Course Content
Browse topics by week:
- Week 1. Introduction. Contested Borderlands in Eastern Europe before and during World War I: “Complex Frontier Regions”, Inter-Imperial Competition, and the “Shatterzone of Empires”
- Week 2. Entangled Histories in Eastern Europe: Transfers, Emulation, and Conflict in the Early 20th Century
- Week 3. Population Politics, Total Mobilization, and the “Dark Side of Modernity” at the Imperial Center and in the Borderlands: Social and Political Consequences of the War
- Week 4. Nationalizing Empires, Mobilization of Ethnicity, and “Enemy Aliens” during World War I: Variations and Trajectories of Imperial Collapse
- Week 5. Bessarabia between Russia and Romania: Competing Visions and Policies during War and Revolution
- Week 6. From Austrian Province to Russian National Territory (and Back?): Ethnicity, Loyalty, and Occupation(s) in Wartime Galicia
- Week 7. Bukovina in the Russian-Romanian-Austrian “Triangle:” A Borderland Divided, or the Uncertain Politics of Ethnicity during War and Occupation
- Week 8. Russia’s North-Western Borderlands: From “War Land” to Ethnic Mobilization under German Occupation
- Week 9. Russian Ukraine Between National Self-Determination, German Occupation, and Bolshevik Triumph: The Failed Experiment
- Week 10. After the Fall: Nation-Building, Challenges of Modernity, and Ethnic Strife on the Ruins of Empires
- Weeks 11-12. The Soviet “Affirmative Action Empire” vs. the “Empire of Nations:” Ethnicity without Nationalism in a (Post)Imperial Setting
- Week 13. Romanian Bessarabia and Soviet Transnistria: Two Competing Models of Nation-Building and ‘Alternative’ Modernity
- Week 14. ‘Conservative Revolution’ and Reactionary Modernism in Interwar Germany: Transfers, Entanglements and Radical Politics in Eastern Europe. Conclusions: Centers and Peripheries of European Modernity after the Great War
Complete Bibliography:
Required readings
- Bakhturina, A. Iu. Okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii: Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie i natsional’naia politika v gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny, 1914-1917 gg. [The Borderlands of the Russian Empire: State Administration and Nationalities Policy during World War I, 1914-1917]. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004.
- Bakhturina, A. Iu. Politika Rossiiskoi Imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny [Russian Empire’s Policy in Eastern Galicia during the Years of World War I]. Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2000.
- Balkelis, Tomas. War, Revolution, and Nation-Making in Lithuania, 1914-1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Baron, Nick, and Peter Gatrell, eds. Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924. London: Anthem Press, 2004.
- Bartov, Omer, and Eric D. Weitz, eds. Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
- Berger, Stefan, and Alexei Miller, eds. Nationalizing Empires. Budapest / New York: CEU Press, 2015.
- Cusco, Andrei. ”Russians, Romanians… or Neither? Mobilization of Ethnicity and ”National Indifference” in Early 20th-Century Bessarabia”, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, 1 (Winter 2019), 7-38.
- Daskalov, Roumen, and Diana Mishkova, eds. Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Volume Two: Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions. (Balkan Studies Library, Volume 12). Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2014.
- David-Fox, Michael, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, eds. Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2012.
- Eley, Geoff. “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923,“ in: Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1988, 205-46.
- Gatrell, Peter. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999 / 2005.
- Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
- Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations. Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2005.
- Holquist, Peter. “To Count, to Extract, To Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in: Terry Martin and Ronald G. Suny, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 111-144.
- Holquist, Peter. “Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905-1921,” in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 4, Nr. 3, Summer 2003, 627-652.
- Holquist, Peter. “The Role of Personality in the First (1914 – 1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina”, in: Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal, eds. Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010, 52-73.
- King, Charles. The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2000.
- Kotkin, Stephen. “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 2, No. 1 (2001), 111-164.
- Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Lohr, Eric. Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens During World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Lohr, Eric. “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” in: The Russian Review (Vol. 60, July 2001), 404-419.
- Lohr, Eric, Vera Tolz, Alexander Semyonov, and Mark von Hagen, eds. The Empire and Nationalism at War. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica Publishers, 2014.
- Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union (1923-1939). Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2001.
- Martin, Terry. “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” in: Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, Nr. 4 (1998), 813-861.
- Miller, Alexey. „Between Local and Inter-Imperial: Russian Imperial History in Search of Scope and Paradigm,” in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, 1 (Winter 2004): 7–26.
- Negură, Petru. Nici eroi, nici trădători: Scriitorii moldoveni și puterea sovietică în epoca stalinistă [Neither Heroes nor Traitors: Moldovan Writers and Soviet Power during the Stalinist Era]. Chișinău: Cartier, 2014.
- Prusin, Alexander V. Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914-1920. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
- Prusin, Alexander V. The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Rieber, Alfred J. The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
- Roshwald, Aviel. Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914-1923. London / New York: Routledge, 2001.
- Sanborn, Joshua A. “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Reexamination.” Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 267-289.
- Sanborn, Joshua A. “Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I,” in: The Journal of Modern History, (Vol. 77, June 2005): 290-324.
- Sanborn, Joshua A. Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Scharr, Kurt. “Die Landschaft Bukowina:” Das Werden einer Region an der Peripherie, 1774-1918. Wien & Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2010.
- Stockdale, Melissa K. “United in Gratitude: Honoring Soldiers and Defining the Nation in Russia’s Great War.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 459-485.
- Stone, David R. The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor. “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in: Terry Martin and Ronald G. Suny, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 23-66.
- Torrey, Glenn E. The Romanian Battlefront in World War I. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2011.
- Velychenko, Stephen. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917-1922. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.
- Von Hagen, Mark. War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914-1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.
- Woods, Roger. The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic. Houndmills / London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.