Eastern European History Research Paper

And yet the underlying importance of 1989 for history far exceeds its significance for the other social sciences, for it has given birth to the need to reconceptualize Eastern European history in an entirely new framework. ‘Never has an ideology and a system of power built on such vast pretensions and still greater human tragedies,’ it has been noted in reference to 1989, ‘fallen so ignobly as did the red star that sought to unite the lands from the gray shores of the Baltic to the azure coves of the Adriatic within a single allegiance’ (Banac 1992, p. ix). Although the degree of de facto control varied widely from country to country, one of the communist system’s greatest pre- tensions was its stated intent to impose a uniform way of viewing and interpreting the past.

In the short term, from the historian’s standpoint, the single most noteworthy aspect of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is the opening of previously closed archives. Unlike in Russia, where the old way of doing things continues to erect obstacles to archival access, the archives of Eastern Europe are now available to researchers with few if any restrictions. Formerly taboo topics from the interwar period can be studied fully. To take Czechoslovakia as an example, the result has been a monograph on the Republican (Agrarian) Party’s critical place in the democratic Czechoslovak political system between the wars (Miller 1999), a study of the Slovak nationalist movement’s place in the interwar state and society (Felak 1994), as well as the first English language study of Czechoslovak diplomacy during this period to be based on archival sources (Lukee 1996). The thorough coverage afforded to Czechoslovak interwar history is a model that could be applied easily to the history of the Baltic States, Bulgaria, and Romania (Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia have received better treatment already, especially in their own national historiographies).

Unlike the study of the interwar period, which more often than not entails grappling with traditional themes, the collapse of communism has cleared the way for new approaches to World War II and its immediate aftermath. Instead of simply positing the war as a prelude to the communist seizure of power in Eastern Europe, the attempt is made to draw a more nuanced picture. The gray hues produced first by collaboration with the Nazis and then by retribution against those deemed guilty of this sin make the conventional story of anticommunist struggle more complex and ambiguous (Deak et al. 2000).

Above all, the immediate post-1945 period, when communists seized power throughout Eastern Europe, and the four decades of communist rule itself can now be empirically researched in a manner that is free from ideological distortions. Not surprisingly, these years have attracted the greatest attention from Eastern European historians themselves. There have also been original and meaningful English-language contributions to the study of the post-1945 period (Kenney 1997, Connelly 2000). While there have been no great revelations from the archives that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the communist period, it is now possible to document just how diverse Eastern Europe became while remaining under Soviet influence. When narrating the history of Polish–East German relations, one historian aptly speaks of a ‘cold war in the Soviet bloc.’ While this is certainly the most extreme such case, the basic model obtains for all of Eastern Europe, where, after 1945, individual states sought to realize their own national aims within a common ideological framework (Anderson 2001). The concept of ‘national communism’ was first developed by political scientists to explain the variations that emerged in the Eastern European states following the death of Stalin in 1953. In the aftermath of 1989, this concept has acquired new relevance and salience. Thus, it is also now possible to explain, with the aid of source material, the similarities as well as the differences between the Eastern European communist states during the period of so-called high Stalinism, which stretched from 1948 49 to 1953 and witnessed the creation of something that, at least on the surface, approximated a monolithic, Moscow-controlled bloc. (The best source for English-language material on post-1945 Eastern Europe is the Cold War International History Bulletin.)

Independently of the topics addressed above, newer methodological trends have also made their mark on Eastern European history, though, for the time being anyway, they are less prominent in this field than elsewhere (Porter 2000, Todorova 1997).

Over the long term, the lasting impact of 1989 will lie close to the agenda of historians who are interested in the role of language and in the changes experienced by language over time. The collapse of communism has initiated a process that promises ultimately to render the very concept of Eastern Europe passe in any meaningful political and thus contemporary sense. The mix of factors driving the distinction has often changed from period to period, whereby foreign domination and perceived ‘backwardness’ have always played a central role. But the fundamental distinction between Eastern and Western Europe has been in existence since the Enlightenment, i.e., since the birth of modern notions of nationhood and statehood. As an Enlightenment thinker, Johann Wolfgang Herder stood out because he argued that the rights and prerogatives of modern nationhood should be extended to the stateless and usually ‘small’ Slavic nations of Eastern Europe.

Reminiscent of Herder’s understanding of self-determination, the demise of communism has opened the way for these same nations to define their statehood within the context of an expanding European Union, which represents an unprecedented supranational pooling of resources, as well as an expanding NATO, which brings with it an unprecedented Western security guarantee for Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the extension of state-creating nationalism into Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Central Asia means that the very notion of what constitutes Europe is now confronting a new and novel environment. Since all of the states sandwiched into the vast region between Germany and Russia will, presumably, one day join the European Union, the old East–West dichotomy may remain in place in civilizational and cultural terms for some time to come, but the stark political distinction between the two halves of Europe is already beginning to fade.

What does all of this portend for the field of Eastern European history? First of all, it confronts a growing need to formulate and answer questions that can be fit into a broader European framework. This is a tricky proposition, because it denotes a challenge to previously dominant assumptions about the region’s peculiarity. Second, the very concept of Eastern European history will, in all likelihood, fall by the wayside completely. In keeping with the trend towards regionalization within the European Union, the individual subcomponents of Eastern Europe, East Central and Southeastern Europe, together with the Baltics and Ukraine, will retain their usefulness as broader categories of historical research and thinking. However, the general decline in the number of monographs devoted to Eastern European historical subjects shows no sign of abating, just as interest in area-studies and linguistic training continues to diminish.

Bibliography:

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