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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
In February 1990 a major conference dedicated to the recent history of the East of Europe was organised at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. The revised papers, edited by Joseph Held, comprise The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. It is the first major Western-language compendium discussing a broad region of Europe which brings together the talents of prominent specialists and exhibits thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship. Such an undertaking was predestined to yield a volume of significance. The kaleidoscopic developments over the last few years make this work extraordinarily timely and important beyond its obvious scholarly merits.
1 The important essay by Szücs, is ‘The Three Historical Regions of Europe’, in Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 29/2–4 (1983), 131–84Google Scholar; for Kundera, , see his ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33Google Scholar; for Milosz, , see ‘The Budapest Round Table’, Cross Currents, Vol. 10 (1991), 18 ff.Google Scholar
2 Vilnius, Lithuania's capital, was recently described as ‘the very epitome of central Europe’. None the less, here it is excluded from even ‘Eastern Europe’. See Venclova, Tomas, ‘The End of the World in Vilna’, The New York Times Book Review, 23 07 1989.Google Scholar
3 Fischer-Galati, a specialist on Balkan, especially Romanian, history, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
4 Völgyes, a specialist on Hungarian affairs, is Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
5 See Rudolf, L. Tökés, ‘From Visegrád to Kraków: Cooperation, Competition, and Coexistence in Central Europe’, Problems of Communism, Vol. 40 (Nov.-Dec. 1991), 100–14Google Scholar, for an insightful commentary regarding the historical and current significance of the ‘Visegrád Triangle’ or what may well become the ‘Visegrád Rectangle’ according to Lech Walęsa, should an independent Slovakia wish to participate along with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
6 We may note in this context the remarks by the leaders of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, overwhelming victors in the 1990 parliamentary elections, especially the recent reference by József Antall concerning the ‘15,000,000 Hungarians’, ‘united regardless of the citizenship some may have acquired in the tempest of history’. See Bárany, Zoltan D., ‘The Hungarian Democratic Forum Wins National Election Decisively’, in Legters, Lyman H., ed., Eastern Europe: Transformation and Revolution, 1945–1991. Documents and Analyses (Lexington, MA: Heath and Co., 1992), 451–2.Google Scholar Hungary's relative demographic torpor in relation to its neighbours has provoked periodic warnings of ‘nation-death’ over the last decades; see Rácz, Barnabas A., ‘The Twelfth Communist Party Congress and the Politics of Neo-Conservatism in Hungary’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 15, no. 4 (1981), 525–6.Google Scholar This is a traditional Hungarian obsession. See Bigler, Robert M., ‘Heil Hitler and Heil Horthy!: The Nature of Hungarian Racist Nationalism and its Impact on German-Hungarian Relations, 1919–1945’, in East European Quarterly, Vol. 8, no. 3 (1974), 254–5.Google Scholar
7 In this regard see Brumberg, Abraham, ‘A Problem that is no More?: National Minorities in Poland Today’, The Polish Review, Vol. 37, no. 4 (1992), 423–30Google Scholar; and Pacewicz, Piotr, ‘Polish and German Minorities: Asymmetry of Problems – Symmetry of Solutions’, The Polish Review, Vol. 37, no. 4 (1992), 445–54.Google Scholar
8 A pioneering effort in this regard is Besemeres, John F., Socialist Population Politics: The Political Implications of Demographic Trends in the USSR and Eastern Europe (White Plains, NY: Sharpe, 1980)Google Scholar, a volume now obviously out of date despite its continued usefulness.
9 Pano, , Professor of History at Western Illinois University, is the author of the pioneering standard text The People's Republic of Albania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).Google Scholar
10 Pundeff is Professor of History at California State University, Northridge, and a specialist in modern Bulgarian history.
11 See Dimitrov, G. M., ‘Agrarianism’, in Gross, Feliks, ed., European Ideologies, A Survey of 20th Century Political Ideas (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948)Google Scholar; Zakrzewski, Andrzej, ‘Z Geografii politycznej ruchu ludowego’, in Garlicki, Andrzej, ed., Z Dziejów Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1986), 208, 220–1.Google Scholar
12 Wolchik is the Director of Russian and Eastern European Studies and Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. She is the author of a large number of works concerning women in ‘Eastern Europe’ as well as on contemporary Czechoslovakia.
13 Hának is Division Director of the Institute for History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of History at Ötvös Korant University in Budapest. Held is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, Camden. He has published works on both Hunyadi, and Hungarian agriculture.
14 Korboński is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely on the former Soviet bloc, especially agricultural questions in Poland.
15 Korboński, had written his first ‘venture into the interwar period’ only shortly before composing this essay; see ‘Final Discussions’, in Wiles, Timothy, ed., Poland between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Polish Studies Center, 1989), 299.Google Scholar
16 The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed peasant emancipation in Russian Poland, the rise of industrial capitalism, rapid urbanisation and the rise of modern Polish politics, among many other fundamental transformations.
17 The status of the Roman Catholic Church in interwar Poland was defined by the Concordat of 1925. See Golęb, Kazimierz, ‘Concordats between Poland and the Holy See’, in Braun, Jerzy, ed., Poland in Christian Civilization (London: Veritas Foundation Press, 1985), 581ff.Google Scholar, cf. Pease, Neal, ‘Poland and the Holy See, 1918–1939’, Slavic Review, Vol. 50, no. 3 (1991), 521–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 The well-organised, influential German minority is hardly comparable to the Belorussian (White Ruthenian) population of the Polish east which was distinguished by grinding poverty and a low level of national consciousness. The numerous Jewish population and the politically significant Ukrainians present quite separate problems.
19 Had Korboński qualified this statement to mean that the task of rebuilding the newly acquired ‘recovered territories’ from Germany was used by Warsaw to generate enthusiasm the reader might agree; as it stands the statement is bizarre.
20 There is far more than ‘anecdotal or impressionistic evidence’ upon which to consider the role of Catholicism in Poland. In addition to many soundings of public opinion, we have available significant scholarly studies on religious sociology by Piwowarski and Pomian-Śrzednicki among others. See, for example, Pomian-Śrzednicki, Maciej, Religious Change in Contemporary Poland: Secularization and Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).Google Scholar
21 A valuable recent discussion of the Church in Poland can be found in the section entitled ‘The Church’, in Wedel, Janine R., ed., The Unplanned Society: Poland during and after Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 185–219.Google Scholar
22 Trond Gilberg is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Soviet and East European Studies Center at Pennsylvania State University. Here, he goes over much the same ground as in his Nationalism and Communism in Romania: The Rise and Fall of Ceausescu's Personal Dictatorship (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990).
23 For example, there is the brief article by Stephen Fischer-Galati that attempts to explain the ‘quintessence of the broadly accepted political ideology of twentieth century Romania’ in his ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality in the Twentieth Century: The Romanian Case’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 18, no. 1 (1984), 25–34.
24 Stokes, Gale, ‘The Social Origins of East European Politics’, in Chirot, Daniel, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 230–4Google Scholar;cf. Puscas, Vasile, ‘The Process of Modernization in Romania in the Interwar Period’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 25, no. 3 (1991), 325–38.Google Scholar
25 The latest ‘hero of choice’ in Romania is the fascist dictator Ion Antonescu; see Ratesh, Nestor, Romania: The Entangled Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1991), 141–5, 169n.Google Scholar
26 A far more satisfactory treatment of this phenomenon can be found in Fischer, Mary Ellen, ‘Politics, Nationalism, and Development in Romania’, in Augustinos, Gerasimos, ed., Diverse Paths to Modernity in Southeastern Europe: Essays in National Development (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 135–68.Google Scholar
27 The Hungarian minority issue in Romania has implications for the potential liberality of the regime that will emerge in Bucharest, as well as for the relationship between Romania and Hungary. For the former phenomenon see Calinescu, Matei and Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ‘The 1989 Revolution and Romania's Future’, Problems of Communism, Vol. 40 (Jan.–April 1991), 42–59, esp. pp. 57–9.Google Scholar For the latter see Brown, J. F., Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC–London: Duke University Press, 1991), 107Google Scholar and Dawisha, Karen, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46–7.Google Scholar
28 Regarding Moldova, see Dima, Nicholas, From Moldavia to Moldova: The Soviet–Romanian Territorial Dispute (Boulder, Co: Westview, 1991).Google Scholar
29 Djordjević is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
30 See Djilas, Aleksa, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 128–33.Google Scholar
31 For example, note the conclusions in Rothschild, Joseph, East Central Europe between Two World Wars (thereafter Rothschild, Europe) (Seattle; WA: University of Washington Press, 1974), 278ff.Google Scholar
32 For Kardelj's important role, see Cynthia, W. Frey, ‘Yugoslav Nationalisms and the Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty’, East European Quarterly, Vol. 10, no. 4 (1976), 444ff.Google Scholar; cf. Banac, Ivo, ‘Political Change and National Diversity’, in Graubard, Stephen R., ed., Eastern Europe…Central Europe…Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 145–64.Google Scholar
33 Croan is Professor of History, and holds the Chair of Soviet and East European Studies, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
34 From the Polish point of view these contacts are discussed in the recent volume, Czubiński, Antoni, ed., Droga niemców do ponownego zjednoczenia państwa, 1949–1990 [Germany's Path to a Re-United State, 1949–1990] (Poznań: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1991).Google Scholar Cf. Bromke's, Adam articles in Poland: The Last Decade (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1981), 118–37.Google Scholar The Church's role is developed in Monticone, Ronald C., The Catholic Church in Communist Poland, 1945–1985: Forty Years of Church-State Relations (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1986), 39ff.Google Scholar
35 Halecki, Oskar, Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York: Ronald Press, 1952).Google ScholarSeton-Watson, Hugh, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967 [1945]).Google ScholarMacartney, C. A. and Palmer, A. W., Independent Eastern Europe (New York: St Martin's Press, 1962).Google ScholarPalmer, A. W., The Lands Between: A History of Eastern Central Europe since the Congress of Vienna (London, 1970).Google Scholar
36 Polonsky, Antony, The Little Dictators: The History of Eastern Europe since 1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Rothschild, Europe.Google Scholar
37 Okey, Robin, Eastern Europe, 1740–1980: Feudalism to Communism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
38 Sugar, Peter F. and Treadgold, Donald W., eds., A History of East Central Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1974 ).Google Scholar
39 Rothschild, Joseph, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
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