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Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands
Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940
Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands
Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940
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Description
This book features contributions that examine the responses of local populations to nationalizing and state-building projects in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on bottom-up, peripheral, and marginal reactions to top-down nation-building efforts, the volume covers border regions of Romania, Austria-Hungary (before 1918), Poland, Finland, the Russian Empire, and the USSR between 1900 and 1940.
Historiography continues to privilege top-down approaches, focused on elites, institutions, and official policies. Despite previous notable works on this topic, in-depth studies of bottom-up perspectives on these regions remain rare. This volume seeks to redress the imbalance by emphasizing the perceptions, discourses, and everyday practices of ordinary people confronted with (often repressive) nation- and state-building agendas. It also addresses multiple levels of social interaction (combining perspectives from above, from below, and from the middle), involving several categories of actors and navigating through different scales of analysis. Individual and comparative case studies explore the social and political peculiarities of various local communities, particularly their evolving forms of national identification across neighboring regions.
This volume contributes to both nationalism studies, by critically engaging with the concepts of everyday ethnicity and “national indifference,” and borderland studies, through a trans-sectional approach focusing on the agency of various marginalized communities.
Table of Contents
Part 1 The Gaze of the State and the Reluctant Masses: Visions, Projects, and Failures
1 From National Indifference to Indifferent Nationality? The Ukrainian Masses and Nationhood in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union Fabian Baumann
2 “National Soul-Catching,” State Categories, and Local Responses: Jewish and Ukrainian Challenges of the Census in Eastern Galicia and Eastern Lesser Poland, 1880–1931 Martin Rohde
3 Moving between Hierarchies: Small Finnic Nationalities in the Finnish and Soviet Modernizations during the Interwar Years Takehiro Okabe
Part 2 Disruptive Outsiders, Alternative Narratives, and Local Agency
4 Populism, Anarchism, and Alternative Nation-Building “From the Left” in Modern Romania: The Cases of Zamfir C. Ralli Arbore and Constantin Stere Andrei Cu?co
5 The Positivist Education of Peasant Children: Village Schools, Local Agency, and the Advent of Polish Statehood Kathleen Wroblewski
6 Elites, Soldiers, Locals, and the Many Faces of a Belarusian Nation Aleksandra Pomiecko
Part 3 The Elites versus the People: Struggles, Tensions, Encounters
7 Treasonous Stripes: Embracing and Banning the Romanian Colors in Dualist Hungary Ágoston Berecz
8 Courting the Straggler Sheep? Hungarian Nation-Building and Popular Reactions among the Csángós, 1920–40 Gábor Egry
9 Interwar Dniester Jews between Romania and the Soviet Union: Struggles for Cultural Agency and Economic Survival Dmitry Tartakovsky
Part 4 Peripheral Actors and Nationalizing Designs: Between Resistance and Survival
10 Dodging the Nation: Peasant Responses to Schooling and Nation-Building in the Interwar Romanian, Polish, and Soviet Borderlands Petru Negura
11 Singing a Different Tune: Jewish Converts and Musical Resistance in Interwar Bessarabia Iemima Ploscariu
12 Criminalizing Belief and Disciplining the Masses: Gendarmes and Orthodox Priests in the First Trial against Old Calendarists in Bessarabia (1934–5) Andreea Kaltenbrunner
13 Choosing the Soviet Union over Romania: The 1940 Jewish Exodus as Protest and Survival Svetlana Suveica
Index
Product details
| Published | Nov 13 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 320 |
| ISBN | 9781350443761 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 7 bw illus |
| Series | A Modern History of Politics and Violence |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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