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Prof Anita Prazmowska SAR M.09

This course is available on the BA in History, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in History and Politics, BSc in International Relations and History, BSc in Politics and History and BSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

May be taken by 3rd years where regulations permit.

The course aims to explain the history of these regions as expressed and moulded by the peoples and their leaders during a particularly turbulent period in European History. Attention will be paid to two European wars and the Russian Revolution, all of which had a profound impact on these countries' freedom to determine their destiny. The study of the inter-war period will include a debate of the reasons for the collapse of democratic institutions, the emergence of patriotic and anti-Semitic movements, economic failures and responses to German and Italian aggression. The establishment, development and the collapse of Soviet domination of the region after the Second World War will be discussed on the background of ethnic and inter ethnic conflicts. In addition political, economic and cultural theories, which formed the background to the emergence of the independent states of Eastern and South Eastern Europe, will be considered. The course will develop these themes in the history of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania and the Baltic States. Final lectures will concentrate on the transition from Communism to democratic states. The break up of Yugoslavia and the wars in the Balkans will be considered in a separate lecture.

10 hours of lectures and 1 hour of classes in the MT. 10 hours of lectures and 1 hour of classes in the LT. 1 hour of lectures in the ST.

There will be a reading week in week 6 of the Michaelmas and the Lent terms.

One essay in the MT

R J Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (1994); S K Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans 1804-1945 (1999); I Y T Berend, Decades of Crisis. Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (1998); A J Prazmowska, Eastern Europe and the Outbreak of the Second World War (1999); P G Lewis, Central Europe since 1945 (1994); T Rakowska-Harmstone, Communism in Eastern Europe (1979); G Swain & N Swain, Eastern Europe since 1945 (1993); F Fejto, A History of the People's Democracies; Eastern Europe since Stalin (1971); J Rothschild, Return to Diversity. A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II (1990); G Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down. The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (1993); John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations. A History of Eastern Europe (2020); Iam D. Armour,  A History of Eastern Europe 1918 to the Present.  Modernisation, Ideology and Nationality (2021)

Exam (75%, duration: 3 hours) in the summer exam period.
Essay (25%, 3000 words) in the LT.