This volume brings together seven essays by former doctoral students at Central European University who worked under the supervision of Alfred Rieber. Spanning three centuries and discussing territory from the Balkans to the White Sea, Bessarabia to North Korea, the contributions are bound together precisely by the influence of their shared mentor. Indeed, the editors frame the volume as “a continuation of the historiographic momentum generated by [Rieber’s] exceptionally long and fruitful scholarly career” (1). This volume builds particularly on Rieber’s contributions to social history (particularly the idea of the “sedimentary society”), his interest in bureaucratic and interest group politics, and his discussion of Russia’s dynamic frontier zones. Many contributors succeed in bringing these ideas together in surprising and suggestive ways.
Thus, for example, the opening essay by Marina Loskutova, devoted to the management of imperial Russia’s forest resources, brings to bear both a sharp understanding of interest group politics and the complex entanglements between the Russian and British empires to offer a new understanding of periodic embargos on timber exports. The forests of the eastern Baltic were of interest both to entrepreneurs exporting timber to Britain and to the imperial Russian Admiralty; rises in exports created genuine anxiety about timber scarcity, and missions meant to investigate the question failed to clarify matters. By way of contrast, Andriy Posunko’s analysis of Cossack reform in the first half of the nineteenth century (centered on the 1834 Don Cossack Statute) demonstrates how the contributions of various interest groups frustrated plans for reform and militated against the creation of a coherent Cossack estate. The primacy of local interests and particularities meant that “there was no such thing as an all-encompassing legislation for Cossacks in general” (74). Different Cossack hosts were legislated differently and there was significant variation within the category of “Cossack”—these, as Rieber might have it, were sediments or layers that Cossack groups carried into the Great Reform era. Viktor Taki’s study of tsarist military views of the Ottoman empire in the second half of the nineteenth century reveals a clash of interest groups within the military, between a new generation of “military intellectuals” (77) and an older cohort of thinkers with more battle experience and less formal training. Ultimately, both groups came to understand that population played an important role in modern warfare, and thus questions of ethnicity and religion came to play a large role in war planning for future conflicts on the Russo-Ottoman frontier. Finally, Oksana Ermolaeva’s cultural study of the gulag shows us the reconfiguration of social hierarchies in the world of the camps and the importance of spatial hierarchies in gulag cultural work. In camp centers, propaganda was sabotaged but entertainment generally well received; in the camp peripheries, however, both “were doomed from the outset” (152).
An outstanding stand-alone contribution, based upon a recent monograph, focuses on population politics and forced population transfers on imperial and national frontiers. Bojan Aleksov’s chapter focuses on Jewish refugees in the Balkans during the 1930s. He demonstrates that during this era, Yugoslavia had a set of policies unusually favorable toward Jews, and that the arrival of refugees “awakened a sense of Jewishness among many in the well-integrated Jewish community of Yugoslavia” (214). Everyday life was challenging for many, but Yugoslavia remained a relative safe haven for Jewish refugees until the Anschluss.
Two contributions, finally, build on Rieber’s interest in comparative studies of the Eurasian borderlands, albeit in very different times and climes. Andrei Cusco’s chapter compares the fates of two “Russian-Romanian” borderlands, Bessarabia and Bukovina, during the Great War through the lens of ethnicity and population politics. Bukovina, under Habsburg control prior to the war and occupied by imperial Russian forces, experienced a similar “escalating mutual radicalization of population politics” (13) to Bessarabia, under imperial Russian control from the beginning and not directly occupied during the war. This comparison invited future research comparing the models of ethnic mobilization in the Russian and Habsburg empires. Balasz Szalontai attempts a comparison perhaps still more ambitious, seeking to explain the survival of North Korea’s regime by juxtaposing it against the transition away from communism in Romania and Albania. Comparing the polities along multiple axes, he concludes that the absence of political liberalization, difficulty of worker resistance, lack of alternative national symbols, and lack of regional differences in North Korea—all present to one degree or another in Romania and Albania—were responsible for the survival of the North Korean system.
Ultimately, it is difficult to say that essays so diverse in their subject matter and methodological approach cohere successfully in a single volume. Yet the contributors have prepared a fine tribute to their mentor all the same. The pieces in this volume are, without exception, deeply researched, interpretively suggestive, and historiographically rigorous; any scholar of modern Eurasian history will find something worth reading here. To have trained a group of scholars of such diverse interests to advance their own research agendas so well is a contribution to the field every bit as lasting as Rieber’s capacious bibliography.
