The Diversity of Eastern Europe—and Ukraine
A beefy, centuries-spanning conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Although Eastern Europe is a little outside of our typical purview, I leapt at the chance to speak with Jacob Mikanowski about the region’s history. Jacob is a historian, journalist, and critic. He’s written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The New York Times, appeared on NPR and the BBC, and is the author of Goodbye, Eastern Europe, published in July.
Jacob’s focus on the diversity of the area, both in the book and in our interview, contextualizes the Russo-Ukrainian War and a whole lot more. A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio, which includes more discussion of Jacob’s personal connection to this history, his Eastern European travel tips, and his insistence that I go to Albania. It wasn’t a tough sell:
Ben: Jacob, thank you so much for being here.
JM: It's great to be with you, Ben. Thank you for having me on.
Ben: Absolutely. Today I'd like to explore Eastern European history, a large subject that you deftly weave into, somehow, fewer than 300 pages.
I'll begin with what seems to me like your central argument. As you write, “There is something distinctive about Eastern Europe, something that sets it apart from Western Europe on one side and the rest of Eurasia on the other. That essential, defining characteristic is diversity—diversity of language, of ethnicity, and above all, of faith.”
I wonder if you could elaborate on your argument.
JM: I think it's a little counterintuitive to frame Eastern Europe around diversity because if you go to most Eastern European countries today, not all but many are pretty homogenous internally. If you go to Poland, it's 97-98% Polish-Catholic, Polish-speaking. Some places have a level of diversity, but a lot are kind of like that: mono-ethnic, mono-religious cultures.
To get the diversity, you have to go back centuries, almost to the Middle Ages, when you see two forking paths: Western Europe going one way, Eastern Europe going another way. Western Europe started off very diverse. It started off having a lot of Jews and a lot of Muslim areas. Sicily was a Muslim Emirate, and most of Spain and Portugal were Muslim-ruled Muslim majority countries.
But then came a series of forced conversions and expulsions of Jews and Muslims. Eastern Europe gained the diversity that Western Europe lost, inviting Jews from Western Europe in. Meanwhile, Muslims conquered parts of Eastern Europe and the region also attracted Christians of various kinds. So it became an incredibly religiously diverse area. And with that religious diversity came class and linguistic diversity.
Ben: Could you talk about the rise of the three major empires in the area, and how diversity helped them maintain power until the 20th century?
JM: By around 1500, three major empires subsumed the region’s kingdoms: the Habsburgs, based in Austria; the Ottomans, from Istanbul; and the Grand Dutchie of Muscovy (which ultimately became the Russian Empire), headquartered in Moscow and later St. Petersburg. So there was this very complex, interwoven, multi-ethnic, multi-religious social fabric, but by 1800, no one in Eastern Europe lived independently of the empires.
For the three empires, difference was a resource. They ruled by keeping people within their social roles; by giving them measures of autonomy but keeping them partitioned within specific jobs, enterprises, and places. This power structure lasted essentially until the 1900s, and there were no major challengers to any of the empirical dynasties.
Ben: Despite the fact that the Habsburgs, for example, were very weird.
JM: Very weird. But weird in a very Central Eastern European way.
Ben: You detail how Franz Joseph I, the Habsburg ruler who led the Austrian Empire (and later Austro-Hungarian Empire), dined every night alone on boiled beef. Every night he slept on an iron bed. He also worked all morning and all afternoon, pausing only to eat lunch, which consisted of sausages with horseradish and a glass of brown ale, and to take a 30-minute stroll in a garden reserved just for him.
JM: You know what? He ruled for 68 years, through World War I, so maybe I should be selling the Franz Joseph diet.
Ben: Nobody can see this, but you've been stuffing boiled beef into your mouth this whole time for nourishment.
JM: It’s going to keep me alive till 88, ruling and thriving.
Ben: If the first many hundreds of years of Eastern European history were marked by diversity, it's almost like the last 120 years have been marked by increasing homogenization. Can you discuss the rise of nationalism in the early 1900s, centered largely around language?
JM: Entering the 1900s, there was this incredibly intricate tapestry of Eastern European life. You could go to any village, especially in the core area of Eastern Europe that runs from Latvia down to Albania, and you’d find a landowner speaking one language, believing in one religion; peasants speaking a different language, worshipping a different kind of Christianity; merchants, often Jews, but sometimes other groups, speaking in another language and adhering to a different religion. This kind of fractal diversity reappeared everywhere.
While the empires found diversity useful, for nationalists, it wasn’t great. How were they supposed to create nation-states out of that kind of heterogeneity?
The way people started doing it was to rally around language—to take the majority language in a specific area and try to carve a nation out of that.
Ben: And it got to the point where there were wars fought over particular letters, is that right?
JM: Well, wars in the press, yes, but symbolically freighted wars all the same about what nationhood meant. For example, Slovaks and Estonians really came to hate the letter “y,” and you see national identities begin to emerge out of those kinds of debates.
Ben: Tomatoes, tomat-ys, you might say.
World War I led to the demise of the three empires and to the emergence of Eastern European states like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. I suppose it’s fair to say that World War II took the process of homogenization to another level.
JM: This is where it gets quite personal. A lot of my family either died in the Warsaw ghetto or died around Minsk, where some of them fled. Some actually survived in very, very difficult circumstances.
In Western Europe, Jews killed in the Holocaust were often rounded up and shipped to concentration camps, most infamously in Auschwitz. But in Eastern Europe, where Jews were part of life everywhere in huge numbers, they were killed where they lived. Some were killed in local camps, but many were killed in ghettos, outright shot. It wasn’t this secret thing; it happened everywhere, with eyewitnesses.
Ben: As you write, “In most of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust was an intimate slaughter.”
JM: Truthfully, it’s very hard for me to talk about. In the research process, I found miraculously-preserved records detailing how some of my family members died.
Ben: Your account of those records is stunning—thank you for sharing them so lucidly in the book. We can leave it there for now, although then we get to Stalinism.
JM: Eastern Europe's history in the 20th century, especially from the thirties through the fifties, really tested the extremes of human experience.
So right after the Holocaust, you had Stalinism. The Red Army came in and in most places imposed mini versions of Stalinism across Eastern Europe—all beholden to the real guy, who lived until 1953. And they ruled in the way Stalin did, which was to completely transform the economy, nationalize everything, and redistribute land. They did some things that were kind of positive, like giving land to peasants, but they also decapitated political opposition and invented absurd conspiracies as justification for executing people and fostering paranoia.
And then Stalin died. The communist parties remained in charge, but instead of eliminating political opponents, they began harassing, intimidating, and tracking them. It was a different level of violence, of the type we associate most stereotypically with Eastern Germany, where dissidents were watched and jailed, but (usually) not killed.
Ben: The dissident journalist Milan Šimečka called it the era of “civilized violence.” Unlike before, when listening devices were installed in people’s apartments, “it would be done without damage to the furniture.”
JM: That gives you the picture. Still, not a great way to live, but it opened a bigger space for expression and contributed to the erosion of Soviet power over time.
Ben: You write that the Fall of Communism left Eastern Europe with an identity crisis. Can you talk about the identity crisis, and how it relates to the history we’ve explored about battles over diversity?
JM: In Eastern Europe, where there’s this long history of complicated, enmeshed societies, it’s been hard for countries to form a clear national narrative that says this is who we are, this is what we stand for.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a decade, decade and a half in most places of countries trying to overcome the socialist legacy, get economies on their feet, and join international associations.
Once that was done, a lot of the politics focused on questions like, well, who are we? What do we want to be? With so many discontinuous histories, there was tremendous fighting (and there still is) about historical identity.
Ukraine is a great example. Various parts of Ukraine had brief spells of independence and moments of sovereignty, with still longer periods of being subsumed by imperial rule. What is Ukraine? When was Ukraine? Where was Ukraine? These are really complicated questions. Parts of Ukraine were administered by the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Russian Empire, each with different traditions and identities. On top of that, you have a question of where do ethnic minorities fit in?
And then you have Russia reaching back to its own traditions and saying, actually, empire is the solution. Essentially the Russian position is that Ukrainian identity is all made up; that it has no validity. Real history is what Russia made it at the height of its empire, organizing this territory into a bigger structure.
So in many ways, the diversity that long defined the region is at the center of ongoing struggles today.
Ben: A helpful contextualization, and a fascinating history lesson. Thank you so much for your book and for speaking with me, Jacob.
JM: Thank you, Ben. It's been wonderful.