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Twentieth-century Europe, especially Central Eastern Europe, has been largely defined by Russia and Germany. In this century, cultural and economic exchanges between the two countries were as active as the fires of hatred intense. The smaller states in between, with their unstable borders and internal minorities, suffered from the powers' alliances and their antagonisms. This volume of new research in political and cultural history examines the two powers' turbulent relationship, including the pre-1914 era of exchange and cooperation; the projects of modernity in post-revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany; the struggle for dominance over Central Europe in World War II; and mutual views of Germans and Russians after 1945. In the wake of the crucial events of 1989 and the transformation of German-Russian relations, it asks whether the configuration of Russian-German relations that once dominated twentieth-century Europe has now dissolved, leaving us to find new ways of cooperation between 'New Russia' and 'New Europe'.

1989explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations,1989describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.

ussia and Germany have had a long history of significant cultural, political, and economic exchange. Despite these beneficial interactions, stereotypes of the alien Other persisted. Germans perceived Russia as a vast frontier with unlimited potential, yet infused with an \"Asianness\" that explained its backwardness and despotic leadership. Russians admired German advances in science, government, and philosophy, but saw their people as lifeless and obsessed with order.Fascination and Enmitypresents an original transnational history of the two nations during the critical era of the world wars. By examining the mutual perceptions and misperceptions within each country, the contributors reveal the psyche of the Russian-German dynamic and its use as a powerful political and cultural tool.Through accounts of fellow travelers, POWs, war correspondents, soldiers on the front, propagandists, revolutionaries, the Comintern, and wartime and postwar occupations, the contributors analyze the kinetics of the Russian-German exchange and the perceptions drawn from these encounters. The result is a highly engaging chronicle of the complex entanglements of two world powers through the great wars of the twentieth century.

Winner of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe's two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler's Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis' genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin's Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

Shatterzone of Empires is a comprehensive analysis of interethnic relations, coexistence, and violence in Europe's eastern borderlands over the past two centuries. In this vast territory, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically widespread, multicultural region at several levels-local, national, transnational, and empire-and through multiple approaches-social, cultural, political, and economic-this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and how and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this specific region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands both past and present.

The phrase \"Cold War\" was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: \"We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.\" The Soviet Union, he wrote, was \"at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors.\" But as a leading historian of Soviet foreign policy, Jonathan Haslam, makes clear in this groundbreaking book, the epoch was anything but stable, with constant wars, near-wars, and political upheavals on both sides. Whereas the Western perspective on the Cold War has been well documented by journalists and historians, the Soviet side has remained for the most part shrouded in secrecy-until now. Drawing on a vast range of recently released archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe,Russia 's Cold Waroffers a thorough and fascinating analysis of East-West relations from 1917 to 1989. Far more than merely a straightforward history of the Cold War, this book presents the first account of politics and decision making at the highest levels of Soviet power: how Soviet leaders saw political and military events, what they were trying to accomplish, their miscalculations, and the ways they took advantage of Western ignorance.Russia's Cold Warfills a significant gap in our understanding of the most important geopolitical rivalry of the twentieth century.

This book compares the various aspects – political, military economic – of Soviet occupation in Austria, Hungary and Romania. Using documents found in Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian archives the authors argue that the nature of Soviet foreign policy has been misunderstood. Existing literature has focused on the Soviet foreign policy from a political perspective; when and why Stalin made the decision to introduce Bolshevik political systems in the Soviet sphere of influence. This book will show that the Soviet conquest of East-Central Europe had an imperial dimension as well and allowed the Soviet Union to use the territory it occupied as military and economic space. The final dimension of the book details the tragically human experiences of Soviet occupation: atrocities, rape, plundering and deportations.

As a force that had to serve two masters, both the Jewish population of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and its German occupiers, the Kovno Jewish ghetto police walked a fine line between helping Jews survive and meeting Nazi orders. In 1942 and 1943 some of its members secretly composed this history and buried it in tin boxes. The book offers a rare glimpse into the complex situation faced by the ghetto leadership and the Jewish policemen, caught between carrying out the demands of the Germans and mollifying the anger and frustration of their own people. It details the creation and organization of the ghetto, the violent German attacks on the population in the summer of 1941, the periodic selections of Jews to be deported and killed, the labor required of the surviving Jewish population, and the efforts of the police to provide a semblance of stability. The secret history tells a dramatic and complicated story, defending the actions of the police force on one page and berating its leadership on the next. A substantial introduction by distinguished historian Samuel D. Kassow places this powerful work within the context of the history of the Kovno Jewish community and its experience and fate at the hands of the Nazis.

The twentieth century began with a deep identity crisis of European parliamentarianism, pluralism, rationalism, individualism, and liberalism―and a subsequent political revolt against the West’s emerging open societies and their ideational foundation. In its radicalism, this upheaval against Western values had far-reaching consequences across the world. Its repercussions can still be felt today. Germany and Russia formed the center of this insurrection against those ideas, norms, and approaches usually associated with the West. Leonid Luks’s essays deal with various causes and results of these Russian and German anti-Western uprisings in twentieth-century Europe. The book also touches upon the development of the peculiar post-Soviet Russian regime that, after the collapse of the USSR, emerged on the ruins of the Bolshevik state that had been established in 1917. What were the determinants of the erosion of the “second” Russian democracy (after the first of February 1917) that had been briefly established following the disempowerment of the CPSU in August 1991, and that existed until the rise of Vladimir Putin? Further foci of this wide-ranging collection of essays include the specific ‘geopolitical trap’ in which Poland—constrained by its two powerful neighbors—was caught for centuries. Finally, Luks explores the special relationship that all three countries of Central and Eastern Europe’s ‘fateful triangle’ had with Judaism and the Jews.

Das insgesamt auf vier Bände angelegte Editionsprojekt erschließt die deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen in einem schwierigen und widersprüchlichen Zeitabschnitt ihrer Entwicklung. Vom Machtantritt Hitlers im Januar 1933 bis zum Beginn des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges im Juni 1941 werden diese anhand von Dokumenten aus einer ganzen Reihe deutscher und russischer Archive in all ihren Facetten dargestellt – Politik, Diplomatie, Wirtschaft, Militär, Wissenschaft und Kultur. Zu einem kleineren Teil werden auch bereits editierte Schlüsseldokumente wiedergegeben. Die Bände zeichnen sich durch eine zweistaatliche und multiarchivarische Perspektive aus. Der nun erscheinende 3. Band umfasst den Zeitraum April 1937 bis August 1939. Damit werden detailliert die Entwicklungen nachgezeichnet, die letztlich zum Abschluss des Molotov-Ribbentrop-Paktes führten. Durch den Einbezug der russischen Quellen in deutscher Übersetzung ist die Edition nicht nur für Historiker von Interesse, die sich im engeren Sinne mit den deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen beschäftigen, sondern für all jene, die die europäische Diplomatiegeschichte in den dreißiger Jahren insgesamt bzw. die Vorgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs erforschen.