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)

In this episode, we’re joined by Rok Stergar, Associate Professor at the University of Ljubljana and historian of the First World War, Nationalism and the Habsburg Empire in the long nineteenth century, to discuss the repercussions of Austria-Hungary’s collapse in the territories that now form the modern Republic of Slovenia. As well Slovenes, prior to the First World War, a politically and economically strong, and rather numerous German-speaking community also lived in these lands. With the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy, and this area's incorporation into the newly founded Kingdom of Yugoslavia in December 1918, however, these local Germans suddenly found themselves the primary target of Slovene nationalist reprisals. As Stergar demonstrates, nowhere was this more apparent than in the sphere of public administration. Throughout the immediate post-war years, the new Yugoslav authorities conducted a series of institutional purges aimed at removing Germans and other non-Slovenes from all aspects of political life. This systematic persecution quickly expanded into the wider public sphere with cultural and educational institutions being forcibly appropriated without regard for any enshrined constitutional protections. "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, Morgane Labbé, Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, discusses the role of statistics and maps within Eastern and Central European nation-building. She emphasizes the need to consider the historical rise of statistics as a form of mathematical science used to legitimise the nation and its boundaries. Morgane also highlights how this tradition gave rise to the symbolic significance of the national census among the new states that emerged across this region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1920s, censuses not only became a tool used to legitimise the new nation-state via numerical dominance but mechanisms of mass mobilisation and mass participation in the process of nation-building. In practice, however, these censuses more often recorded a broader diversity of belonging. This, in turn, gave rise to a form of administrative categorisation that would always take place afterwards and focus on recoding or ignoring these responses, reflecting the real “fabric” of what actually constituted national majorities and minorities. "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, Barbara Warnock, Senior Curator and Head of Education at The Wiener Holocaust Library, and Elise Bath, the Library’s International Tracing Service (ITS) Archive Team Manager, discuss the marginalization and persecution of Roma and Sinti people before and during the Nazi period. Informed by archival resources held by the Library, including the first comprehensive research project conducted on the genocide against the Roma, and materials from the ITS Digital Archive, they also discuss the continued marginalization of Roma and Sinti people in the post-war era. "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) Image credit: Margarete Kraus, a Czech Roma survivor, photographed in the 1960s in East Germany by Reimar Gilsenbach. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections, © Reimar Gilsenbach

In this episode, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History at Northwestern University, talks to Oleksii Chebotarov, Postdoctoral Fellow at the New Europe College - Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest, about Jewish communities in the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and the challenges in framing this history. As the Romanov Empire expanded into what is today Ukraine and Poland, these newly incorporated territories included a sizable Jewish population, most of whom remained confined to these western provinces. Petrovsky-Shtern considers how, despite often representing the majority of residents in certain towns, Eastern Europe’s Jews have continued to be exclusively viewed through the lens of their proscribed minority status. By exploring this issue in closer detail, he also assesses how even small communities that ostensibly existed at the imperial peripherals displayed far greater social and cultural diversity and division than is often presented within more mainstream historiographies. This became even more complex when analyzing the transformation of the East European Jewish population and its changing roles within societies across the region, at a micro-historical level from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. These questions of historical framing are compounded by the no less complex and multi-faceted issue of national identity and ethnic belonging. A Jew living in the borders of the Russian Empire, for example, might not be viewed as a Russian Jew, while, until recently, a resident of Lviv or Kyiv would very rarely be labelled or self-identified as a Ukrainian Jew. "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) Image credit: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton University Press, 2014)

In this episode, Professor David Smith at the University of Glasgow discusses the minority aspect in the history and politics of the Baltic States. David suggests that the ‘commonality of fate’, rather than ethnic and demographic character, has made this region seem so culturally uniform in the popular imagination. Nowhere does this seem more apparent than in their modern history: having formerly been part of the Russian Empire until 1918, all three countries proclaimed and preserved their independence between the wars, only to be occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. Despite these similar historic trajectories, however, following the restoration of independence in 1990, widely differing demographic challenges have seen extensive divergence when it comes to determining contemporary minority policies on the ground. ‘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, Marcos Silber, Professor of Jewish History and chair of the Gotteiner Institute for the History of the Bund and der Jewish Labor Movement at the University of Haifa talks to Jan Rybak, Early Career Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism about the Jewish experience in early-20th century Eastern and Central Europe. Silber addresses some of the key questions relating to the experiences of persecution and exclusion in the region, notably Jewish demands for minority rights in relation to the ethnonationalist state-building projects that followed the end of the First World War and the collapse of the multinational empires. He also illustrates how discussion over the place of minorities in these newly created states related to the wider social histories of the region, especially pre-existing tensions between prevailing liberal paradigms of civil equality, the far from harmonious realities on the ground and the answers Jewish minority rights activists found in seeking to address these challenges. These demands for minority rights and national autonomy were not only key in ongoing efforts at finding a place for minorities in interwar Eastern and Central Europe, but remain an important historical means for understanding the dynamics of intercommunal relations in the more heterogeneous societies of our contemporary world. ‘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, Ágoston Berecz, Research Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, is in conversation with Alexander Maxwell (Victoria University of Wellington) on the increasingly fraught relationship between language, education and nation-building in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Kingdom of Hungary. Having gained extensive political autonomy within Austria-Hungary since its formation in 1867, in the closing decades of the Dual Monarchy's existence an increasingly nationalistic Hungarian state sought to impose a Magyar identity on its territory's populace. Unsurprisingly, language was viewed as key to this process. By 1900, the Budapest government had already passed a raft of policies targeting education while diminishing the public visibility of all other languages besides Hungarian. Nevertheless, as Berecz reveals, these state-building efforts were far from universally successful, or consistently applied, as local actors often ignored or exploited them in pursuit of their own interests. "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, Ulf Brunnbauer, Professor of History at the University of Regensburg and director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies talks to Petru Negură, Humboldt fellow at the Leibniz Institute, Regensburg about the categories of perception, as well as strategies for the inclusion and exclusion of interwar Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia's Muslim minorities. The historic “othering” of these minorities was broadly twofold, comprising ethnic and religious components. The case of the Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks is especially revealing with both Bulgarian and Greek nationalists and state agencies claiming they were “alienated” from their true identity (Bulgarian or Greek), having been forced to embrace Islam in the past. The state's mission would, therefore, be to bring these minorities back into the national fold. Emigration was another prominent theme insofar as it often represented part of the wider nationalising agenda deemed crucial for creating diaspora communities that would remain politically loyal to their respective homelands. This was especially relevant in the case of independent Serbia, and subsequently Yugoslavia after 1918. Both states also viewed emigration policies as a useful means of removing groups perceived as “a-national,” or of non-Slavic origin, such as the Kosovo Albanians. "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, Ulrich Schmid, Professor of Russian Culture and Society at the University of St Gallen, talks to us about Russian nationalist ideology and its place in contemporary Eastern European and international politics. Prof Schmid discusses how popular understanding of the Russian nation has evolved since imperial times, and what being Russian means in today’s multi-ethnic and multi-confessional context. Central to this are questions regarding Russia’s status as a Eurasian empire, its dealing with the tsarist and Soviet past, as well as the Russian state’s attempts at rewriting history. Prof Schmid shows how contested issues of language and identity are being politicized to the point that they have become a legitimizing factor in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. "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, Andrei Cușco, researcher at the “A.D. Xenopol” Institute of History in Iași, Romania, discusses the history of Bessarabia and its various minority communities, from the 19th century to the dissolution of the Russian Empire, and during the interwar period. Andrei analyzes this region from the perspective of a “contested borderland” disputed by both a Russian imperial and a Romanian national narrative. In this context, he shows how ethnicity was affected by the consequences of the post-imperial transition while revealing the continuities and discontinuities between the imperial and national regimes regarding ethnic communities and interethnic relations. "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)