The nations of Central and Eastern Europe experienced a time of momentous change in the period following the Second World War. The vast majority were subject to Communism and central planning while events such as the Hungarian uprising and Prague Spring stood out as key watershed moments against a distinct social, cultural and political backcloth. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification and the break-up of the Soviet Union, changes from the 1990s onwards have also been momentous with countries adjusting to various capitalist realities. The volumes in this series will help shine a light on the experiences of this key geopolitical zone with many lessons to be learned for the future.
By Małgorzata Hanzl
May 27, 2024
Across a range of disciplines, urban morphology has offered lenses through which we can read the city. Reading the urban form, when conflated with ethnographic studies, enables us to return to past situations and recreate the long-gone everyday life. Urbanscapes – the artefacts of urban life – have...
By Przemysław Strożek
May 27, 2024
This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin. During the 1920s ...
By Dennis Deletant
May 27, 2024
This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a ...
By Andriy Zayarnyuk, Ostap Sereda
May 27, 2024
This is the first synthetic book-length study in English of the Ukrainian nation-building during the "long" nineteenth century. The narrative follows the evolution of the Ukrainian intellectuals and their ideas from the Age of Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century and to the era of ...
By Mariusz Mazur
May 27, 2024
This book is the first study of the mentality of anti-Communist underground fighters and presents, especially, their thinking, ideals, stereotypes and customs. The models and psychological processes that the volume analyses are relevant not only to the Polish partisans, but also to members of other...
By David A. Norris
March 04, 2024
This volume focuses on Serbia’s need to manage change while preserving community identities, a narrative that avoids the common depiction of Serbian culture as a hostile struggle between modernizers supporting foreign models and traditionalists advocating forms of national cultural patrimony. ...
By Tomaž Ivešić
March 04, 2024
The Rise and Fall of Communist Yugoslavism: Soft Nation‑Building in Yugoslavia examines how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia incorporated the idea of a Yugoslav nation into its ideology and created the Yugoslav Soft Nation‑Building project after the Second World War. With an innovative approach of...
By Gintarė Malinauskaitė
February 23, 2024
This volume aims to offer a fresh perspective towards the evaluation of Soviet war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators, their representation through various means of media, and their reception in the context of the Cold War.By examining the 1964 Klaipėda war crimes trial in Soviet ...
By Sergei I. Zhuk
January 29, 2024
Oriented for a general reading audience, this book gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB "special operations" in Soviet Ukraine, which targeted especially the USA and Canada, using issues related to Soviet Ukrainian identity and cultural diplomacy of Soviet Ukraine after Stalin’s death in ...
By David W. McFadden
January 29, 2024
Although there have been many studies of U.S.–Soviet diplomacy in the twentieth century, most explorations of people-to-people diplomacy begin in the 1980s and to not take into account the early contacts in the revolutionary period and 1920s. This study explores in greater depth the religious ...
Edited
By Susanne Bauer, Tanja Penter
January 29, 2024
This book is about nuclear legacies in Russia and Central Asia, focusing on selected sites of the Soviet atomic program, many of which have remained understudied. Nuclear operations, for energy or military purposes, demanded a vast infrastructure of production and supply chains that have ...
By Dina Khapaeva
October 26, 2023
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the ...