Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.

Explores what does the life of Julia Warhola add to our understanding of her son, the artist Andy Warhol?

Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.

Russian painter, explorer, and mystic Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) ranks as one of the twentieth century’s great enigmas. Despite mystery and scandal, he left a deep, if understudied, cultural imprint on Russia, Europe, India, and America. As a painter and set designer Roerich was a key figure in Russian art. He became a major player in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and with Igor Stravinsky he cocreated The Rite of Spring, a landmark work in the emergence of artistic modernity. His art, his adventures, and his peace activism earned the friendship and admiration of such diverse luminaries as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Jawaharlal Nehru, Raisa Gorbacheva, and H. P. Lovecraft. But the artist also had a darker side. Stravinsky once said of Roerich that “he ought to have been a mystic or a spy.” He was certainly the former and close enough to the latter to blur any distinction. His travels to Asia, supposedly motivated by artistic interests and archaeological research, were in fact covert attempts to create a pan-Buddhist state encompassing Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet. His activities in America touched Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet with scandal and, behind the scenes, affected the course of three US presidential elections. In his lifetime, Roerich baffled foreign affairs ministries and intelligence services in half a dozen countries. He persuaded thousands that he was a humanitarian and divinely inspired thinker - but convinced just as many that he was a fraud or a madman. His story reads like an epic work of fiction and is all the more remarkable for being true. John McCannon’s engaging and scrupulously researched narrative moves beyond traditional perceptions of Roerich as a saint or a villain to show that he was, in many ways, both in equal measure.

This is the story of a man who tried to resurrect the spirit of democratic life. He was born into a time of chaos and absurdity, and he took it as his fate to carry a candle into the night. This is his story and the story of many others, the writers, artists, actors, and philosophers who took it upon themselves to remember a tradition that had failed so miserably it had almost been forgotten. Václav Havel (1936-2011), the famous Czech dissident, intellectual, and playwright, was there when a half million people came to Wenceslas Square to demand an end to Communism in 1989. Many came to hear him call for a free Czechoslovakia, for democratic elections, and a return to Europe. The demonstrators roared when he spoke. "Havel to the castle," they chanted - meaning Havel for president. And a few weeks later, Havel became a most unusual president. He was sometimes misunderstood and not always popular, but by the time of his death in 2011, the world recognized Havel as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. Born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in Prague, Havel was the constant subject of attention and an artistic eccentric in a family of businessmen. A young Havel and his family were cast by the Communist takeover as class enemies. Havel traveled a dark road that, ironically, provided the experiences he needed to reconnect not only to his own "ground of being" but to the traditions of civic society. This biography is the story of Havel's inward journey in his underground years and thus the story of how Havel, the outsider, became the ultimate insider as president of the nation. In this intimate and sweeping portrayal of Havel, David Barton reveals the eccentricities of the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.

After crushing the Polish Uprising in 1863-64, Russia established a new system of administration and control. Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864-1915 investigates in detail the imperial bureaucracy’s highly variable relationship with Polish society over the next half century. It portrays the personnel and policies of Russian domination and describes the numerous conflicts between the Tsarist officialdom and the local population. Presenting case studies of both modes of conflict and cooperation, Malte Rolf replaces the old, unambiguous "heroic Poles vs. evil Russians" narrative with a more nuanced account and does justice to the complexity and diversity of imperials encounters of Poles, Jews, and Russians in this contested borderland. At the same time, it highlights the process of "provincializing the center," in which the erosion of imperial rule in the (Polish) borderlands facilitated the demise of the authority of the monarchy in the capital itself.

Like most cities, Poland's Krakow developed around and because of its favorable geography. Before Warsaw, Krakow served as Poland's capital for half a millennium. It has functioned as a cultural center, an industrial center, a center of learning, and home for millions of people. Behind all of this lies the city's environment: its fauna and plant life, the Vistula River, the surrounding countryside rich with resources, and man-made change that has allowed the city to flourish. In Krakow: An Ecobiography, the contributors use the city as a lens to focus these social and natural intricacies to shed new light on one of Europe's urban treasures. With chapters on pollution, water systems, the city's natural network with the surrounding area, urban infrastructure, and more, Krakow demonstrates how much an environmental perspective can bring to the understanding of Poland's history and the challenges presented by the heritage of the past.

Between 1890 and 1893, Ignaty Potapenko published a number of works (including Not a Hero) in which he presented the Russian intelligentsia with a new role model, the “mediocre but commonsensical man” whose diligence and steady devotion to the improvement of society are depicted as being more productive than the reckless heroism of the regime’s most outspoken, and often violent, opponents. Not a Hero introduces the twenty-first-century reader to an important debate of the pre-revolutionary period, a debate that is still relevant today: how to bring about social change within an oppressive and ossified political system without resorting to violence.

Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of post-war development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, choice local edifices were resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged as simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where “redemptive reconstruction” had proven less vigorous, sometimes because citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized borders, three cities under three rival regimes shared a common history after Hitler—both in terms of top-down “redemptive reconstruction” and residents’ efforts to make home in their city as it shifted around them.

Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902-80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups - Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism - yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist’s own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen’s career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.

In this 19th century Russian social novella, two contrasting characters - one a western-educated intellectual, the other a hidebound country squire - find themselves thrown together on a long cross country journey in a primitive but sturdy carriage - a tarantas. Their shared observations as the troubled panorama of the Russian countryside rolls past is the basis for this commentary on the country’s prospects for social change. Renowned translator Michal R. Katz offers the first new translation of this overlooked novella since the late 1800s, shortly after original publication.

One of the iconic images of WWII was a Russian soldier raising a red flag atop the ruins of the German Reichstag. Award-winning author Hicks explores how the Soviets, and then Putin, have used this image and the banner itself to build a remarkably powerful mythology of Russian greatness.

John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in over 500 years, and the first Slavic pontiff in history. Shortly after his election to the papacy in 1978, he launched a series of visits to his native Poland, then in the midst of dramatic social changes that heralded the end of Communism. In this groundbreaking book, James Ramon Felak carefully examines the Pope’s first four visits to his homeland in June of 1979, 1983, 1987, and 1991 in the late Communist and immediate post-Communist period. Careful analysis of speeches, press coverage, and documents from the Communist Party, government, and police show how the Pope and the Communist authorities engaged one another. Felak gives equal attention to John Paul’s political and religious messages, highlighting how he astutely maneuvered between the rising hopes of the Polish people and the dangerous fears of a dying regime. The Pope in Poland recreates and explicates these dramatic visits that played a major role in the collapse of Communism in Poland as well as laid out a papal vision for Poland’s post-Communist future.

This volume brings together a diverse group of young scholars from North America and Europe to explore the history and memory of Germany’s fateful push for power in the Balkans during the era of the two world wars and the long postwar period. Each chapter focuses on one or more of four interrelated themes: war, empire, (forced) migration, and memory. The first section, “War and Empire in the Balkans,” explores Germany’s quest for empire in Southeast Europe during the first half of the century, a goal that was pursued by economic and military means. The book’s second section, “Aftershocks and Memories of War,” focuses on entangled German-Balkan histories that were shaped by, or a direct legacy of, Germany’s exceptionally destructive push for power in Southeast Europe during World War II. German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century expands and enriches the neglected topic of Germany’s continued entanglements with the Balkans in the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and today.

Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin from August 1991 to January 1996. During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, he was present when tanks moved in to seize the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to address the crowd assembled. He then departed to Paris to muster international support and, if needed, to form a Russian government-in-exile. He participated in the negotiations at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in Belazheva, Belarus where the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to secede from the Soviet Union and form a Commonwealth of Independent States. Kozyrev’s pro-Western orientation made him an increasingly unpopular figure in Russia as Russia’s spiraling economy and the emergence of ultra-wealthy oligarchs soured ordinary Russians on Western ideas of democracy and market capitalism.

Rising Subjects explores the change of the public sphere in Russian Poland during the 1905 Revolution. The 1905 Revolution was one of the few bottom-up political transformations and general democratizations in Polish history. It was a popular rebellion fostering political participation of the working class. The infringement of previously carefully guarded limits of the public sphere triggered a powerful conservative reaction among the commercial and landed elites, and frightened the intelligentsia. Polish nationalists promised to eliminate the revolutionary “anarchy” and gave meaning to the sense of disappointment after the revolution.