Crisis and Change

Eastern Europe has been divided from the West by much more than the relatively ephemeral experience of communist rule and Soviet domination, and the major problems and challenges confronting post-communist Eastern Europe are as much political, social and cultural as they are economic.

In A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, Robert Bideleux and lan Jeffries examine the problems that have bedevilled this troubled region during its imperial past, in the interwar period, under fascism, under communism and since 1989. The book provides a thematic historical survey and analysis of the formative processes of political, social and economic change which have played the paramount roles in shaping the development of the region. This is the most ambitious and wide-ranging single-volume history of the ‘lands between’, the lands which have lain between Germany. Italy and the Tsarist and Soviet empires.

While mainly concentrating on the modern era and on the effects of ethnic nationalism, fascism and communism, the book also offers original, striking and revisionist coverage of:

• ancient and medieval times
• the Hussite Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Revolution
• the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire
• the rise and decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
• the impact of the region’s powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours
• rival concepts of ‘Central’ and ‘Eastern Europe’
• the 1920s land reforms and the 1930s Depression