the
beholder that ideas of superior or inferior development origi-
nate and should be rejected as both uninformative at best and
prejudiced at worst. Scathing critique of the Western colo-
nizing gaze on Eastern Europe has been voiced especially by
Todorova, who also expressed well-taken criticism of the idea
of Central Europe as a project meant to include some in the
elite European club at the exclusion of the others in partic-
ular the Balkans.
World War II is an important chapter in any regions
history, but it left a particularly heavy mark in Eastern Europe.
In his recent book entitled Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder (2010)
documents just how much the region squeezed between
Russia and Germany suffered, not only during World War II,
but also in the 1930s (Holodomor in the Ukraine, Stalinist
Purges) and after the War. The region is located precisely at the
fault line between the two most murderous regimes in history
and this basic fact has to be comprehended by anyone who
studies it. The role of Eastern Europe as a victim of forces
beyond its control has been a recurrent motif in the regions
literature and historiography. According to Milan Kundera, the
experiences of World Wars and imperial domination molded
a unique national subjectivity in the region, a subjectivity
constantly aware of its very existence being fragile, in danger,
and at the mercy of larger powers. Poland has been portrayed
already by early nineteenth century romantic writers as
814 Eastern European Studies: History
a Christ of the Nations redeeming the sins of other nations.
This tradition has remained very much alive in Polish histo-
riography. While Snyder and other scholars never push their
metaphors so far, there exists a tradition of writing about the
PolishLithuanian Commonwealth and its peoples from
a victimized perspective one of the denitive works on
Polish history, written by the British historian Norman Davis,
is entitled Gods Playground (1979).
The history of Ukraine in the twentieth century is often
written from a similar perspective as primarily a victim of two
regimes, Soviet and Nazi. Karel Berkhoff in Harvest of Despair
(2004) provides an in-depth narrative of how the experience of
Nazi occupation looked for the ordinary Ukrainian, what were
its daily dangers and deprivations. Mark Mazowers (2008)
comprehensive survey, Hitlers Empire, is the rst comparative
account of the Nazi occupation in the entirety of Europe.
Mazower demonstrates that the term occupation did not
entail an even remotely similar set of experiences for Western
and Eastern Europeans, with the General Government and the
territories of todays Ukraine and Belarus being the most
brutalized and exploited of all. This victimization narrative has
been recently challenged and problematized, however. Works
of Jan Gross (2001), starting with Neighbors: The Destruction of
the Jewish Community in Jedwabne a depiction of how local
Polish population organized the killing of several hundred of
their Jewish neighbors in the summer of 1941 have made it
impossible to hold that local populations were merely passive
bystanders. The categories of resistance and collaboration have
been recently revised and nuanced by numerous authors and
the topics of postwar popular justice, retribution, and memory
have seen collaborative efforts by the most renowned authors
in the eld (Dek et al., 2000).
The intersection of Eastern European and Jewish histories
has been a vibrant eld of study in the last two decades. While
the Holocaust and Jewish studies in general were largely
a taboo subject in the rst several decades following the war on
both sides of the Iron Curtain, these topics have seen a great
deal of attention (including some major controversies)
recently. Ranging from micro-studies such as Helmut Walser
Smiths (2002) work on the small German town of Konitz
(now: Chojnice) before the Great War to broad surveys span-
ning several centuries (Slezkine, 2004), Jewish history and
European history are nally put into dialogue with each other.
Poland has seen a wave of historically informed cinematog-
raphy on the issues of Polish role in Jewish extermination
a promising sign showing that is no longer a forbidden
subject it had been for half a century. The process of coming to
terms with historical memory and issues of guilt and respon-
sibility has been addressed by Charles Maier in his evocative
essays (Maier, 1988) and many historians followed suit.
Historians of Eastern Europe, although often preoccupied
with some of the traditional topics outlined in this article,
have not remained unaffected by recent trends in historical
scholarships. The eld has seen innovative work in gender
(Wingeld, 2006), urban (Thum, 2011), and everyday history
(Healy, 2004). Historians have also paid attention to subal-
tern groups often overlooked in traditional political or
international histories: children (Zahra, 2011) and underpriv-
ileged ethnic groups such as the Roma. The crimes committed
against this particular minority have recently emerged as one of
the main topics of scholarship, nally lling a gap in the
literature (Lewy, 2000). Environmental history has been on the
rise as well (Dawson, 1996). Traditional areas such as imperial
history have in consequence received less attention, but there
have been some groundbreaking work in this area as well
(Plokhy, 2014). It is impossible to do justice to even a small
fraction of new scholarship in this short article, but it is beyond
doubt that Eastern Europe as a eld remains at the cutting edge
of historical scholarship and in stimulating dialogue with the
rest of the discipline.
The calls to integrate Eastern European history not only with
continental, but also global, history, have not remained unan-
swered. Naturally, the global approach has been most useful for
historians of empires. Both the Austro-Hungarian and the
Russian Empires have witnessed a sustained effort to reconnect
their history with global agenda such as slave trade, global
commerce, colonial expansion, or racial relations, issues which
had been often marginalized earlier due to the urgency of
military, diplomatic, and national questions. Especially the
younger generation is keen on showing how the region they
study participated in and inuenced global movements such as
the Renaissance, Enlightenment, birth of mass politics, origin
and spread of technological advances, etc. This focus on inter-
connectedness, exchange, and mutual inuence emerges as
a dominant motive of the current doctoral works on the region.
Tony Judts Postwar (2005) has arguably been one of the rst
attempts to put Western and Eastern European history back
together into one integral whole. It took one of the greatest
minds of the generation to achieve this monumental and (not
very long ago) hardly thinkable task. In 1989, the Berlin Wall
was a symbolic and all-too-tangible expression of vast rifts
splitting the heart of the continent. The last quarter century has
witnessed all kinds of integration and interchange of unparal-
leled scale and intensity. The rapidity of these processes has
exceeded all expectations and poses a challenge for historians
and for the ongoing European integration project. Writing
history is now a truly global enterprise and old nation-state
boundaries of historiographies, though still strong, are being
diluted every year. The recent crisis in Ukraine (201314) did
show that some of the Cold War categories still remain valid
and that the rift between Western and Eastern Europe is not
yet fully leveled. At the same time, it is certain that the model of
Eastern European studies as it was conceived in the Cold War
era is a thing of the past. This model would not function well in
the current political or cultural reality. Many actively resist the
Eastern European label and the conditions for Eastern Euro-
pean commonalities no longer exist to mention just two
major reasons. Traditional clichs do not work either. The old
language of nationalism and xenophobia seems to win more
votes in some old democracies such as France than in the
perennially nationalistic Eastern Europe. The differences in
political orientation of two countries often put into one cate-
gory by historians Poland and Hungary were rarely greater
than in 2014. On the other hand, the twentieth century and the
last 25 years are just a fraction of the regions millennial history
and historians tend to be able to resist pressures of the present
rather well. There is certainly enough of shared history in
Eastern Europe to keep the eld alive and to what extent it will
be perturbed by recent divergent developments remains to
be seen.

See also: Area and International Studies: Cultural Studies;
Communism, History of; Eastern European Studies: Culture;
Eastern European Studies: Society; Nationalism, Sociology of;
Socialist Societies: Anthropological Aspects.
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