The Unknown Europe

How Eastern Europe Got That Way

James R. Payton

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781666704778
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The fascinating history of Eastern Europe includes highs of soaring cultural achievement and lows of almost unimaginable repression. But we in the West don't know much about Eastern Europe or its history--this book helps us see why. We got interested when the region became a threat during the Cold War, but what we learned focused on the Communist period after World War II--not Eastern Europe itself or its deep history, a history that continues to live in the hearts of its peoples. James Payton offers an accessible treatment of the history of the region, an opportunity to learn about Eastern Europeans as they are. He overviews that story from pre-history to the present, examining eleven turning points that profoundly shaped Eastern European history. His treatment considers the backgrounds to the turning points, the events, and the long-lasting impacts they had for the various Eastern European nations. This helps us understand how Eastern Europeans themselves see their history--the "long haul" over the centuries, with the influence and impact of events of the sometimes-distant past shaping how they see themselves, their neighbors, and their place in the world.

chapter 1

Introduction

“We are what history has made us. . . . Our history has formed our experience of the world.”1

When we who live in the West—Western Europe and North America—speak of “Europe,” we almost always actually refer to Western Europe. It is really the only “Europe” we know. We picked up this pattern in school: textbooks and teachers in primary and secondary schools, and even in universities, commonly use “Europe” as if Western Europe is all there is to the continent.

But Europe extends far beyond the German-speaking nations of Germany and Austria, which are the outmost edges of how we typically use the term. The nations to their east—Poland, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, among others—are also European. They are the “other” Europe, Eastern Europe—the Europe unknown to us in most regards. Geographically, the European continent extends all the way to the Ural Mountains in Russia. Actually, then, Western Europe constitutes less than half of the total land mass of Europe: most of the continent falls outside our common use of the term. This book deal with this other, unknown, Europe.

The paths of historical development have not been the same for the two parts of the continent. The history of Western Europe—dealing with England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Scotland, and the rest—has taken a different trajectory than its eastern counterpart has. This volume will guide readers into the historical development of the unknown Europe.

To be sure, the two Europes shared similar backgrounds and some influences. Both built on the heritage of the ancient world. Additionally, for centuries, the Christian faith took root in and significantly shaped the history of both segments of Europe.

In the midst of those similarities, though, pronounced differences also emerged. While both Eastern and Western Europe took up the Greco-Roman heritage, they did so from different centers: Rome shaped Western European experience, but Byzantium exercised the greatest influence in Eastern Europe. While we in the West probably have at least vague notions of how Rome shaped Western Europe, we have come to know little about Byzantium and even less about the profound ways it influenced numerous people groups, including many in Eastern Europe. Rome and Byzantium focused on different elements of the Greco-Roman heritage, making for significant dissimilarities in what unfolded over the course of centuries. With that, Christianity as it developed in the two segments of Europe moved in discordant directions,2 affecting and shaping the cultures developing in the two parts of the continent. With these differences even in what Eastern Europe and Western Europe shared, readers can begin to sense why Eastern European history and culture are sometimes only subtly different from, but often dramatically other than, the Western Europe they have learned about in their schooling.

What This Volume Will Do

This volume asks and answers why we have not known more about Eastern Europe, even though much of the schooling offered in North America and the English-speaking world has focused on Europe. It will point to the situation in prehistory that set the stage for it, the historical significance of the geographical limitations of Greek and Roman civilization during antiquity, and the impact that had for subsequent developments of Western European schooling. It will also indicate how the dramatic development of Eastern European states during what we call the Middle Ages came to be forgotten, and why that all remained unknown to us in the West.

The subtitle—“How Eastern Europe Got That Way”—is both cheeky and precise. The cheeky element recognizes an attitude too often found in the West as it views other areas of the world. For the past five centuries, the West has been in the vanguard of the privileged, in many ways dominating what has happened in much of the rest of the globe.3 In this situation, it has become almost a default position for many to look down on or disregard what has transpired in other geographical regions—even among our closest neighbors, such as Eastern Europe. As the privileged, we in the West have readily thought of our culture, status, or accomplishments as the harbingers of progress and endorsed what is among us as a sort of norm for advanced society and culture. Others, then, need to “catch up” with the way the West has developed. For Eastern Europe to be “that way”—different from, other than, us—would then imply deficiency in what has developed in the region.

But by presenting the history of Eastern Europe this book will challenge and correct that attitude. It will show how the remarkable and resilient civilizations in Eastern Europe developed over the centuries. This volume will lay out, in condensed form, what happened to shape Eastern Europe—to make it, indeed, different from, other than, us.

What We Will Find

The assumption of the superiority of the West noted above actually runs aground on what transpired in the long period after the collapse of the Roman Empire.4 As the centuries from antiquity unfolded, the developments in Eastern Europe advanced far beyond anything going on in Western Europe. To be sure, the western half of the continent would catch up and, in the wake of devastating invasions that overwhelmed Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century and subsequently, surpass its eastern sibling. But for several centuries, the advanced peoples of Eastern Europe lived in and developed significant civilizations more accomplished and sophisticated than anything that had arisen in Western Europe. This book will lay out how and why Eastern Europe attained such pre-eminence, and how that pre-eminence came to an end.

For centuries after that, the West paid scant attention to Eastern Europe, until, in the aftermath of World War II, the tensions of the Cold War reversed that pattern dramatically. The need to know as much as possible about the nations that ended up constituting the Communist bloc led to the establishment in major universities of study centers focused on Eastern Europe. The last half of the twentieth century finally saw the West develop a keen interest in the region. Myriad books and scholarly articles focusing on Eastern Europe were published, as the West sought to learn about that part of Europe that had become communist by Russian intervention.

How We Will Approach It

While I am a “baby boomer” who grew up during the Cold War, and so might well have developed interest in Eastern Europe because of its role in that tense period, I was not attracted to Eastern European history until after the 1989 collapse of Communism throughout the region. My interest in that history focused not on the aberration occasioned by the Soviet domination for the last half of the twentieth century; rather, it was on the actual histories of the various peoples and nations themselves, seeking to understand them on their own terms. It has been an engrossing journey, which I want to share with readers in this book.

Studying and teaching Eastern European history for nearly three decades at university level entailed becoming conversant with the scholarly literature about that history. This led me to identify some significant problems in how the vast bulk of post-World War II studies examined the area.5 While these studies provided much information about the various countries of the Communist bloc, they did little to help understand the peoples and nations of the region on their own terms—which is what I was primarily interested in (and what, from my perspective as a historian, is what history should be especially concerned to discover and present). It surely does not need much argument to point out that focusing on peoples while they are under foreign domination is hardly the way to learn about them for who they are themselves. However helpful these numerous studies were in the exigencies of the Cold War, they proffered little assistance in better understanding the peoples and nations of the regions themselves. If one desires to learn about the history of Eastern Europe, it will not do just to study the Communist period—which is what most of the histories of Eastern Europe produced in the West have done.6

This volume will look at the long-term, broad sweep of Eastern European history by examining significant watershed events in it. A full treatment of that history is, of course, far beyond the scope of a book of this size. But years of studying and teaching Eastern European history have convinced me that we can get a good sense of the region’s history by focusing on these eleven significant turning points.

All peoples’ histories have such epochal events that end up exercising extraordinary impact on what happens among them. Western readers can probably name a few—e.g., the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, and the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789. Each of these, to be ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Pronunciation
• Explanation about Names
• Note on Maps
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Prehistoric Eastern Europe
• Chapter 3: A Bird’s Eye View, from Byzantium to Bosnia
• Chapter 4: A Question of Terminology
• Chapter 5: Problems in the Historiography of Eastern Europe
• Chapter 6: The Evangelization of the Slavs (860s)
• Chapter 7: The Conversion of Vladimir and Kievan Rus’ (988)
• Chapter 8: The Development of States (Tenth–Twelfth Centuries)
• Chapter 9: The Fourth Crusade (1204)
• Chapter 10: The Invasion of the Mongols (1240s)
• Chapter 11: The Battle of Kosovo (1389)
• Chapter 12: The Battle of White Mountain (1620)
• Chapter 13: The Dismemberment of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795)
• Chapter 14: The Aftermath of World War I (1918–22)
• Chapter 15: The Coming of Communism (1945–48)
• Chapter 16: The Overthrow of Communism (1989)
• Since 1989
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• For Further Reading