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Often when I look for books on some particular historical subject (generally Eastern Europe) I find that while a great deal of new work has been done on the subject, little to none of recent work is in English. Often English language publication cuts off around the mid 1980’s.

Is this an actual trend?

This thing happened in 1989 and then again in 1991. We're still trying to figure out what it was...

While I can't speak on this with much of any authority, the fall of the socialist system in Eastern Europe essentially killed off Sovietology as a field of study overnight in the United States. Jobs dried up very rapidly. I know a couple professors that narrowly avoided what amounted to career suicide by switching to other areas of research right before '89.

Is it a trend away from the study of Eastern Europe? Maybe. Depends on what you're looking for exactly; odds are you'll never run out of biographies on the Lenins and Stalins or Cold War narratives. On the other hand, I never thought Eastern Europe was ever extensively covered by historians, but you can still find rather recent work here and there. I know political scientists had a field day with Russia in the 90's and early Putin days (of course, they were almost universally wrong, but that's to be expected from them ). I imagine the continuing opaqueness of things in Eastern Europe doesn't help matters with research; again, I have no real authority on this, but I can't imagine rumaging through, say, old Soviet archives is easy.

spaceviking wrote:Often when I look for books on some particular historical subject (generally Eastern Europe) I find that while a great deal of new work has been done on the subject, little to none of recent work is in English. Often English language publication cuts off around the mid 1980’s.

Is this an actual trend?

I did a historiography on the subject for grad school a couple years ago (specifically Eastern resistance to Soviet Domination) and ran into the same problem. I managed to find two books however from the post-Cold War era (albeit, one was focused on Soviet policy towards Eastern Europe). They were:

Gati, Charles. Failed Illusions – Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (2006).

Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine. Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War – From Stalin to Krushchev (1996).

Hope that's of some use.

Let me voice my opinion here, there's plenty of high class historiography on Eastern Europe after the opening of Soviet and East European state archives, military and police archives, etc. From about 1987 to 2010, the main body of highly professional, archive based work was composed by specialists.

Too often however the problem is national language. English is not the language which East European historians work in. Czech or Polish, etc. but not English. A huge body of good work is thus lost for english speakers.

Stas Bush wrote:Let me voice my opinion here, there's plenty of high class historiography on Eastern Europe after the opening of Soviet and East European state archives, military and police archives, etc. From about 1987 to 2010, the main body of highly professional, archive based work was composed by specialists.

Too often however the problem is national language. English is not the language which East European historians work in. Czech or Polish, etc. but not English. A huge body of good work is thus lost for english speakers.

Without a doubt. The original poster noted this as well. Hopefully the subject will attract more English-speaking historians, so they can publish such works in the US, Britain, Canada etc or that the Eastern European works find themselves translated to English.

Of the two sources I mentioned, Gati's book on the Hungarian Revolt seems to exist because it was a personal work for him having lived through the revolt (he avoids making it a personal account however), and he's a journalist, not a historian, who is furious at the U.S. for not backing the Hungarians after encouraging revolt through Radio Free Europe. Zubok and Pleshakov are professors at American universities, whose fields are Russia and Eastern Europe (hopefully more will follow in their foot steps).

I'd also recommend Norman Naimark's history of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany from 1945 - 1949: The Russians in Germany (1995).

Huh. Over here the focus has mostly shifted. In Germany, Eastern European History is actually a separate field of study separated from Western European history. What has happened there however is that people seem to concentrate more on the Tsarist regime and early Russia nowadays.

Interesting. Wouldn't that tend towards a compartmentalization of European history that isolates the West's history from the East? Moreover, where exactly does "West" end and "East" begin?

TC Pilot wrote:Interesting. Wouldn't that tend towards a compartmentalization of European history that isolates the West's history from the East? Moreover, where exactly does "West" end and "East" begin?

No, not really. It is just that the main reason for this is language competency. People who study Eastern European history are required to learn more eastern languages (mostly Russian and Polish/Ukrainian) than those who study modern history, who are required to learn English, French and/or another modern language, which might be Russian, but does not have to be - In contrast, in Eastern European history you have to study an eastern language as your second foreign language or as your first.

There are no real barriers between western european or eastern european histories. The studies are set up so that they both have the same basic knowledge, just that the accentuation is different. Less British Empire, more Russian conquest of siberia for example.

As for the subjects, they vary wildly and there is no real division between east and west. It is primarily an organizational matter.