A History of Eastern Europe (2024)

Or, a political history of modern Eastern Europe, with a couple of lectures about earlier times tacked on.

Works which purport to be a survey of all of a country's or region's history, but are mostly 19th to 20th century, are a bugbear of mine. This lecture series might be the most extreme example of this all-too-common phenomenon which I've read or listened to in my years on Goodreads.

It particularly emphasises the 20th century and beyond - even though the lecturer himself says that medieval and early modern would be worth a lecture series alone! No less than 17 of the 24 lectures are about events that happened since the births of two of my grandparents in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and six are about events I remember hearing about in news from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s.

The lectures are well presented and do add some information I hadn't heard before, especially about countries other than Poland and the USSR. But too much of this was a rehash of familiar material that I wasn't looking for (especially about the Second World War, where there was too much time spent explaining events most listeners would know, like appeasem*nt and the Anschluss). Really, I really wanted pre-19th century history, but I got this because there is no audiobook history about the region in earlier times, material which is still, in English largely restricted to specialist academic books. (It's the same even for medieval Russia, where you'd think there might be more.) I also figured it would tell me something about the countries I know less about (it did, though it sometimes felt like scraps) and that because the lecturer himself has Lithuanian heritage, it would inevitably bring different perspectives from that.

Having listened to the first third of the series (more interesting to me) in autumn 2019, I was determined to finish these lectures at some point, but of course it didn't help that 2020 was an even more unpleasant time for listening to content about the repeated encroachment of authoritarianism. Over and over again that has happened in the region when many hoped for greater freedom: in the inter-war period; then just after the Second World War; and now, growing in the years since this was recorded (back in 2015 - when the lecturer could imply that mass protest had seen off Orban's proposals to restrict the media in Hungary).

On one level it was comforting hearing again about 1989 and Gorbachev, a time when I felt the future was promising and optimistic, personally as well as politically. But the 90s were not the same for people in Eastern Europe: a Russian friend is more positive about that time than a lot of her compatriots because, whilst there were shortages, there wasn't the repression of LGBT people there is now, and there was generally more cultural freedom; whilst for one from the former Yugoslavia, the 90s were obviously a very bad time.

And now the feelings of optimism that many had at the time the Soviet regimes fell - a sense that liberal democracy had won - look transient. Those years look like one of those brief periods, which, in a narrative history of long ago, or focused on something else, gets summarised in a couple of sentences. "In the years immediately after…" "For about a decade…" (One realises now, from having lived through this, that a time described that way can be a big chunk of people's lives, and if you were young then, it may have been formative of your default view of the world.) It's like Bede's sparrow.

Now right-wing authoritarianism is well and truly on the march in Poland and Hungary, and seemingly entrenched in Russia. Now open corruption on both sides in US politics reminds one of Italy. [digression for the rest of this paragraph] And on a macropolitical level, this looks like the year from which it will be said that China became Top Nation (© ). The Chinese ascendancy was anticipated by all political commentators, but happened faster than expected because of the way many countries had a similar response to the pandemic. Regardless of that, the trajectory seems obvious looking back. Some was always obvious. Smart millennials among friends & relatives were studying Chinese a decade ago. (I admired them for being able to choose a difficult subject that wasn't necessarily a major passion, because it was going to be useful.) Australian academics specialising in China have felt for some time that viewpoints critical of the government are gagged, and the ever-increasing number of countries taking up Belt and Road mean this is surely going to become more widespread. Brexit Britain surely won't be able to resist the scheme for long. But the epiphany was that aspects of Anglophone culture amenable to a new China hegemony had been dovetailing for a few years. I think it a sensible response to read up on older Chinese culture, and if I were a faster reader, I'd have been reading The Story of the Stone this autumn, and finishing, not just dipping into, non-fiction books whose reviews would have been a more appropriate place for this paragraph. But I did watch part of Michael Wood's 2016 BBC documentary series on Chinese history, and noticed how he elided religious persecutions; it was no surprise to read that the series had been praised by the Chinese government and shown on TV in the country. The worst aspects of online social justice movement often used to be described as Maoist; the self-criticism and struggle sessions did often seem like a more voluntary version of certain scenes in Wild Swans - a bestseller just after the fall of Soviet communism, when it still seemed possible China's regime might be next to go. Wild Swans is known to have some inaccuracies - even if it gives a broadly correct impression of ethos and atmosphere of the times - but it made a big impression when I and a few school classmates read it back in the early 90s. Circa 2020, neither most contemporary social justice activists, nor the regime in China are overtly Maoist, but both are intellectual descendants of Maoism (the activists from 1960s-70s radicals in the West, and the Chinese government still being, nominally, the same communist party Mao founded, even if they run an economic system of state capitalism). So there is something of a common ethos, and which in the Anglosphere arguably paves the way and reshapes culture. When I saw October's news about the renewal of the Australia, India, Japan, US Quad, predictions of a multipolar world began to seem more credible - though the US election result may also mean an America less active in that Quad alliance. Regardless, I still think that Belt & Road and economic and cultural soft power mean things lean China's way, and will it will mean - and increasingly does mean - that certain approaches are more admired and adopted, just as American-influenced culture, not always overtly described as such, was a globally influential set of norms particularly from 1945 to the 2010s. [/digression]

But back to the history of Eastern Europe.

Liulevicius is a really good lecturer in terms of delivery and keeping the listener's attention, and I enjoyed the distinctiveness of his Chicago accent - most obvious in the way he says 'Maascaw'. As so many East Europeans emigrated to Chicago, including distant relatives of my own, this felt like a connection with the region too.

However, his chronology might occasionally be confusing to listeners without previous grounding. For example, in the second lecture, probably the worst for this issue, he talks about the Mongol invasions (13th century) and then goes back centuries to discuss the possible origins of the Slavs, arrival of Bulgars and other population movements of the Migration Period in the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Even if the coverage of the medieval and early modern eras was scanty, I was glad to hear some new info here: e.g. about Prussia inbetween the Baltic Crusades and Frederick the Great; and about how 'Bohemian' came to have its meaning in English.

The Partition of Poland gets a lot of attention - but then it was really the Partition of Poland-Lithuania and therefore connected to the lecturer's ancestral home. He describes it as "an international crime". I'm not generally a fan of emotive takes on history and don't want them to be the default (they were invariably discouraged when I was a student in the 90s) but it's always interesting to see a topic given an emotional slant on an occasional or one-off basis, as it can open up a new understanding of those involved in the original events. This approach is even more ambiguous in the case of Poland as emotive Polish history has not gone in good directions lately, as shown here and the country's centuries' long sense of a chip on its shoulder, which began with Partition, has contributed to the recent virulently anti-immigration stance of the Law & Justice Party's government - elected in 2015 after these lectures were recorded.

The Partition had always seemed like a corner of history that one couldn't expect people with no connection to the region to know or care about, so it was a revelation to hear "the Polish Question" situated as a major issue in European and North American politics of the late 18th and early 19th century. Liulevicius explains that it had implications for how we now think about democracies and how they can fail today, going into the attempts at reform from 1772-95 which advanced the state of the country, and were feared by the partitioning powers who closed in. (It's always curious in histories of early modern Poland to see it described as too democratic for its own good, even if all the voters and parliamentarians were nobles - it did not allow the monarch as much power as competitors elsewhere in Europe, and the elected monarchy system was too easily manipulated.) The roles of Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski are emphasised, as their roles in the American Revolutionary War mean they will be familiar to the US audience. The Partition also has a place in intellectual history: Liulevicius explains how Enlightenment theories were employed to depict Poland as a backward place that needed to be taken over by superior powers; he says it was the beginning of the idea of Eastern Europe as less developed, as the Other. (I'm instinctively unsure about the latter and would have liked a lot more detail. Perhaps it's just the way West European history is traditionally told, but there always seems to have been a lot less interaction between elites of the two regions than within them. However, he does recommend Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment by Larry Wolff, which evidently explores the issue in more detail.)

He also joins the dots about Poland's love of Napoleon, whom most other European countries hated, but Poles had looked to to liberate them from Russia and Austria, never quite becoming dislliusioned with him although he didn't pull this off. (In classic Polish 19th century novel The Doll, one character is a big Napoleon fanboy.) Liulevicius explained that Napoleon portrayed himself to the Poles as different from other empires, but he was really just using Poland for his own ends - and eventually he told them to prove themselves.

There's an underlying negativity about Germany here, which reminds me of what one picks up by osmosis from old Polish people - though, here, there are reasons pre-dating the Second World War: German thinkers' responsibility for the Enlightenment ideas that contributed to Partition, and then for spreading nationalist and racist ideas in the 19th century. Herder being the notable exception, described as an originator not only of romantic nationalism but cultural relativism, multiculturalism & other ideas that became prominent in the second half of the 20th century. Overall, Liulevicius has certainly not made me any keener to read German literature.

He makes a brief survey of Romantic nationalism in other countries, highlighting poets at least as much as political activism - after all, the influence of that movement was often in arts and ideas rather than concrete change. Sándor Petőfi, both a poet and fighter, wrote what is now the Hungarian national anthem. Of the 1848 revolutions in the region, Hungary's went furthest. Other notable revolutionary leaders of the time included Ana Ipătescu in Wallachia, and František Palacký in Czechia.

Hungarian nationalism was pushed by Magyars, who were actually only 40-50% of Hungary's population at this time - some expected and wanted other ethicities to assimilate, in the process of Magyarisation. The revolt surrendered to the Russians but refused to surrender to Austrians. Eventually Magyar elites got more power and it became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This allowed them to ignore that half their people weren't Magyar.

Continued below in comment field

(Listened Sept 2019 & Nov 2020, reviewed Nov-Dec 2020)

How the East was Won and Lost Again and Again, etc.
Review of the Teaching Company audiobook edition as available on Audible Audio (2015)

I had A History of Eastern Europe on my radar ever since I read my GR friend Antonomasia's very thorough review back in December 2020. It was available via an Audible sale in early September 2021 and I snapped it up immediately. It consists of 24 lectures, each of approximately 30 minutes in duration.

As Anto's review mentions, there is very little about the ancient and medieval history of the Eastern European countries. After the introductory Lecture 1, by Lecture 4 we've covered up to the end of the 18th century, by Lecture 7 we've covered the 19th century and by Lecture 8 onwards we are already in the 20th/21st century for the balance of the course.

With my Estonian heritage, I had hoped for more about the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, also given that the author/narrator's background was Lithuanian. There really wasn't very much that I didn't know already though. It was interesting to hear more about the Forest Brothers movement of partisans who continued to fight against the Russian occupation of the Baltics for almost 30 years after World War II. The last known Forest Brother was the Estonian August Sabbe (1909-1978) who died while evading capture as late as 1978.

The other most interesting new information I learned was about the role that Anna Walentynowicz (1929-2010) played in the founding of the Solidarity Workers' Union at the Gdansk shipyards in Poland. Walentynowicz's firing by the authorities for her activism was what most kicked off the entire movement. Her role was never prominently known in the West after Lech Walesa became the figurehead.

Even with its sparse early history, this was still an excellent series that covered a lot of information in 12 hours. The narrator's speech has a slight tic, whereby he starts a syllable in a word and then restarts the word again. It is somewhat like a blip or a record skipping. Once you notice it, you can't avoid hearing it every time it occurs, usually several times in each lecture. It is not disruptive though.

The lectures were:
Lecture 1: The Other Europe: Deep Roots of Diversity
Lecture 2: Formative Migrations: Mongols to Germans
Lecture 3: Clashing Golden Ages, 1389–1772
Lecture 4: The Great Crime of Empires: Poland Divided
Lecture 5: The Origins of Nationalism, 1815–1863
Lecture 6: The Age of Empires, 1863–1914
Lecture 7: Jewish Life in the Shtetl
Lecture 8: World War I: Destruction and Rebirth
Lecture 9: From Democrats to Dictators, 1918–1939
Lecture 10: Caught between Hitler and Stalin
Lecture 11: World War II: The Unfamiliar Eastern Front
Lecture 12: The Holocaust and the Nazi Racial Empire
Lecture 13: Postwar Flight and Expulsion
Lecture 14: Behind the Iron Curtain, 1945–1953
Lecture 15: Forest Brothers: Baltic Partisan Warfare
Lecture 16: Life in Totalitarian Captivity, 1953–1980
Lecture 17: Power of the Powerless: Revolts and Unrest
Lecture 18: Solidarity in Poland: Walesa’s Union
Lecture 19: Toppling Idols: The Communist Collapse
Lecture 20: The Turn: The Post-Soviet 1990s
Lecture 21: Yugoslav Wars: Milosevic and Balkan Strife
Lecture 22: The New Europe: Joining NATO and the EU
Lecture 23: The Unfolding Ukraine-Russia Crisis
Lecture 24: Eastern Europe at the Crossroads

Trivia and Link
The audiobook lecture series is accompanied with an extensive book-length 232 page pdf file with illustrations and maps. I think it is available to everyone regardless of whether you have purchased the audiobook at this link (Note: the link downloads a pdf file).

I know I'm not the only person to have felt thoroughly confused by and almost entirely ignorant of the history of Eastern Europe. And yet the thought of wading through the molasses of empires, countries, dates, and unpronounceable names would have sent me running from a big fat book. But, speaking of unpronounceable names, along came Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius with this outstanding Great Courses audiobook. I have loved every minute of the thoughtfully curated content, and I enjoy his lively presentation. Ask me anything about Poland, Lithuania, or Bulgaria! One reviewer criticized Liulevicius's occasional verbal fluffs, but I found that they only added to his authenticity and presence.

Please see Antonomasia’s review. I did not know as much Eastern European history as he does, so I found a significant but not an excessive amount of the material familiar already. It is, after all, popular literature. His excellent review offers an excellent overview of what is and isn’t included.

Unfortunately the final chapter seems hopelessly optimistic in light of events since 2015.

I really like Professor Liulevicius's teaching style, and this is a pretty good introduction to Eastern European history. I now have a much better grasp of the way some historical events unfolded and how they affected current events. I wish there had been more treatment of said current events in this text.

When I traveled through Eastern Europe in the Summer and Fall of 2015, I felt lacking in my knowledge of the history of the area and I wish to learn more. This lecture offers a great overview of "Eastern" Europe and I appreciated that the professor acknowledges, early in his lecture, that these countries prefer other titles, a preference which I discovered the hard way during my travels. If, like me, you are unused to listening to history lectures and are unfamiliar with the material covered, then I recommend making time to listen to this several times through.

I got these lectures hopeing to learn more about the dramatic sweeps of the Magyars and Huns, The Flying Hussairs, and the Ottomans. But this was not that kind of lecture. This series should of been called the history of Modern Eastern Europe, this being said it was fantastic it showed the flow and diversity of the areas as well as it's strengths and weaknesses. It told the story behind the iron curtain that we don't hear in the west for that alone it is worth getting.

This is the best Great Courses lecture series I've heard to date. I would recommend it to all and sundry interested in the region.

Well edited, easy to consume. Wished for more in-depth commentary on earlier times as a lot of focus is on the last 100 years. Still, a superb and well rounded piece of work.

It's an insane amount of knowledge fitted into a rather sizeable set of courses.
As a matter of fact, I'm glad this wasn't actually a book, as I am rather certain I would have not had the tenacity to read it all the way through. I love being told a story, but just couldn't keep my eyes open for this much history on paper.

Being an Eastern European myself (and one of the more complicated storylines) I found this fascinating. Fascinating to earn about more than just our own little corner of the continent, as I had to admit I knew next to nothing about history of most of our closer or further neighbors.

Yet the size of the area and the time the lectures are trying to encompass also mean that lots and lots are barely glanced over. Which is normal as you can only take so much information in, yet in spots it feels a tiny bit lacking. But that is probably just bias towards thing I may be more interested in and everyone would find something else to complain about.
Nevertheless, even if you are not much of a history buff (or maybe exactly if you are not one) this one is a great listen. Whether it qualifies for a "book" or not?
Who am I to judge?

This was a slightly disappointing Great Course. Personally I didn't mind that more than 2/3 of it was 20th century and later history, but I can imagine that someone might. What put me off more was the fact that the focus is so strongly on military and political history. You need to make choices in history writing, of course, but there are many examples of popular history writing (e.g. Richard Evans) that manages to capture a broader range of perspectives. In this course, economic, intellectual and cultural history are virtually absent. Second, the period from 1945 to 1989 is discussed in a rather classic cold war history writing way. There's a teleological urge to see the period as one long march towards liberty. Hence, there is a lot about opposition to the regimes, but very little communist rule itself--with the exception of the usual follies. Indeed, the author calls this period a 'detour', a revealing word if any. On a lighter note: This was my third Great Course by a male professor (out of five), and, incredibly, they all sound *exactly* the same. What's up with that???

This is the first of the Great Courses that I've completed. Well worth it despite my few critiques. Also, Amazon offers Prime members an option to subscribe to the video versions of a large number of the GC collection for $7.99/mo. So even though I had already bought the audio version at Audible, I sat down in front of my TV for this version. Because this course covers a lot of geography, it was a real plus to be able to see the maps.

Prof. Liulevicius is an excellent history teacher. His lectures are extremely well organized and his presentations of each lecture are taut. I chose to watch this course because I knew there were lessons to be learned from the Balkan wars relevant to understanding the Ukraine crisis today. Even though I pursued a history degree in college, I never studied Eastern Europe, so I wanted to catch up.

When we are talking about Eastern Europe, we are talking about the Slavs. In the case of the Balkans, those people are all southern Slavs. The Czechs, Slovaks and Poles are the western Slavs, and wouldn't you know it but the people of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are the Eastern Slavs.

So, contrary to the grossly, historically-ignorant newscasters we see today wherever we look, the Russians and Ukrainians are the same people. The people in the Balkans are one people, which is why they tried to come together as one nation of united Slavs, which is what the name Yugoslavia means.

Yes, the history shows ethnic differences, but as this course shows, these people have a tremendous history of trying to get along together as a united nation.

Of the 24 half-hour lectures, the first 20 were excellent. But it is precisely in the modern history where the good professor becomes a bit too circ*mspect when talking about the economics behind the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the illegal, unsanctioned by the UN Security Council bombing massacres of Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright, two American war criminals (ever notice how American professors never talk about American war criminals?)

Nothing about the attack by the IMF on the industrial co-ops, the social safety net, and privatization of everything that the IMF foisted on Yugoslavia after the support from the collapsed Soviet Union disappeared. Make everybody poor and homeless and suddenly the ethnic differences erupt. In America, we are taught that the war only began when the ethnicities started to battle each other. So we blame the Serbs, the people who tried to keep Yugoslavia united.

In other words, as I was taught in college, every modern war is over economics, not politics. Look at our own foreign policy. Our fascist Republican and Democratic warmongers and bankers have supported the most heinous dictators because they support privatization and foreign investments in their countries, as well as access to cheap, almost slave labor (BTW the word slave comes from the word Slav).

So we have to look elsewhere for some incisive modern history, although the lecture on Ukraine is nevertheless worthwhile.

I do think you should take this course. You will feel you have a much greater understanding about a region that now could launch World War III.

The professor/narrator/author of this one clearly knew what he was talking about and had a kind of 'hook' to him that made me want to hear what he had to say. A problem, though, is that he tackled a section of the world that probably needed twice the number of lectures because there is just way too much to cover.

Peoples arrive, leave, tribes invade, settle, get conquered, and in a lot of cases were recreated (like Prussia, the later country, wasn't actually the same people as the Prussians who used to be there who got 'destroyed' as a people fairly early on but had developed a particular reputation so their name was used later; and Poland, as a country came and went. I knew about Germany and the Soviet Union tearing it apart, but I hadn't known that it was poofed from the map earlier and had to come recreate itself later). Basically, what I'm saying in this paragraph is what I already said - there just was way too much information to convey in the amount of time given. Especially since he was conveying basically the entire history of a section of Europe (Central & Eastern Europe), without really looking that closely at Russia except as an actor on the stage that invaded and or was invaded, etc.

Rating: 3.5

October 12 2020

Still, quite interesting.

This lecture series was comprehensive and engaging, giving form to a history this is extremely multi-layered. And Liulevicius would incorporate historical jokes and literature that brought this incredibly vast history back to the human experience of it.

All in all, I learned many things and now won't shut up about Eastern Europe. So the lecture series was a success.

Eastern Europe is a fascinating region and this course does a great job of giving a broad overview of it. Great to listen to in order to find some regions to delve deeper into.

Very interesting, but also can be much much bigger.

I enjoyed and benefited from this meticulous professor who passionately educates regarding the grand sweep of Eastern European history. You will have the opportunity to better understand the very profound impact today’s complex geopolitics and Eastern European roots.

Longer course. What I remember from it is:
* Poland got fully anexed by Russia, Austria and Prussia at some point. This shocked me when I found it out! It was a non-violent anexation that the Polish state wasn't prepared to handle militarily. One revolt per generation followed, as the Poles didn't give up their state! Poland the got its independence again in 1918.
* After the second world, Poland got moved West a few hundred kilometers XD OMG, Poland was really unlucky during its history. It's amazing they are doing fine now!
* Hitler's war in the East was different than that in the West. His purpose was to exterminate the local populations (even if not completely), and have Germans move to occupy and inhabit the East (the "Drang nach Ost"). As such, millions of slavs were killed.
* Lithuanian people went through a period where they would hide in the woods and fight back against the USSR. 40.000 of them spent at least some time (years for some) in the woods!
* The fall of communism throughout Europe, in 1989 happened because Gorbachev wanted to stop USSR's military involvment in the communist states. As such, Poland was the first one to change regimes, and that led the way for all the other countries, because they saw that Russia wasn't going to send the army to repress the revolutions. Ceausescu got stubborn and that cost him and thousands of Romanians their life.
* The Berlin wall fell because of a miscommunication. The communist party was working to indeed allow less strict checks on people wanting to travel between the 2 sides of Berlin. The party speaker didn't know when these new regulations would come into effect, so when he was asked about this at the meeting when he announced the news, he just said "immediately". After this, people just went and tore down the wall :p
* Gorbachev allowed some freedoms in Russia, but those got the regime unstable. Unfortunately the regime collapsed because of too much instability eventually.
* The Russia-Ukraine conflict is old. Russia historically wanted to have Ukraine as an imperial subject. Recently, thd Krimea issue surfaced also because Krimea was originally indeed an imperial subject of Russia that got handed over for administration to the Ukraine soviet republic. Meanwhile USSR got split up, so Russia retained claims to the territory.
* Yugoslavia: bloody things happened there. Ethnical cleansings in the 1990's - sounds like it couldn't happen, but killing doesn't go out of fashion it seems :|

Awesome course!

Audiobook: Great thinking + pretty good narration (although I found the occassional stumbling for words a bit problematic - supposing this is a recording which can be edited, why weren´t these places cut out?
I have picked this lecture so that I could understand a bit more how the western historians see the history of Eastern Europe. Coming from Eastern Europe myself, I actually despise this term and the sort of thinking that anything east of Germany is actually Eastern Europe. Thanks to this lecture, I am actually proud to be part of this region, whatever the term would be.
These days (at least for me) it is easy to see differences in Eastern Europe rather than common ground - this lecture is extremely convincing in showing there is a common ground.
Being well-read in the history of Czechia and Hungary, I could pin down certain tiny mistakes in the lecture. For example, the beating of students by the police in Prague 1989 did not happen, as Lielevicius puts it, on Wenceslas Square in front of the statue of Saint Wenceslas, but in one of the boulevard leading to that square, actually about 2 kilometres from the statue.
All in all, an interesting read.

A solid course. Particularly good and setting themes for periods of eastern european history across countries and using speeches and primary sources to give you a sense of the political dialogue within countries.

A wonderful series of lectures. Since I was driving while listening to most of it, I didn't get to take notes, but I want to find the notes and write it out, but I sure got a sense of what the world looks like from the many many countries that make up this part of the world. I couldn't put it down. My father also suffered through much of it with me and kept telling me he wanted to hear more. We finished it the day we reached North Carolina, so it was a bit odd to hear this history while driving across the U.S.

Very good for what it covers. I would have liked more Huns, Tartars and earlier history. A good overview. Needs to be updated in the age of Trump-Putin, Mueller Report, impeachment, Ukraine, etc. More geography and paleontology would be appropriate. Still covers ground about the "Other Europe" which most ignore.

I picked this one up because I’ve dealt with some of the pressures of recent tensions by diving into deep family history. I believe I have identified my four-times great-grandfather as a merchant or public official who moved to the Bukovina region of modern-day Romania when that region came under Hapsburg empirical control in the 1780s or ’90s. In a slight way, I feel as if I’ve come to know him (and many of the 800-900 descendants I’ve uncovered with the help of various cousins) so I hoped that this series of lectures would give me a fuller context for his world.

There are parts here that do answer my particular question, and I did pay special attention to the Hapsburg’s 18th century expansion and the rising and falling fortunes of the Romanian state. As happens with a lot of things, though, I wound up getting drawn into things I didn’t expect.

Liulevicius is an academic, as am I, and he’s a skilled lecturer. I think he could probably use a little polish in the way he delivers a joke, but I am confident there are some (OK many dozens) who’d say the same about me. And his jokes are relevant since they represent a sustained way that Soviet-bloc citizens dealt with the gap between the reality they experienced and the propaganda the state produced.

Liulevicius’s themes are broad and flexible, but they do help orient the details of his account. He opens with the question of whether there really is a place called “Eastern Europe,” noting that many people within the region understand themselves as drawn more to Western or, at times, Russian influence.

We see states and empires rise and then fall. We see a hunger for mobility across the region, one that the two-generation reign of the USSR could slow but not stop.

In the way of good classes, this gives a deeper sense of its subject, and I feel more at home in the geography and cultures of the nations and peoples he describes.

If I started this as part of an escape from the tensions of the moment, though, I found myself getting drawn back to some of what I didn’t want to be thinking about.

Above all, I was struck by the persistent memory that the conservatives of my adolescence and young adulthood defined themselves by recollections of these conflicts. From Goldwater through McCain, the abiding fear was of Soviet power, of the power of an Eastern Europe that tried to influence us through subtle and direct ways.

One hard-to-understand feature of Trumpism – which may or may not be conservatism – is its acquiescence to Russian and authoritarian interests. We now have a President whose interests align uncomfortably with Putin’s, and no one on the right seems troubled by that.

There’s a strangeness in all that, a reminder that, as Liulevicius says, the ferment of Eastern Europe has a way of shaping the rest of the world. Whether we like it or not, Putin – whose authority comes in large measure through Russia’s ability to influence the region – has had much to do with bringing Trump to power and with challenging many of the institutional structures of the United States.

Anyway, thanks to Liulevicius for a stimulating class even though it gave me less on my Romanian ancestors than I hoped and then, for further insult, made it all the tougher to stay in my escapist mode.

At only 12 hours and 4 minutes, the inevitable shortcoming of this lecture series is that the subject's scope and time constraints didn't align. Waaaaaaaaay too much subject to cover in any sort of depth (indeed, quite a few countries got short shrift). And the shortcoming of the listener (me) was that I should have consulted a map much more often to orient myself to the particular lecture's landscape. How terrific, though, that the release date was 2015--allowing the analysis to include the strife between Ukraine and Russia, the progress of some of the countries joining the European Union, etc. A definite plus for this particular historical record.

When you study the history of a large area over a vast amount of time, which way is best to proceed? In my high school days, we pretty much took one region and followed those people from the beginning of their records until the present day, then jumped to another area of the globe and hurtled back in time to their roots to begin the process again. It was kind of disorienting, and you never really got a sense for contemporaneous events across cultures and countries.

Professor Liulevicius did a better job than my school textbooks, I think, by trying to tell the overall story from roots to recent events with a wide-angle lens, punctuated by zooming in for close-ups in one region or another as the centuries and decades progressed. There were times when I had to readjust my time period orientation, of course (I kept an eager ear peeled for talk of the Berlin Wall coming down, since that was a major event of my childhood, only to have it mentioned as a casual throwaway during discussions of Czechoslovakia's 1991 breakaway from the Soviet Union's hold, but then--voila!--it came up in greater depth in the next lecture (whew!)), but the lectures followed as logical a course as possible, I think.

My interest is only whetted, however, not sated, after finishing A History of Eastern Europe. Which is pretty much what the professor would hope for, I think. I certainly wish I had learned this material before visiting Vienna, Prague, and Berlin in 2016. I'll just have to go back!

I must say that I was surprised by how little I knew about Eastern Europe's history, for some reason I assumed my education about the Soviet block, Russia and Germany would be enough but the complications and relationship these many ethnic groups, countries and kingdoms is much more involved than "a bunch of soviet states".

Getting to know how the region arrived at it's current state, how diverse the population there was and still is and how they ended up with the nationalistic issues they had during the 19th and 20th century. The region was marked and scarred by the many empires that conquered it's lands, pushing and pulling borders, with the two world wars playing havoc on the tenuous peace that they had.

And while many might try to point out how backwards the region "looks", historically they have produced amazing science (think Copernicus), thinking (Poland and it's effort to free all the peoples), literature (with all the Nobels received and many other great works of art), art and so many more. The current view of the East (that's not really that east, given the Czech Republic has Austria at it's south) is much more a prejudiced view that ignores the effects of bad policies after the two world wars and previous treaties than of what it actually looks like.

While still problematic, there are high hopes for the region and it's countries, that have played an important part in world history (as Churchill would say, the east produces much more history than it is capable of absorbing) and must be seen not as a land of barbarians and zealots, but as a population like any other that have had to deal with much more troubles than the West, as it was visible during WW2 when the Germans really wanted to destroy and kill all the "slavs" and resettle the lands with pure germans, causing a much higher toll and a much more violent war.

It's a must read.

Gabriel Liulevicius starts by dedicating a few lectures to cover the geographical characteristics of Eastern Europe, providing some context and summarizing the span of time from the Mongolian invasion in the XIV century to the consolidation of Empires by the XVIII century. After this introduction, the author deep dives into the main core of the course, the XIX and XX centuries. He explores the ever changing and highly interesting political and geographical realities and struggles that have always characterized this region, taking us through the Age of Empires, The Great War, World War II and the rise and fall of the Communist Regimes during the Cold War.
By the end, we get a dedicated lecture on the modern history of Ukraine, ending with the Annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and it's consequences. Although not discussed in the course, it is easy to link the dots with the recent War in Ukraine that exploded in 2022.
More relevant than ever and interesting from start to finish, this course touches on topics that are a key to understanding today's world and it's geopolitical conflicts.

While the lectures provided were very informational and enlightening, I was disappointed that this professor completely glossed over 1500+ years of history of Eastern Europe. This region was populated and contributed to the history of major empires (Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman, etc) for a very long time. Lots of interesting stuff happened there, especially during the Middle Ages. This professor barely spends one lecture on it, starting around 1300. His specialty must be modern history. He spends many lectures on the Communist period. Which is fascinating, but most of us listening to these lectures can remember those periods, and these lectures are basically just rehashing what we learned growing up. I think he could've spent several lectures detailing the ancient history of the region, 1 or two on the middle ages history, and then spent the rest of the series on the modern history. So, sadly, I can't overly recommend this lecture series unless you are really interested in the modern history of this region.

This was a disappointing course offered by the teaching company. It seems that the organization, or the professor, has decided to try to make this entertainment. Maybe the Teaching company is doing this to serve their more aggressive marketing. Maybe it was the professor as he has Eastern European roots.
I learned many interesting things in the course but it could have been done in half the lectures. The glorification of past times Eastern Europeans, Poles, Estonians, etc seems to be a draw to try to get people from those cultures to promote this course. The use of jokes to illustrate so often, taking time from real presentation is a bit frustrating.
Some things learned or explained had real value and improved understanding but I would be hard put to lend this course to someone without a warning.
For example well done was the result after WWI - we learned that it set the stage for the Nazi take over of Germany but - as well pointed out in the course - for Eastern Europe the big change was the demise of the four empires, German, Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian that had dominated them for centuries - but it could have been presented more efficiently.
PS - Goodreads indicates only audio courses - I di this course as a video course and the book is only a support of the lecture content.

An excellent overview of the vast region of Eastern Europe that has played such a pivotal role in world history. The freeway so to speak from Europe itself into Russia this area is highlighted as a gathering of states that formed, dissolved and reformed to bring us to the present where we continue to see the ravages of war as Russia and Ukraine fight it out in present time.

The struggles laid out here are timeless and timely in helping understand the dynamics of the land and the people that make up the players in the great adventure. Many of can trace our roots to this area and it makes for an interesting journey into the past and what our ancestors dealt with.

The narrator is not only informative but also engaging in laying out the issues that surfaced from the very beginnings and kept resurfacing as wars and ideologies played out their episodes to form what we know as this region Eastern Europe and will continue into the distant future adding more chapters to the drama.

This Great Course hosted by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius covers the history of Eastern Europe mostly from within the last 600 years or so. The course very quickly sets up context by going over geographical terrain, language groups, and the ethnic makeup of the people that have lived there over time.

8 lectures in (out of a total of 24) we are already at World War 1 - and I wished the material spent more time pre-20th century. In fact the course reaches WWII at the midpoint of the courses meaning Liulevicius spends about half of the course on the nationalist movements, violence, and political tensions of the last 50 years.

I expect most American school systems don't cover eastern European history in any serious detail so (being an American) I certainly learned quite a lot and am now more able to sort out the many countries and their political states beyond Germany in Europe.