European Modern History

‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the question ‘what was the logic and language of Soviet power?’ by shifting the focus away from Russian nationalism and onto Soviet identity. ‘Sovietness’ is explored via the newspapers, films, plays, and popular music of the era. Soviet identity, in relation to the outside world, provided a powerful frame of reference in the late‐Stalin years. ‘Being Soviet's’ most significant contribution lies in its novel answer to the question ‘How did ordinary citizens relate to Soviet power?’ It avoids the current Foucault‐inspired emphasis on ‘supporters’ and ‘resistors’ of the regime. Instead it argues that most Soviet citizens did not fit easily into either category. Their relationship with Soviet power was defined by a series of subtle ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Kotkin) that enabled them to stay fed, informed, and entertained in these difficult times. ‘Being Soviet’ offers a rich and textured discussion of those everyday survival strategies including rumours, jokes, hairstyles, music tastes, sexual relationships, and political campaigning. Each chapter finishes by exploring what this everyday behaviour tells us about the collective mentalité of Stalin‐era society. ‘Being Soviet’ focuses on the place of Britain and America within Soviet identity; their evolution from wartime allies to Cold War enemies played a vital role in redefining what it meant to be Soviet in Stalin's last years.

What role did the courts play in the demise of Germany's first democracy and Hitler's rise to power? This book challenges the orthodox interpretation of Weimar political justice. It argues that an exclusive focus on reactionary judges and a preoccupation with number-crunching verdicts has obscured precisely that aspect of trials most fascinating to contemporary observers: its drama. Drawing on untapped sources and material previously inaccessible in English, it shows how an innovative group of party lawyers transformed dry legal proceedings into spectacular ideological clashes. Supported by powerful party legal offices (hitherto almost entirely disregarded), they developed a sophisticated repertoire of techniques at the intersection of criminal law, politics, and public relations. Harnessing the emotional appeal of tens of thousands of trials, Communists and (emulating them) National Socialist institutionalized party legal aid in order to build their ideological communities. Defendants turned into martyrs, trials into performances of ideological self-sacrifice, and the courtroom into a ‘revolutionary stage’, as one prominent party lawyer put it. This political justice as ‘revolutionary stage’ powerfully impacted Weimar political culture. This book's argument about the theatricality of justice helps explain Weimar's demise but transcends interwar Germany. Trials were compelling not because they offered instruction about the revolutionary struggle, but because in a sense they were the revolutionary struggle, admittedly for the time being played out in the grit-your-teeth, clench-your-fist mode of the theatrical ‘as if’. The ideological struggle, their message ran, left no room for fairness, no possibility of a ‘neutral platform’: justice was unattainable until the Republic was destroyed.

It is a commonplace in biographies of Disraeli (later Lord Beaconsfield) that his attitude to the East and the Eastern Question is essential for understanding his complex persona and the most crucial period of his career, yet until now this topic has not been researched in detail. Disraeli and the Eastern Question now fills this gap, providing the first complete reconstruction of Disraeli's attitudes towards the East and the Eastern Question as a whole, from his early youth onwards, and using a wide range of primary sources, from Disraeli's private papers, correspondence, and novels, the manuscript collections of Queen Victoria and the prime minister's closest associates, to the minutes of parliamentary debates and the official correspondence of the Foreign Office, as well as Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Albanian documents. Blending a biographical approach with the history of ideas, Miloš Ković analyses Disraeli's role in the Eastern Crisis, at the Congress of Berlin, and after, to provide a full intellectual biography of his attitudes to the Eastern Question and how these affected the history of international relations in the late nineteenth century.

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 was a defining event of the twentieth-century. In nine short days, the centuries-old tsarist regime was overthrown and a chain of events was set in motion that led to the disintegration of the Russian empire and the rise of the Soviet regime. Yet even today, as we approach the centennial of the February Revolution—and twenty years after the opening of the previously inaccessible Russian archives—historians still lack firsthand contemporary accounts of what happened during those nine fateful days. This book presents for the first time the earliest known oral histories (interviews) of the February Revolution as told by ten of its leading participants shortly after the events, at a time when the outcome of the revolution was far from certain. The story of the interviews, which remained in private hands between 1917 and 2006, is presented in the introductory chapters. Each interview is prefaced by an introduction that includes a biographical note on the interviewee and the specific circumstances and significance of the interview, with textual and contextual annotations, placing this unique documentary collection in its wider historical context. The interviews are particularly useful in illuminating the role of the Duma Military Commission in neutralizing and defeating the forces of the old regime, the origins of the Petrograd Soviet, and the nature and workings of the so-called dual power arrangement between the Duma Committee and the Petrograd Soviet during the first days of the revolution. The book closes with an interpretive chapter that discusses the historical significance of the interviews and their broad implications for our understanding of the February Revolution.

Over the last two centuries and up to the present day, Eastern Europe's lands and peoples have conjured up a complex mixture of fascination, anxiety, promise, and peril for Germans looking eastwards. Across the generations, a varied cast of German writers, artists, philosophers, diplomats, political leaders, generals, and Nazi racial fanatics have imagined (often in very different ways) a special German civilizing mission in the East, forging a frontier myth that paralleled the American myths of the ‘Wild West’ and ‘Manifest Destiny’. Through close analysis of German views of the East from 1800 to our own times, this study reveals that this crucial international relationship has in fact been integral to how Germans have defined (and repeatedly redefined) themselves and their own national identity and culture. In particular, what was ultimately at stake for Germans was their own uncertain position in Europe, between East and West. Paradoxically, the East came to be viewed as both an attractive land of unlimited potential for the future and as a place undeveloped, dangerous, wild, dirty, and uncultured. Running the gamut from the messages of international understanding announced by generations of German scholars and sympathetic writers, to ambitions for imperialism and the violent racial utopia envisaged by the Nazis, German imaginings of the East represent a crucial, yet unfamiliar, part of the history of modern Europe, and one that remains fundamentally important today in the context of an expanded European Union.

The book traces the turbulent history of the borderlands that before World War constituted the frontier‐zones between the Austro‐Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and in the course of the twentieth‐century changed hands several times. It subscribes to the notion that internal socio‐economic cleavages and ethnic rivalries — the most common patterns to the East European landscape — were at the root of conflicts in the borderlands. However, its dominating thrust is predicated upon the notion that the borderlands' ethno‐cultural diversity was in basic conflict with the nationalizing policies of the states that dominated the region. In peacetime, when the state's control over all forms of social relations was unchallenged, it acted as the highest arbitrator, manipulating the conflicting claims of rival groups and maintaining relative stability in its domain. But in the time of crisis, when the state's resources became strained to the limit, suspicions of the groups deemed less loyal to the state blurred the concept of internal and external enemies and entailed the persecution of allegedly ‘corrosive’ ethnic elements. Simultaneously, state‐violence was sustained and exacerbated by popular participation and acquired its own destructive logic, mutating into a vicious cycle of ethnic conflicts and civil wars.

Although often viewed as ineffectual intellectuals, or a spent political force, Left Liberals had become the third largest party in German politics by 1914, and in the German Revolution of 1918–1919 it was Left Liberals who effectively wrote the new Weimar constitution. This book investigates Left Liberals in the locality, as well as at the national level, with case studies ranging from Kiel to Kattowitz. Overturning old notions of German liberalism as the helpless victim of mass mobilization and political polarization, it is central to understanding both increasing left liberal influence and support on the eve of the First World War, and why liberal values could not be consolidated after 1918. This study has powerful general implications for the history of imperial Germany, reassessing the role of political parties, public perceptions of politics, and the impact and character of the state.

The Assembly of Notables which met between 22 February and 25 May 1787 was a major turning point in French, even world history: it was the first link in an unbroken chain which led to the French Revolution which itself formed the template for the modern world. The reform programme which finance minister Calonne, with the full backing of Louis XVI, presented to a hand picked Assembly of Notables, had it been accepted, would have transformed France but not in an obvious way. For embedded in the origins of the French Revolution is this double paradox, that a process which ultimately delivered equality began with the defence of inequality by the Notables, who nevertheless by resisting the king's attempt to increase his power by introducing that same uniform equality started a process which culminated, for a short time at least, in greater liberty. The Notables were able to defeat Calonne because in 1787 (unlike 1789) liberty was prized higher than equality. Also they were united and disciplined whereas the government was divided. Moreover, Calonne's enemies in the ministry formed links with the Notables: Miromesnil, keeper of the seals, with the parlementaire Notables, Castries, the naval minister, with Necker's powerful faction. And the differences in the ministry were not simply factional (as is often assumed) but ideological and it was this which undermined the royal government as it entered its last crisis. For few ministers still believed in absolute monarchy: Castries, for example, advocated an aristocratic constitutionalism like England's, which was also the view of many Notables. In the light of modern scholarship and the latest archival information, the various facets of this seminal event which are often considered in isolation (the king, the royal council, the Notables, Necker and the public) are integrated into an analytical narrative interspersed with the Notables' critique of Calonne's measures as they were successively presented to them.

This book examines British attempts to wage political warfare in the countries occupied by Germany in the Second World War. It describes the slow construction of political warfare machinery in London in terms of two twin difficulties: Whitehall politics and fundamental doubts about what a successful war should have as its purpose. It then examines how political warfare operated as a semi-detached adjunct of diplomacy, and how it engaged with the development of armed or ‘active’ resistance in France, Denmark, Poland, and Yugoslavia. This is a study of British political imagination in a period when Britain still acted as a great power in control of her own decisions. The experience of near-defeat, however, left decision-makers with dilemmas about rhetoric and ideology as much as policy. Their refusal to resolve these dilemmas until pushed by events meant political warfare lacked the consistency and definition that might have given it greater force.