BOOK REVIEW: ‘Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land’

OPINION:

With the first sentence of his kaleidoscopic guide to Eastern Europe’s past, the journalist Jacob Mikanowski reveals that his work is meant to discover, to unearth: “This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist.”

What he means is that “people don’t identify as Eastern Europeans,” a phrase whose geographic connotation says little about the region’s complex identity and traditions. The author takes the reader on a journey to find this strange domain.

Eastern Europe today is made up of many young states of inchoate nationalisms, whose peoples once belonged to long-extinct empires. It was never a homogenous entity. Its borders could not be easily defined.

Rather, this region was distinctive because of its richness of ethnicities and cultures, “a world of multiple faiths and languages in which many parallel truths lived beside one another.”

The author’s ancestry testifies to this diversity. He is half Catholic, half Jewish, with ancestors who “included downwardly mobile aristocrats from Lithuania of Hungarian descent, illiterate peasants from the Polish heartland, patriotic Catholic bookbinders, Orthodox Jewish farmers, and Communist seamstresses.”

Current events have pulled this place called Eastern Europe from the margins of the past to the center of our attention, and it is impossible not to think of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine while reading this book. The war’s massive violence and bewildering politics obscure the very layers of human complexity that are the focus of Mr. Mikanowski’s attention.

Vladimir Putin’s war is an assault on history itself. In the view from the Kremlin, Ukraine has never and does not exist, despite “a long history of autonomy and several flickering moments of independence reaching back to the seventeenth century,” Mr. Mikanowski writes.

He wants us to look not only through the lens of imperial politics, where all we see is a “clash of feuding ideologies,” as important as these forces were in redrawing borders and crushing millions of lives.

“But that is only the story of the past hundred or so years,” he writes. “Eastern Europe has a longer history and older traditions to draw on in formulating its future. Largely neglected by historians, there was an Eastern Europe that existed alongside the structures imposed by empire and independent of the hopes fostered by nationalism.”

So what about this region’s existence before Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mr. Putin? You will find stories of mind-boggling diversity. To be a Pole today likely means living in Poland and speaking Polish, but in the 19th century, to be “born a Pole in the valley of the Dniester River was a source of endless confusion and complication.”

Mr. Mikanowski cites the Polish essayist Jerzy Stempowski, born in 1893, to recreate this landscape: “a single giant chessboard of peoples, full of islands, enclaves, and the most peculiar combination of ethnic mixtures. In many places, every village, every social group, every profession almost spoke a separate language. … Landowners spoke Polish, peasants, Ukrainian, and bureaucrats, Russian, but with an Odessa accent.”

Empires tried to impose some administrative structure around this heterogeneous society. Still, life was defined by language, work and caste rather than political allegiance.

This does not mean one’s neighbors were always tolerant or that life wasn’t without its miseries. Serfdom was harsh. Poverty was real. Revolutions happened. Modern notions of equality did not exist.

But the coexistence that characterized day-to-day life in Eastern Europe before the 20th century is worth unearthing, “a kind of ramshackle utopia” with “many peoples and faiths and languages arranging themselves in a loose symbiosis” that had lasted centuries, Mr. Mikanowski writes.

Given his bond with this forgotten world, Mr. Mikanowski is bothered by the backsliding or recession of liberal democracy in some former Soviet Bloc states. The revolutions of 1989, while celebrated by Cold War triumphalists in the West, brought about difficult transitions. The new nation-states needed new origin stories to form a “moral basis” for their existence.

“People cast around for new pasts as a way of making up for lost time. Recovering lost graves and reclaiming banished or forgotten heroes was a way of drawing boundaries around new states; it also helped fracture some old ones,” the author says.

It was time for the post-1989 nationalists to claim victory over fascism, Stalinism, and then joyless, sclerotic late communism. While establishing a new point of origin challenged leaders and publics, the transition from socialism to capitalism proved harder than its cheerleaders imagined. Some of the highest rates of suicide in the world were reported in several Eastern European countries in the 1990s. The region continued to experience a “happiness gap” compared with its neighbors in the West.

Today, it is the rancorous and violent history of Eastern Europe that seems most relevant to current events, as democracy retreats and a new war rages with no end in sight. One must wonder if its future will resemble the vanished world that Jacob Mikanowski vividly brings to life.

• Martin Di Caro is a veteran award-winning journalist who has worked as a news anchor at Bloomberg Radio’s Washington bureau, and reported for NPR and Associated Press member radio stations. He lives in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of D.C., and his interests include reading history and following his beloved New York Jets. 

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