Review: A History of Eastern Europe

A History of Eastern Europe by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this one up because I’ve dealt with some of the pressures of recent tensions by diving into deep family history. I believe I have identified my four-times great-grandfather as a merchant or public official who moved to the Bukovina region of modern-day Romania when that region came under Hapsburg empirical control in the 1780s or ’90s. In a slight way, I feel as if I’ve come to know him (and many of the 800-900 descendants I’ve uncovered with the help of various cousins) so I hoped that this series of lectures would give me a fuller context for his world.

There are parts here that do answer my particular question, and I did pay special attention to the Hapsburg’s 18th century expansion and the rising and falling fortunes of the Romanian state. As happens with a lot of things, though, I wound up getting drawn into things I didn’t expect.

Liulevicius is an academic, as am I, and he’s a skilled lecturer. I think he could probably use a little polish in the way he delivers a joke, but I am confident there are some (OK many dozens) who’d say the same about me. And his jokes are relevant since they represent a sustained way that Soviet-bloc citizens dealt with the gap between the reality they experienced and the propaganda the state produced.

Liulevicius’s themes are broad and flexible, but they do help orient the details of his account. He opens with the question of whether there really is a place called “Eastern Europe,” noting that many people within the region understand themselves as drawn more to Western or, at times, Russian influence.

We see states and empires rise and then fall. We see a hunger for mobility across the region, one that the two-generation reign of the USSR could slow but not stop.

In the way of good classes, this gives a deeper sense of its subject, and I feel more at home in the geography and cultures of the nations and peoples he describes.

If I started this as part of an escape from the tensions of the moment, though, I found myself getting drawn back to some of what I didn’t want to be thinking about.

Above all, I was struck by the persistent memory that the conservatives of my adolescence and young adulthood defined themselves by recollections of these conflicts. From Goldwater through McCain, the abiding fear was of Soviet power, of the power of an Eastern Europe that tried to influence us through subtle and direct ways.

One hard-to-understand feature of Trumpism – which may or may not be conservatism – is its acquiescence to Russian and authoritarian interests. We now have a President whose interests align uncomfortably with Putin’s, and no one on the right seems troubled by that.

There’s a strangeness in all that, a reminder that, as Liulevicius says, the ferment of Eastern Europe has a way of shaping the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not, Putin – whose authority comes in large measure through Russia’s ability to influence the region – has had much to do with bringing Trump to power and with challenging many of the institutional structures of the United States.

Anyway, thanks to Liulevicius for a stimulating class even though it gave me less on my Romanian ancestors than I hoped and then, for further insult, made it all the tougher to stay in my escapist mode.


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