A bottom-up approach to the history of the region

Photo courtesy of Jacob Mikanowski

ADAM REICHARDT AND NINA PÁNIKOVÁ: We’d like to start by talking about how you came up with the idea to write the book. What were your motivations? What drew you to the region?

 JACOB MIKANOWSKI: It was a kind of voyage to write the book. It took many years and developed pretty slowly. Part of it is my background. I’m Polish by family. I grew up speaking Polish. My parents are immigrants from Warsaw. I grew up in a Polish-Jewish family and lived in America, but then moved back for a few years to live with my grandparents in Warsaw. Then I went to grad school for history. I was actually supposed to study Soviet history. I studied Russian in college, actually partly because I spoke Polish, so I thought it would be easy. But I got less interested, I was always pulled back towards Eastern Europe, the Eastern Europe which is not a part of Soviet history. And I was doing that at a time when I think interest in Eastern Europe, in America at least, was at an all-time low, before 2014 and Russia’s start of aggression against Ukraine. Then there was an absolute kind of nadir of popular and academic interest. So I was in graduate school and watching the ground vanishing under my feet in terms of jobs and interest. Yet, I was very passionate about this region. I thought what I was studying was incredibly interesting. And I thought what I had inherited with my family’s story, two world wars, the Holocaust, spies, guns, it was incredibly interesting. And there was very little audience for it. So ultimately I was leaving grad school to be a journalist. As a kind of last look back at what I’d been working on, I wrote an essay in 2017 called “Goodbye, Eastern Europe”, which was partly saying goodbye to the idea of Eastern Europe that was in the 1980s and 90s, when there was that high point of western interest. I actually had trouble publishing that essay, but it eventually came out and had a little bit of viral success, especially in Eastern Europe. I felt like it spoke to somebody. Then there was a slow process over five or six years of turning that essay into a fuller story.

Your book is called Goodbye Eastern Europe. I was wondering how did you decide about where to draw borders in such a region which is so vast, so different, but as you also go through the book, you find a lot of similarities. So why Eastern Europe? Especially despite the fact that you say at the beginning that there is no such thing…

It’s true. It is such an amorphous idea. I think it is hard to find people who self-identify as Eastern European. It’s something that you get ascribed to you once you leave. For me, some of it is related to emotion. There is this baggage that comes with being Eastern European outside the region, this cloud of stereotypes and misunderstanding that you can actually work with. That’s how I start when I am teaching students. When someone teaches about Western Europe, students already have an idea, a mental image of France, of Spain, of Germany… But when you’re teaching Eastern Europe, there is this void that you’re filling. So my approach was a big tent one. Everything between Germany and Russia, and essentially Finland and Albania. There is of course a risk with this approach. We have about 20 modern day countries, more or less. But there are some advantages to this approach as well. I found incredible commonalities from Estonia down to Albania, which seem on paper to have nothing in common in terms of religion and background, or economic development. If you go from Moldova to the Czech Republic, there are actually some historical experiences or styles of experiences and parallels of social organization, parallels in history, parallels in politics. It’s not a uniform region, but it’s given its uniformity by its diversity. It is the most diverse part of Europe. And that diversity is woven very deeply into the social fabric. We actually lost a lot of that diversity over the 20th century. I also think its distinct from continental Russia or places in the world that are like it, the Caucasus is kind of like it, but it’s quite unique within Europe, within European history. So it’s that whole belt.

You mentioned the research, how long did it actually take you to conduct the research and write the book? In many of the places that you write about you actually visit and you take the readers there, and we feel like we are there with you when you describe the scenery, etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the process of the research.

It was a long process, because it started with my essay. And only then did I start travelling. I was already pretty familiar with the region, especially with Central Europe. I spent years in Poland, I had done some reporting in Hungary and wrote a lot on Czech literature. So I started travelling beyond those parts. I did a couple of long trips by train and bus. Usually I’d start in Poland because I have family in Warsaw. I’d visit them and then get on trains and go to Ukraine and then down through Romania and across the Balkans, or through Budapest into Serbia and up through Bosnia. I try to visit places, not just capital cities. In every country I try to visit at least some place big, some place medium, some place very small, and then go to places that are resonant with the themes in the book. Some of the places I found I had never heard of and discovered on site. I did a long research trip to Albania, which I fell in love with and found completely fascinating. I had such a good time researching the book. Of course a lot of the research was in the library, a lot of it was reading novels, and then reading fiction, and then reading history, and then back and forth. But the travel was absolutely invigorating, fascinating, occasionally uncomfortable, but usually terrific.

I also wanted to add that in the book you really chose to tell the stories of these places also through people, many of whom were not really well known. Sometimes it was an emperor or king, but really you chose poets, writers or some marginal politician. I imagine that this also took you a lot of time, to find these stories…

I try to do a bottom-up approach instead of a top-down one. I think that works especially well in Eastern Europe because up to the 20th century, there was a long period of imperial domination of most of the region being run by one of three empires. The political history is happening in places like Vienna or St Petersburg. And I try to find the stories that pull you a bit away from there. Eastern Europe itself is a story of imperial expansion, imperial retreat, with Empress Catherine or Emperor Peter you get this narrative told from the centre, from the imperial capital. To avoid that, I try to tell it from people, including famous writers, but a lot of people who are completely anonymous to history. How did I find them? A lot of reading. A lot of times fiction was where I started. Reading a lot of fiction and then looking for the historical real-life versions of it. For example, there are these great books by a German writer from Transylvania named Gregor von Rezzori. And you read them and he gets you into the world of 1920s Czernowitz. And I’m like, this seems real. There’s this big football riot in the book. It seems to have a ring of truth to it. So I get into football history in early Romania. And it’s this incredible world of ethnically segmented rivalries. These towns in Romania would have two Jewish teams, a Zionist and an anti-Zionist one; a Polish team; a Romanian team; a Hungarian team; and depending on where, even a Serbian team. And they would all dislike each other, but play in these tournaments in this wonderful world of contained ethnic rivalry that’s simmering but in some ways peaceful, until it isn’t. I did a lot of that. You go back and you find the real life stories out of the fiction. So it was a fun process.

In the book you also tell the story through your family, which intersects with many of the interesting points in the region’s history. Can you talk a bit more about your family and how that fits in this book? Also, were there things that you discovered while you were writing this book personally about your family?

I was actually a little conflicted in how to use my family history in the book, because I didn’t want it to be a memoir or a family history. I wanted just a few moments of family history which illustrated bigger themes. I think I have a pretty interesting family history, which in some way is typical. Lots of people across Eastern Europe have family histories where there are divided loyalties, or they’re divided by ethnicity or religion or political orientation. My family is Polish Jewish. Both my parents are half and half. I had Polish Jewish grandfathers who survived the war, one fighting with the Red Army in Belarus, one in Central Asia and then back with the Polish army attached to the Red Army. They had lost most of their relatives in the Holocaust and married Polish women, ethnically Polish, but with backgrounds from Lithuania and Hungary. I already knew a fair amount of my family history. I knew those grandparents, I grew up with them in Warsaw, and I heard the stories going back to the 1920s and earlier. But there was a lot I didn’t know. A lot which was unsaid and unspoken at home. I found a lot out by pulling my grandfather’s personnel files from the Institute of National Memory and learned from the things that he wrote about himself in 1945. There were also Holocaust archives, especially from the Warsaw Ghetto. I had a lot of relatives who were in the Warsaw Ghetto, who mostly just disappeared. We don’t know what happened to them. But I discovered one aunt, Róża, who came up a few times in memoirs and in detail in that archive. And I found the story of her execution. Her last moments were witnessed by someone in a prison on Gęsia Street. And that’s something that I discovered that my parents did not know, or that their parents did not know.

I wanted to ask about what conclusions you came up with following the research in terms of the importance of identity and language. I had marked here that in the section on nations you write that “the age of nationalism was a golden age of forgery,” and then you go on and tell the interesting stories of how nations had to sometimes create backstories to help define themselves. Maybe you could share a few thoughts and reflections on this topic and this whole process of building the nation.

The story of nationalism is very important in Eastern Europe, and very connecting. There’s a shared style of nationalism across Eastern Europe. It’s quite distinct from Western European nationalism. It started as a cultural movement which turned into a political movement. And that pattern is almost everywhere in the region and goes back to the imperial history, circa 1800. Almost every square kilometre of Eastern Europe was ruled by an empire, Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman or Prussian. And across the 19th century, some of that starts disintegrating, first in the Balkans. But you have a world of peoples inside empires. The way the nationalist movement develops, in the Czech case for example, is paradigmatic. It begins as a movement of reclaiming culture in a very language-specific way, with building up the vocabulary. Even though anyone who wanted to learn about science philosophy would read it in German or they’d read it in French or Latin, depending on where you were. Despite this, you have to first strengthen the language, expand the language and then you expand the culture, expand the music. Once you do that, you start stretching into the economy, creating Czech beer or Czech institutions to rival the German ones. In the Bohemian lands a Czech-German rivalry emerged. The Czechs actually forged a whole kind of medieval epic history. In the Baltics they created them out of cloth or from bricolage or the revival, it’s a different process of finding narrative, finding language. And then after one, two or three generations, it turns into a political movement.

You mentioned all this beautiful diversity that you have seen in the region, especially at the end of the 19th century which finished with the two world wars. So I just would like to move us a little bit to the war that we are unfortunately experiencing in Europe right now. We are curious to hear from you and your take on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You mention it a bit in the epilogue of the book, but do you see it as a continuation of the story that you’ve been writing?

I was in the last phases of the last revisions when the invasion started. And so I faced a real dilemma because the war had started, in some ways it started in 2014, but this new war started. I had to think, how does this fit into my story? I also didn’t know where it was going. We remember those first weeks in February, the predictions were Ukraine will collapse, within weeks. And I was writing literally as it was happening, trying to determine how to balance the long view of a thousand years or a hundred years versus the short term of writing into an unknown future? I do think it’s a continuation in some ways, especially because Russia sees it as a continuation. It’s amazing to me how backwards looking Vladimir Putin’s conception and justification is. It is so purely imperial; not Soviet, but a return to Catherine and to Peter and to the idea of specifically Russian empire building, of the brotherhood of the Russian people. These are ideas that were promulgated to explain Russian linguistic national hegemony in Ukraine. I think Putin very much looks at himself in the lineage of Russian empire making, that he’s in the lineage specifically of Peter and Catherine, and that this is a way of reasserting their legacy and furnishing his own as a successor to that imperial lineage. But there’s been 200 years of history since then, a whole world of national sovereignty and nation states and national cultures and independence and the breakup of the Soviet Union, and to just blow past that and imagine that you can return to the days of Potemkin and Catherine in Crimea is extraordinary. To see that historical conception, I think, is so false. Is it part of an Eastern European doom and gloom story? I hope not. But I worry that in some ways what I’m talking about in Goodbye Eastern Europe is that this concept of Eastern Europe is disintegrating. When I was writing it, especially in 2011 or 2014, prosperity was the thing. There was the enlargement of the European Union and the broader integration with Western Europe which has erased a lot of the diversity from previous centuries. But I think you have another Eastern Europe that is now under this shadow of frozen or active conflict. That is the Eastern Europe of the Bosnian conflict; or the frozen conflict of Transnistria and Moldova; and then you have Ukraine, a very active conflict. When I was in Republika Srpska, in the area near Croatia where there was heavy fighting in 1993, I travelled through burnt-out villages where trees are growing inside houses and everything is for sale. It is a conflict that happened 30 years ago, and has not yet healed. With Ukraine we have a lot of optimism, a lot of admiration for the strength shown in the conflict. But there is a lot of worry about when the rebuilding is going to happen. Will it happen? The shadow of a conflict can last generations, definitely decades. And we can see a split between two kinds of Eastern Europe emerging. One very western focused, and one that wants to be western focused but essentially has a ball and chain around its ankle. I hope that’s not true, but that’s my worry.

This interview is also available as a podcast episode for Talk Eastern Europe – visit www.talkeasterneurope.eu.

Jacob Mikanowski is a freelance journalist and writer. He is the author of the book Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

Adam Reichardt is the editor in chief of New Eastern Europe and co-host of the Talk Eastern Europe podcast.

Nina Pániková is a is a senior capacity building officer at with the Human Rights House Foundation and co-host of the Talk Eastern Europe podcast.

Central Europe, Eastern Europe, history, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Western Balkans