Goodbye Eastern Europe, Jacob Mikanowski, One World, 2023, £22
Hector Monro (Saki) observed that there was too much history in Eastern Europe for its own consumption. Jacob Mikanowski, born in Boston from Polish emigrants of the eighties, has managed to absorb this surplus and produce an exciting narrative from the Dark Ages to our own ‘dark’ one full of fascinating detail and riveting stories some of which came from the records of his own ancestors. He has enjoyed tracing Czech cowherds, Dalmatian sailors, Romanian doctors, Hungarian winemakers and reading the Austro-Hungarian census which recorded everything down to the last calf.
For my generation, except for the intrepid, the region was unknown to travellers until the Soviet yoke was lifted in 1989. We could only learn about it from books and the occasional film, but we were aware of its multi-cultural peoples long before such labels became buzz words in the West.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire migrations stopped much earlier in the West where homogenous nations were created, helped by geography and determined rulers who enforced religious and linguistic uniformity. Visigoths and Franks were soon forgotten, while in Eastern Europe population movements never stopped. Paganism persisted much longer too (c1000): an outdoor religion with forests as temples and groves as shrines but it never disappeared completely, becoming absorbed in folk tales and beliefs. Much of the land was empty and mysterious with dangerous borders and primeval forests containing vampires. As late as 1691 an old man in Latvia was tried for being a werewolf. Cumans were. still arriving in Hungary from the steppe in the 13 th century and Tatars were still carrying out slave raids around Lviv in the eighteenth while groups of Sufis, Jewish and Christian pilgrims, professional beggars and particularly Gypsies with their special skills were wandering around the region, until the present day – Mankowski calls the Wanderers the great cross pollinators and hybridizers of Eastern Europe.”
The beautiful province of Transylvania illustrates the East European ’layer cake’ in miniature: Hungarians, Sceklers and Saxons at the top and Romanian serfs at the bottom as well as Armenian and Jewish traders in between. Even in this century ,in a day you can see a fortified church in Biertan, (a world heritage site) full of German graves – most of the Germans left after 1989, a Hungarian castle, a Romanian village or an Armenian cathedral. The different castes never mixed; the lady of the Manor might chat to her Jewish factor but he woudn’t be asked to stay for dinner. Equality before the law also was an unknown concept in Eastern Europe
Three Empires dominated the region from the end of the Middle Ages: Russian, Austrian and Ottoman but unlike the West they tolerated differences of race and religion. The Ottomans had swallowed up the Balkan peninsula as well as parts of Ukraine and Romania but Christians and Jews were allowed to manage their own affairs and many of them worked for the Turkish administration. The Hapsburg monarchy never enforced German although it was the lingua franca of the educated.
Jews travelling to Eastern Europe in the medieval period found it empty and welcoming especially Poland-Lithuania which was a huge country stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic and comprising today’s Poland, Lithuania and Belarus as well as Ukraine and parts of Latvia .Most Jews can trace their ancestry back to their Polish forbears but after the Polish commonwealth was swallowed up by Austria, Prussia and Russia in the 18 th century the Russian Empire became anti-semitic because Jews dominated the commercial life of the towns. To deal with the competition Jews were forced to live in the Pale of Settlement – roughly the former Poland.
By the 1800’s the French Revolution had spread nationalism throughout Eastern Europe and rebellions broke out regularly in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. The drive for independence was necessarily tied to language, but sometimes there wasn’t a formal one but many dialects – Slovenia had 48, so it had to be invented. Tomas Masaryk, the Czech leader proved (1918) that some medieval manuscripts which had been “discovered” were fraudulent. Serbia and Poland were fortunate for they had been able to keep national identities before they were conquered.
The twentieth century was a catastrophe for Eastern Europe and its peoples endured unimaginable suffering unknown to us in the West. In the First War the three Empires collapsed, replaced by independent but vulnerable nations with substantial minorities bringing discord for the future. The Russian Revolution a mong its other evils increased antisemitism as so many of its leaders were Jewish. In the Second World war the Nazis destroyed European Jewry. In Poland alone three million Jew were killed: 92 per cent of the population. In most places “it was an intimate slaughter; the official reward for delivering a Jew to the German authorities could be as much as fifty kilos of sugar; even the smallest village had a 100 eyes.”
The aftermath of the war saw the largest movement of populations since the end of the Roman Empire; many German communities who had lived far away for centuries like the one near the Volga were forced to return to Germany. In the soviet satellite states social cleansing, arrests, expulsions and show trials were common. On the bright side vestiges of feudalism disappeared and landless peasants often moved to the towns while cinemas, telephone and electricity came to the countryside. Housing might be unpleasant but it was available like healthcare, holidays and education.
By the fifties Stalin’s death and Khruschev’s secret Speech in 1956 indicated that the God would fail eventually. The Hungarians were rewarded by their brave but unsuccessful rebellion with Goulash communism – “keep your head down and enjoy a peaceful life” but in other places vicious persecution continued almost to the bitter end. In Czechoslovakia intellectuals were sacked from their jobs and worked in factories and, boiler rooms; in East Germany one in 10 people spied on their fellow citizens
The collapse of the Soviet Empire was a major revolution as people were forced to adjust to capitalism in a hurry. The past was predictable: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Now healthcare and other services were no longer free while most East European countries were soon full of crooks hatching fraudulent schemes. In Albania many lost their savings in a phony pyramid scheme which started a civil war, with thousands fleeing the country.
A terrible four-year war erupted in the early nineties in the former Yugoslavia for Croatia and Serbia’s bigoted leaders wanted to enlarge their countries at the others’ expense which brought brutal massacres and destruction of a kind not seen the Second World War.; Bosnia Herzgovina’s experience was tragic for this part of Yugoslavia, a mixture of Muslims Croats and Serbs was still a fine example of the tolerance that had existed since the Middle Ages. Even thirty years later the villages in the Serbian half of that province are still empty.
By around 2008 most nations in the region had adjusted to the changes and developed market economies and acceptable democracies but nowadays the future for Eastern Europe is uncertain for the West has lost its resolve in its support for the Ukraine laying the region open to further attacks from Putin’s Russia .If there is no positive outcome Moldavia and the Baltic states might be the next victims.
Mikanowski much regrets the passing of the old Eastern Europe, “a ramshackle Utopia” – many people of different faiths and languages managing to live together. “For Europe to have a future, it would be best not to lose sight of its promise even as we remember the tragedy of its demise.”
