Over the past decade right-wing populism has achieved unprecedented popularity across much of Europe. The first intimations came in 2010 when Viktor Orbán's Fidesz Party won a super-majority in alliance with Christian Democrats, gaining the power to reshape Hungary's legal framework. While the eurozone crisis then sparked the rise of left-wing anti-establishment movements across Mediterranean Europe, elsewhere populism exploded on the right. In the 2014 European parliamentary elections centrists lost seats to parties on the margins, and Fidesz extended its grip over Hungary. Over the next three years Law and Justice won elections in Poland with a campaign steeped in religion and euroscepticism; the United Kingdom shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union; Marine Le Pen of the National Front demolished conventional candidates in the first round of the French presidential elections; the anti-immigrant Lega joined a ruling coalition in Italy; and in Germany, Europe's largest country, the nationalist Alternative for Germany (Alernativ für Deutschland; AfD) entered parliament as the third largest party.

One day in December 2019 I knew something was badly amiss. Russian President Vladimir Putin had called a meeting with the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States – the vague post-Soviet association of former Soviet republics that semi-defer to Russia – in order to discuss history. Not just discuss: he actually brought a thick stack of archival documents to the meeting, which, he said, demonstrated certain truths about the history of the Second World War. These had allegedly been forgotten or perhaps deliberately ignored in the West. He then selectively cited from these documents (most, if not all, of which are well-known to historians) to prove that, effectively, the West, and especially Poland, were responsible for the war.

After the end of communism, foreign direct investment in Eastern Europe increased dramatically. In December 1990, the Austrian chain BILLA opened the first foreign-owned supermarket in Poland. I examine foreign-owned supermarkets as key spaces of encounter between West and East in which neoliberal ideas about urban space, everyday life, material consumption and retail were promulgated, contested and routinised. Examining coverage of the Warsaw BILLA shops in Gazeta Stołeczna, the local edition of the widely read and arguably most trusted daily newspaper in Poland, I draw from literature in consumer history as well as economic and urban geography alongside concepts from business and marketing to argue that local actors, and in particular the emerging independent press, helped naturalise neoliberal values about consumption and retail in early post-communism.

Transitional justice is typically perceived as a product of the third wave of democratisation, which came to the fore after the fall of the Iron Curtain, bringing along with it various mechanisms, from truth commissions and lustration procedures to national trials, leading to the creation of hybrid and international tribunals of global reach.1 Despite its obvious relevance, the aftermath of the Second World War is generally treated as a cursory prehistory in the transitional justice literature. With the exception of the Nuremberg trials, robust research on legal and extralegal ventures which characterised the first postwar decade remains largely disconnected from contemporary transitional justice concerns, and yet it offers a number of valuable lessons.2 Three recent publications which are the subject of this review are therefore a welcome intervention, highlighting the scope and depth, successes and fallacies of efforts to come to terms with the atrocious legacy of the Second World War in its immediate aftermath.

This article examines how Soviet Ukrainian cultural artefacts acquired anti-Soviet meanings between the 1970s and the 1990s. It explores the life and posthumous commemoration of the pop composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk through the prism of the history of emotion. Although Ivasiuk promoted his Ukrainian-language music on Soviet radio and television in the 1970s, he turned into a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule after his premature death. The article frames this anti-Soviet turn in Ukrainian popular culture as a rebellion against state-sponsored emotional norms. In contrast to the more widely studied nonconformist circles, Ivasiuk's life and afterlives illuminate the experiences of misfits who tried but failed to find happiness and self-fulfilment within the boundaries of mainstream Soviet society. For a brief moment in the late 1980s, memories of Ivasiuk fuelled new visions of Ukrainian identity which underpinned attempts to push the limits of permissible emotional expression in the Soviet Union.

This paper addresses an under-researched topic in Soviet post-war history. It is about institutional hierarchies in a newly annexed Western borderland based on recently disclosed archival materials from Chișinău (including ex-KGB and MVD) and Moscow depositories. In contrast to all-Union institutional practices, the Moldavian SSR's case study shows that the party was hardly a hegemonic institution in late Stalinism. Using kompromat and inside information, the political police (NKGB-MGB) controlled the party institution. In contrast to the Baltic republics, Soviet Moldavia was headed by weak first secretaries appointed with the connivance of local police. Agency is an essential variable in explaining the dynamics of institutional design and hierarchies in Soviet peripheries in late Stalinism. Political police's predominance in this period is explainable as Bessarabia – mostly part of Soviet Moldavia – was a contested territory between Romania and the Soviet Union and hence the need to establish a more repressive policy to counteract the mass expectations of a regime change. I also argue that the realities of the immediate post-war Soviet Moldavia do not fit the conclusions of a recent book on ‘substate dictators’ by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk (2020).

This special issue argues that historical work must take ‘the family’ seriously as an active participant in shaping historical change. The issue offers seven case studies from across the North to South and East to West of Europe, ranging from the 1940s until the present, and looking across authoritarian, liberal democratic, communist and fascistic systems. In all case studies, authors look ‘from below’ to show how individuals thought of themselves, in messy and complex ways, as living within ‘families’. This powerful yet shifting idea shaped people's social lives, political choices and activism. This introduction explores grand narratives of welfare and democracy in the twentieth century; offers a new working approach to analysis of family ‘agency’; and then summarises the collection's main findings around chronologies and geographies of change.

Studies of interwar travels from Europe to Russia tend to prioritise reactions to the Soviet Union. This article, in contrast, examines how travellers reflected on Europe in the mirror of Russia and focuses on the little-studied writing and reception of narratives by Andrée Viollis, Luc Durtain, Georges Duhamel and Alfred Fabre-Luce in the late 1920s. Through a comparative analysis shaped by recent histories of temporality, the article explores how encounters between Europe and Russia challenged assumptions on borders, time and history. Although Europeans are generally associated with a model of linear, evolutionary time, this case study reveals their engagement with competing models of time as linear, cyclical and salvational.

Initially admitted to the United Kingdom on a short-term visa, the disabled German student activist Rudi Dutschke applied for a student visa in the United Kingdom in 1970. His application was rejected on grounds of national security. Dutschke was one of the first aliens who made use of his right to appeal, but the closed material procedure applied in his case meant that critical evidence remained undisclosed. Far from being ‘simply a historical curiosity’, the Dutschke case powerfully illustrates how two social dynamics at the centre of the moral panic in the late 1960s – immigration and student protest – were linked and framed as a threat to the nation.

Morocco and Catalonia are often mentioned as key elements in the crisis of Spanish liberalism, but little attention has been paid to the relation of these conflicts with the global developments of the 1920s. In their effort to break from Spain, Rifi rebels and Catalan separatists resorted to the League of Nations and were supported by sympathisers in British India, the United States, Latin America and Europe. Both separatist attempts utterly failed, but their campaigns provide new insights into the global connections (and dis-connections) of anti-imperialist and sub-national movements during the ‘Wilsonian moment’, and the strategies they developed to project their domestic agendas to the international sphere.

Historians of modern Europe have long seen the tragic events of the Second World War in France as a major caesura in the history of that nation. But eighty years later, do the legacies of the war still help us understand postwar France and its political divisions? The five superb books under review make a strong case that the fracturing experiences of defeat, Vichy and the Resistance shaped some of the most important subsequent developments in France in ways that previous historians have failed to recognise. The developments identified by these authors include the waxing and waning of Resistance myths as part of a contested deportation memory landscape, an anti-authoritarian résistant psychiatry born in 1940 that went on to revolutionise French theories of alienation in the face of both Stalinism and postwar capitalism, and rural resistance to the state-led transformation of the countryside as part of France's postwar economic modernisation. Collectively they point to a larger takeaway for historians of postwar Europe: oppositional movements in France may resemble similar movements elsewhere in a Western context marked by Cold War tensions and, more recently, globalisation; but these protests are also always following a script haunted in part by the trauma of France's war years – a past that has not passed, even eight decades later.