Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands: Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940

by Petru Negura (Editor), Paul Jackson (Editor), Andrei Cusco (Editor), Raul Cârstocea (Editor), Svetlana Suveica (Editor)

Overview

Bringing together an international cast of contributors, this book engages with popular responses to nationalising and state-building projects in Eastern Europe. The volume focuses specifically on the Western border regions of the Soviet Union and the eastern provinces of Romania, Poland, and the Baltic States during the interwar period, as well as their imperial legacies, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Top-down studies, which focus on political and intellectual elites, state structures and state policies, continue to dominate the historiography. Nationalism from Below in the Soviet and East European Borderlands compensates for this imbalance by approaching the East European borderlands from a 'bottom-up' perspective; it is based on the perceptions, discourses and practices of ordinary people as a response to the nation- and state-building projects. The book uses several case studies to highlight, from a comparative perspective, the local population's social and political peculiarities around national identification. It considers how these positions have changed over time and impacted the relationships between these neighbouring regions, which today make up parts of various independent states. Lastly, it reflects on how gender-based statuses and hierarchies overlap and intertwine in everyday settings of staging nationhood, alongside ethnicity, religious affiliation, class, and age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350443754
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/11/2025
Series:	A Modern History of Politics and Violence
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Jackson is Professor in the History of Radicalism and Extremism at the University of Northampton, UK.

Raul Cârstocea is Honorary Fellow in Modern European History at University of Leicester, UK. He is the co-editor (with Éva Kovács) of Modern Antisemitism in the Peripheries: Europe and its Colonies, 1880-1945 (2019).

Table of Contents

Editors' Introduction
1. Treasonous Stripes: Minoritizing Ethnic Romanians in Dualist Hungary Ágoston Berecz (European University Institute, Italy)
2. State Categories, 'National Soul-Catching', and Local Responses: Jewish and Ukrainian Challenges to the Census in Eastern Galicia and Eastern Lesser Poland, 1880–1931 Martin Rohde (Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
3. Populism, Anti-Imperialism, and Alternative Nation-Building 'From the Left' in Modern Romania Andrei Cuşco (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania)
4. From National Indifference to Indifferent Nationalism: Ukrainian Peasants' Confrontation with Nationalism over the Twentieth Century Fabian Baumann (The Research Center for the History of Transformations, Austria)
5. The Positivist Education of Peasant Children: Village Schools and Local Agency on the Eve of Polish Statehood Kathleen Wroblewski (University of Michigan, USA)
6. What Does It Mean to Be Polish? Local Opposition to the Soviet Minority Experiment in Interwar Ukraine Olena Palko (University of Basel, Switzerland)
7. Courting the Straggler Sheep? Hungarian Nation-Building and Popular Reactions among the Cengai/Csangos, 1920-1940Gábor Egry (Institute of Political History, Hungary)
8. Interwar Dniester Jews between Romania and the Soviet Union: Struggles for Cultural Agency and Economic Survival Dmitry Tartakovsky (Slavic Review)
9. Criminalising Belief and Disciplining the Masses: Gendarmes and Orthodox Priests in the First Trial against Old Calendarists in Bessarabia Andreea Kaltenbrunner (University of Vienna, Austria)
10. Singing a Different Tune: Jewish Converts and Musical Resistance in Interwar Bessarabia Iemima Ploscariu (Directory of Open Access Journals, Spain)
11. Moving Between Hierarchies: Small Finnic Nationalities in the Finnish and Soviet Modernisations during the Interwar Years Takehiro Okabe (University of Helsinki, Finland)
12. Peasants Against the Nation: Popular Responses to Schooling and Nation-Building in the Interwar Romanian, Polish, and Soviet Borderlands Petru Negura (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany)
13. Choosing the Soviet Union over Romania? The 1940 (Jewish) Exodus as Protest and Survival Strategy Svetlana Suveica (University of Göttingen, Germany)
Index