BASEES 2023 Opening Keynote

Professor Gwendolyn Sasse (Centre for East European and International Studies - ZOiS, Germany)

'Quo vadis Area Studies amidst Russia‘s War against Ukraine?'

University of Glasgow

31 March 2023

In our final episode (for now), we talk to Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell Junior. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. Besides a long-standing reputation for having been an early exponent and pioneer of Soviet and Nationalist Studies as areas of historical inquiry, Professor Suny has also garnered international recognition for his work on the South Caucasus before and after 1917, most notably Armenia.

Surveying how these fields of study he originally championed have since developed following the end of the Cold War in 1991, Suny not only provides us with a comprehensive retrospective but also offers an eloquent rebuttal to critiques of having normalised Soviet domination while seeking to delegitimise national identities. Such perspectives represent these specialisms' failure to break from a Western-academic mooring and provide an effective counter-discourse to nationalist narratives. Nowhere is this better encapsulated than in the Republic of Armenia. Despite ongoing efforts at producing a more balanced picture, understanding of the Soviet past continues to be subsumed into wider notions of perpetual victimisation at the hands of external aggressors. Through this, Suny weaves together the key analytical throughlines explored in this podcast and illustrates the many challenges for those who study minority history.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this week’s episode, Petre Matei (Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania) talks to Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth University) about the history of the Roma in Romania, from the late 19th century to the present. Petre Matei argues for a more nuanced history of the Roma, questioning dominant narratives of their persecution, deportation, and mass murder that tend to focus on the level of the state and/or of a monolithic Romanian nationalism by factoring in the local dimension, which in many cases was decisive in determining who was deported and who was not. He also emphasises the importance of seeing the Roma not exclusively as victims (of slavery, genocide, the Holocaust), but also as active agents partly shaping their own history – if not in circumstances of their own making. The discussion concludes by considering the educational potential of initiatives that examine both the local dimension of the Holocaust – and point out that it did not happen ‘elsewhere’ – and instances of Roma political mobilisation and resistance, in Romania and beyond.

Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania: https://www.inshr-ew.ro/proiecte/

The Forgotten Genocide. The Fate of the Sinti and Roma: https://romasinti.eu/

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this podcast, Timothy Blauvelt of Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, in conversation with Francis King of the University of East Anglia's East Centre, considers the early years of Soviet Abkhazia and its well-connected leader, Nestor Lakoba. The discussion ranges over Lakoba's role in the revolution, his career as the indispensable Bolshevik figure in Soviet Abkhazia, and what his story reveals about nationality policy and personal patronage in the pre-war USSR. It touches on themes considered at greater length in Timothy Blauvelt, Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom. The Trials of Nestor Lakoba (Routledge, 2021).

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

Jakub Beneš, Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, joins us to discuss the role of peasant communities and anti-urban sentiment in the socio-political landscape of Austria-Hungary, its successor states and the independent Balkans. Challenging earlier characterisations of the peasantry as inherently reactionary, Jakub considers how the growth of the modern metropolis gave rise to more distinctive forms of rural identity. Alongside greater political and cultural agency, this was accompanied by an increasing sense of alienation from the state and urban elites, predicated on majority fears of 'becoming a minority' in one's own land.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this episode, Austin Charron (University of Wisconsin-Madison, https://www.austincharron.com/) and Oleksandr-Martin Kysly (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) discuss the experiences of the Crimean Tatars before the Second World War and their forced deportation to Central Asia and Siberia in 1944. Our guests also consider the Crimean Tatars’ return to Ukraine from exile, following the lifting of the ban on their return in 1989, placing the so-called “Crimean Tatar problem” in the broader context of late-Soviet national policy and the subsequent challenges faced by the new Ukrainian government in the early 1990s. In addition, they also consider allegiances and the contested nature of Crimean Tatar affiliation to Ukraine in view of Russia's occupation of Crimea since 2014.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

In this episode, Natalia Aleksiun, Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, discusses the social dynamics of interethnic relations in interwar Poland, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. One of the characteristics discussed is the double marginalisation of Jewish women, which made them more susceptible to discrimination regarding education, professional choices and family life. Focusing on her numerous studies of Jewish communal life in Eastern Galicia, Professor Aleksiun explores what she calls “intimate violence”, showing how those who survived the Holocaust came to perceive the question of local collaboration and assistance when attempting to make sense of their strained relations with people whom they had known before the war. The episode also considers the impact of immediate post-war developments, examining how Poland’s newly established Communist regime shape subsequent patterns of popular and state antisemitism through its encouraging of Jewish mass emigration.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

Photo credit: Yad Vashem Archives

In this episode, Catherine Wanner, Professor of History, Anthropology and Religious Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, and Julia Buyskykh, Research Fellow at the Institute of History of Ukraine (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) and co-founder of the Centre for Applied Anthropology, discuss religious minorities in Ukraine and Poland. Drawing upon their long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Greek Catholic and Protestant communities Wanner and Buyskykh suggest the need to rethink how religious “minorities” should be framed within academic and public discourse. While Greek Catholics in both Ukraine and Poland, for instance, may represent a minority in purely numerical terms, this is historically outweighed by their public visibility and extensive influence across the civic, cultural, religious and political spheres. Moreover, alongside Lutherans, Baptists and other protestant groups, the Greek Catholics have started to reengage with their ancestral, denominational and territorial legacies, from which they had previously grown distant during the Communist era. Wanner and Buyskykh also discuss the role of religion and religious communities in view of Russia’s aggression on Ukraine.

More information: www.wglivedreligion.org ; https://duh-i-litera.com/bookstore/antropologija-religi-porivnjalni-studi-vid-prikarpattja-do-kavkazu

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

Photo credit: Greek Catholic memorial pilgrimage to the mountain of Zjavlinnia (Apparition) near Fredropol, Subcarpathia province, Poland, August 2018. Photo by Julia Buyskykh

In this episode, Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust History at Brandeis University talks to Jan Rybak, Early Career Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. For several decades, Professor Polonsky has been at the forefront of Polish Jewish historiography. Having grown up in Apartheid South Africa, he came to Poland to study authoritarianism and dictatorship, realising that Polish history cannot be fully understood without being able to fully comprehend the legacy of Poland’s Jewish heritage or its historic culture of antisemitism and chauvinistic nationalism. Drawing upon his experiences as both an anti-Apartheid activist and campaigner against the regime in Poland, Polonsky considers how a deeper understanding of domestic factors within such widely differing national contexts can help with reassessing Polish-Jewish history.

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)

Among the many challenges facing the new, or enlarged, nation-states that arouse on the territories of the former empires of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe in 1918, few were as vexing or complex as the minorities’ question. During the First World War, both the Entente and Central Powers attempted to win the loyalties of various ethnic minorities across the region by exploiting societal discontent and promising recognition or even outright sovereignty. At the same time, political elites had worked to kindle patriotic feelings and nationalistic pride among their fellow countrymen, embracing popular slogans of self-determination while demanding independence, or unity, with their respective national ‘homeland’ following the war.

Organised in collaboration with the Leibniz-Institut für Ost- & Südosteuropaforschung, this roundtable considers how this sequence of historical contingencies shaped and defined the identities of many communities who found themselves living as national minorities after 1918. Focusing on the interwar Kingdom of Romania, a country that experienced sudden and dramatic diversification with the expansion of its borders following the Great War, our panellists assess the political, cultural and economic factors through which these identities were both constructed and contested.

Roundtable participants: Anca Filipovici (Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Christopher Wendt (European University Institute in Florence), Giuseppe Motta (Sapienza University of Rome) and Petru Negură (Leibniz-Institut für Ost- & Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg).

"Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary. The co-conveners of the Study Group are Olena Palko (Birkbeck) and Samuel Foster (University of East Anglia)