To some readers of Central European History, a book review about a self-described “East European Borderland” may seem misplaced. Lying on the extreme margins of “Central Europe,” Bukovina probably seems like one of those remote places in Eastern Europe that was “repeatedly annexed and lost by different states” over the course of several centuries (4). And yet, Cristina Florea’s impressive survey of the region’s history from 1775 to 1945 shows Bukovina to be the epitome of the European story, encompassing many themes and topics that have long interested historians in other parts of Europe.
At its heart, the book is basically an examination of “successive attempts” by Enlightened Habsburgs, Romanian and Ukrainian nationalists, fascist Romanians, and Soviet apparatchiks “to integrate Bukovina into different polities, remaking it in the process” (4). Its academic focus follows closely in the postcolonial tradition, elucidating and placing into a comparative framework the efforts by various outside officials and actors to transform the province into their respective ideological visions. Here we meet plenty of Austrian, Romanian, and later Soviet officials who sought to modernize this supposedly “backward” province.
The book also continues recent trends by emphasizing the multidirectional nature of power. In Bukovina, imperial dreams often crashed into political realities, with locals negotiating or outright resisting the demands of outsiders. Financial limitations also played a role, forcing states to repurpose structures built by their predecessors. As Florea notes, “[p]laces like Bukovina remind us of the multi-perspectival, complex nature of European history” (7). More broadly, the work deals with questions related to power and marginality, modernity and culture, nationalism and identity, and of course change over time.
This is an impressive work, which draws on sources in many languages to create a wholistic picture of a cosmopolitan political and cultural space. Unlike many studies of “colonial” territories, Florea does an excellent job bringing out the voices of Bukovina’s diverse inhabitants; here we read not only the words of the bureaucrats, but also those of the inhabitants themselves as they navigated the complex and sometimes rapid shifts in the region’s politics. The book also does an excellent job placing local developments within a broader historical context, seamlessly integrating Bukovina’s history into broader discussions of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century nationalism, the World Wars, Nazism, and Soviet Communism. Sections of it will no doubt be of interest to specialists from these areas, regardless of their interest in the long durée history of the region.
To reduce Florea’s work to simply another postcolonial study of a “borderland” would be a mistake, however, as there are other themes that run through the book that deserve recognition. One of the most interesting is the disconnect between ideology and reality. For example, nationalist activists in the nineteenth century often praised peasants as the epitome of national virtue, only to discover that they felt little connection to it. Local Romanian nationalists celebrated the reconquest of Bukovina in 1941 as a moment of national liberation, only to find the best jobs and resources were quickly taken by outsiders from the Old Kingdom. And the German community of the regional capital of Czernowitz was destroyed not by Romanians or Russians but by the Nazis, whose anti-Semitism eliminated the principal practitioners of German culture in the region.
A second major theme that the book discusses but does not necessarily emphasize is the constancy of anti-Semitism in the region across political groups and time periods. Like many Eastern European provinces, Bukovina featured a large and thriving Jewish community for many centuries. Jews actually made up 33 percent of the provincial capital of Czernowitz’s population by 1890, and they were deeply integrated into the local economy (63). And yet, they were often treated as outsiders, both by locals who saw them as a “foreign” element and by some of the states that tried to remake Bukovina.
When Imperial Russian forces occupied Bukovina in 1914, they conducted a brutal campaign against the local Jewish population, who were suspected of being Austrian spies (110). When the Romanians arrived in 1918, they thought the local Jews were “the most serious obstacle to the province’s Romanianization,” stripping many of their citizenship rights (133). This process was then accelerated in the 1930s and 40s, as Romanian fascists adopted anti-Semitism as an official political platform (175–181, 190–193). Things got even worse after Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, as Jews were associated with and blamed for Soviet Communism (205). Although Florea doesn’t make this point, it quickly becomes clear that anti-Semitism had deep roots in European culture outside of Nazism.
Overall, the book’s argument is engaging and compelling. My only real quibble with it would be the subtitle, which speaks of the death of this “Eastern European Borderland.” As the epilogue (which discusses the present war in Ukraine) makes clear, Bukovina “is again at the epicentre of a geopolitical revolution,” a “crucible for rival visions of Europe’s past and future” (284–285). As Florea herself concludes, the story of Bukovina “highlights the fragility of memory and the past’s eternal return” in terms of “its inescapability. Our story ends here: fittingly not at a finale, but in the middle of a new episode whose contours we cannot yet know.” Ukraine’s, and by extension Bukovina’s, future is still very much an unknown. But whatever happens, the winners of the conflict will most likely try once again to remake the region in their image. They would do well to read Florea’s impressive study before doing so.
