About Eastern Europe: Notes on Mikanowski (2023)

Over the course of my career I have become increasingly cognizant that the field of “transition economics” is becoming a subset of economic history. Moreover, the geographical domain of my expertise — Eastern Europe — may no longer exist.

At first this was a worry. I do not see myself as a historian, and I do not want to become irrelevant. But I am buoyed by books like Jacob Mikanowski’s, which demonstrate continued interest in the topic, and the region. There is a even a hint that a “post” transition narrative is still to be written, and I am beginning to notice some explicit parallels with other regions around the world today.

In this essay, I intend to gather some notes on three themes from Goodbye Eastern Europe. These are not intended to summarise the book, or constitute a review. They are simply a reflection on (i) the legacy of communism; (ii) how Eastern Europe resembles the Middle East; (iii) anti-semitism.

The legacy of communism

To what extent is Eastern Europe defined by its shared history of communism? I believe the answer is a lot, but not entirely.

Mikanowski calls communism “the glue that held it together” and made Eastern Europe “a tangible presence” (p.xvi). But he also notes that “its people have long dreamed of a sudden, transformative leap into the future” (p.xix). This implies that there were cultural and possibly even ideological foundations for what communism subsequently wrought. Mikanowski’s history of the region starts, as you would expect, with the written record. The deep rooted pagan peoples became superseded by Christians, Jews, and Muslims but an indelible mark of superstition and fatalism remained. Within this context, communism can be seen as one of many great religions that offered an irrational hope, it “didn’t just address present concerns; [it] foretold the coming of a new world” (p.212).

In practice, communism brought the entire region into the same orbit and “By 1950, all of Eastern Europe belonged to a single integrated social, political, and economic system” (p.241). This system was defined by:

• A one-party state
• A command economy
• Leadership that was dependent on Stalinism (with Yugoslavia the notable exception)

Thus “for as long as Stalin was alive, these satellite countries acted like provinces of a single gigantic state” (p.241). Academics interested in colonialism and empire should take note.

After Stalin, things changed. Socialism in practice became what Milan Simeck referred to as a more “civilized violence”, where police interviews were conducted in daylight, at an appointed time and imprisonment became a bureaucratic process rather than an ad hoc event (see p.265). But Eastern Europe as a concept becomes very clear. It’s the countries that lay beyond the Iron Curtain.

Vladislav Zubok pins the dissolution of the USSR on Mikhail Gorbachev’s flawed leadership (I wrote about his book, Collapse, here). Mikanowski suggests a deeper reason. It wasn’t Gorbachev per se who was flawed, but the fact that he represented a different generation. “Soviet power lasted long enough to create one generation of leader born into the system. Once that generation — with Brezhnev at its head — began to die out in the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was soon to follow” (p.287). The notion that communism was flawed, and doomed to fail is retained. But no one doubts that Gorbachev was sincere, and intended Glasnost and Perestroika to work. I think the point is that he was trying to solve an unsolvable problem, and his willingness to “open up” exposed that contradiction. As Mikanowski says, “Glasnost and perestroika did not revive the Soviet economy. What they did, however, was remove fear as one of the primary supports of the Soviet system” (p.289).

Indeed, the consequence was not only the end of communism and the start of transition, but a fundamental transformation in people’s daily lives: Czech people vowed to “live in truth” (p.292).

Parallels with the Middle East

I have recently read several histories of the Middle East, and I was struck by the fact that Mikanowski’s attempt to define the region beyond the legacy of communism resonates.

Some of the key concepts that make Eastern Europe distinct, are:

• An area in between, a “borderland between the rival Christendoms of Rome and Byzantium. The dividing line between Orthodox and Catholic” (p.15); “the place where the Catholic church meets its Orthodox counterpart. It was the border between Rome and Constantinople, Latin and Greek, Gothic Spires and wooden domes” (p.42). This territorial factor is particularly relevant given the clash of empires on either side (West vs East, or Arabs vs Persians), “Eastern Europe is a land of small countries, wedged between great powers” (p.318). As a result, “warfare on the fringes of empires created a constant churn of captives and refugees fleeing across the frontiers” (p.129).
• Of subjugation: “To be Eastern European was to have had the experience of being governed from far away… it was a region defined by being part — but never at the centre — of empires” (p.79). But this presents an interesting dichotomy. Where there was a strong central state, “the machinery of the state worked like a giant steam roller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found” (p.112) but where there wasn’t, “these empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing” (p.112). Consider the following quote about the freedoms that existed within the Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg empires: “Eastern Europe tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowski’s birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans.” (p.112) Furthermore, the Eastern European empire served as “an arena for plunder, a strategic buffer zone, and a captive economic market” (p.286) to the USSR. Such regions exist within the occupied territories today.
• A lack of agency. In Eastern Europe “plenty of things happened to them, but not enough has been done by them” (p.310). A parallel could be drawn to Palestine. And yet — ironically — one of the myths of transition was that it was imposed by the so-called “Washington Consensus” of western policy advisors. Shock therapy was in fact, to a significant extent, attributable to the ideas and execution of local politicians.
• Of Diversity: the “diversity of language, or ethnicity, and above all, faith.” (p.xvi) “Vilnius was a true Tower of Babel” (p.115) containing a mosque, synagogue and churches for five separate denominations in a town of just twenty thousand. Hotel concierges in Czernowitz spoke five languages, and Timisoara had multiple tri-lingual newspapers (p.117). A historic account needs to be careful to place these factional challenges within a proper context. While “segmentation, rather than integration, tended to be the rule” (p.118), there were often healthy rivalries, such as between the three choral societies that reflected the major ethnic groups of Sarajevo in 1905 (p.118). There is also a certain distinctiveness — “Eastern Europe abounds in such odd pockets of people — isolates, breakways, and geographic exceptions” (p.125).
• A yearning for freedom, but freedom defined as “ruling in a language of their own people, over their own territory” (p.xix) and — because of diversity — “more often than not… the fight for independence required a fratricidal struggle against impossible odds” (p.xix).
• Nationalism, which “appealed especially to those who felt themselves powerless or adrift and sought a way to make themselves count on some larger ‘world scale’” (p.159). A two-state solution is the only serious proposed compromise for the Middle East, but this relies on the interactions between formative nations. And yet, “Eastern Europe was a constant headache for diplomacy, and the main culprit was nationalism” (p.150). In Europe in particular, language plays an important role: “their equation of language and nation was a rather peculiar idea and a very Eastern European one”. [Language] “ was the very soul of the nation” (p.152). And this might not be because of the importance of language: the Czech and German culture were similar on so many other dimensions that it was only language that set them apart, serving as a suitable focal point for an emerging Czech nationalism (see p.154). To US or British academics this nationalist vehemence can seem striking, and perhaps even irrational. But that may reflect the confidence of having one’s own national identity so stable, dominant, and irrelevant. Eastern Europeans have been legitimately “haunted by the threat of cultural extinction.” (p.169)

Maps like the one below reveal more than they declare.

The Jews

There is a strong Jewish history in Eastern Europe: “Nowhere else was Jewish life as plentiful, as varied, or as thickly interwoven with its surroundings” (p.34). What I find particularly interesting, is the extent to which Jews suffered from a broader distrust of strangers, impersonal economic exchange, and capitalism, “Commercial intermediaries occupied an ambiguous position in their respective societies… Their presence was an economic necessity, yet they were often feared, mistrusted and resented” (p.122). By challenging historic customs and monopoly privileges, Jews “posed an obvious threat to Russia’s urban merchants and craftsmen, whose position were often hereditary and kept free from competition by state and guild law” (p.95).

Mikanowski argues that Eastern European’s don’t have a “deeply rooted sense of shared destiny” and it makes sense to consider how meaningful the label is outside of a Cold Ward context. It seems clear that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are fundamentally different types of country to Albania or North Macedonia, which are in turn very similar to Greece.

The German Permanent Committee on Geographical Names provides 6 main european regions and it seems reasonable to consider “Southeast” as a uniquely warranted addition to a simple North/East/South/West and Central designation.

The distinction between cultural proximities and state borders reveals three key areas of ambiguity. The first is whether the Mediterranean coast of France constitutes Southern or Western Europe. The second is how much of Romania and Serbia belong in Southeast rather than Central. The third is which parts of Ukraine cross from Eastern to Central. There will be no map that neatly designates geographical boundaries between peoples so historically interlinked, but integrating Poland and Hungary with Germany and Austria; Albania and Bulgaria with Greece; and recognising that Belarus and Ukraine constitute a closer bond with Russia than Poland and the Czech Republic — indeed that some countries have gone from the East, and that Russia’s zone of influence has shrunk — is notable.

It should be clear that I very much enjoyed reading this book, and that Mikanowski has produced something sensitive and also expansive. The combination of family history with broad sweeps of history provide an emotional grounding without becoming sentimental or self-involved. He even makes a funny joke:

“this deed later earned [the author’s grandfather] a brief mention in the third (and in my opinion, best) volume of the History of the Working Class of the Belarusian Worker’s Republic.” (p.256)

There’s always more volumes to be written!