Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Eastern Europe’s Wars – History Beyond War – Jacob Mikanowski
222 Plays1 year ago
Ep 032 – Nonfiction. What is the importance of Eastern Europe, and how has it been defined by warfare? Jacob Mikanowski joins me to discuss his insightful new book, "Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land."
Support local bookstores & buy Jacob’s book here: https://bookshop.org/a/92235/9781524748500
Subscribe to the War Books podcast here:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@warbookspodcast
Apple: https://apple.co/3FP4ULb
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3kP9scZ
Follow the show here:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/warbookspodcast
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/warbookspodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/warbookspodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Eastern Front of World War I
00:00:00
Speaker
What do you think one thing people should know about World War I in Eastern Europe that most people don't know? That's easy. I think that World War I was fought in Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe. There's a whole Eastern front that was quite bloody, quite spectacular, quite
00:00:18
Speaker
difficult point interesting and maybe more important than the West. I mean, if you're a, this is the war books podcast, there's so much about the Western front, but there's a whole other war in the East. And in the history of the war and history of the world, that's what ends the Russian empire. That war, the Eastern war, the Russian defeat there.
00:00:41
Speaker
That's what ends the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even though no one invades Austro-Hungary. No foreign soldiers step on Austro-Hungarian soil, but they get exhausted.
Who is Jacob Mykonowski?
00:01:00
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on Jacob Mykonowski for his new book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Jacob is a historian, a freelance journalist, and a critic. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Eon, Cabinet,
00:01:27
Speaker
The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The New York Times, newyorker.com, The Point, The Owl, Atlas Obscura. Is it owl or all, Jacob? I think all. Oh, okay. It's defunct, so it's an inner graveyard now. All right, well, your writing's been there. And also the Los Angeles Review of Books. How are you doing today, Jacob? Great, great to be with you, okay? Yeah, thanks for joining me.
00:01:53
Speaker
And we were talking a little bit about this before we started recording. So your book, Goodbye Eastern Europe, it's not like a war book per se, but I wanted to have you on because your book, the history of Eastern Europe is so closely tied to war. I mean, you do have a picture of a tank on the cover of the book.
Why is Eastern Europe's perception changing?
00:02:20
Speaker
So war factors very prominently into this story that you tell. And I think you did a very good job with this book, especially given the relevance right now with obviously Russia and Ukraine. But yeah, excited to dive in. First, maybe in your own words, a question I like to ask authors on this show, could you just tell us what is your book about?
00:02:43
Speaker
It's good to be with you. And it's actually pretty easy in the broad strokes. It's a comprehensive history of Eastern Europe. It's my take on the comprehensive history of Eastern Europe. So everything, the story of Eastern Europe from the dawn of written history, even a little bit before then, up to more or less the present in a thematic presentation and kind of guided
00:03:13
Speaker
by what I see as the big theme structuring Eastern European history, so it's not a strict narrative of one thing happening or another, it's sort of the matted resolution where I think they're the biggest cultural principles and shared experiences in Eastern European history, and there's a fair amount of my own family history woven through it as a kind of
00:03:35
Speaker
guardrail, you could say, or, you know, crumb trail to give.
What makes Eastern Europe unique?
00:03:40
Speaker
It's not a family history, but there are bits of family history, especially as you come into the 19th and 20th century. I'm from a mixed Polish Jewish family, Catholic Polish Jewish, that had turbulent time in the 20th century, especially. And some of those stories are woven in to make it kind of a more personal tale. So the hope is that
00:04:02
Speaker
for novices and for amateurs and for people who are just with an interest, they can start this book, read from London in the end, and have a picture of Eastern Europe as a shared space, shared space of cultural affinities, not a uniform space, but one with a lot of similar principles of society and culture, and then a kind of a more of a narrative of the 20th century that runs easier from 1900 to present,
00:04:36
Speaker
read you have in common, suffered and endured in common, told through kind of miniature stories and individual people. So it's much more anecdotes and personal stories than individuals. There's not my personal, but individuals than it is high politics. There's a
00:04:57
Speaker
kind of dusting or outline of high politics, you get the major rulers, you get major wars, but it's not a straight and narrative history of that. It's more history of experience, history of lived suffering, lived joy sometimes.
How is Eastern Europe defined?
00:05:13
Speaker
So the title of your book is Goodbye, Eastern Europe. Explain that. Why Goodbye, Eastern Europe? It's a little bit ironic. It's a little bit of a... It actually works I think on a couple of levels.
00:05:27
Speaker
One comes from kind of my life, and I think the level of my generation, I'm 40, the generation that, kind of the last generation that saw socialism, I don't remember the 80s, go to Poland in the 80s, like world above. You used to go to Poland, you used to go to Eastern Europe, it was a crossing a civilizational divide. You would go, that's a really foreign place, especially, I think, Poland, Romania, some of the countries that had a really, like really tough time economically in the 80s, you were crossing from,
00:05:56
Speaker
You went to a place where the stores had no food, where the air smelled like coal, brown lignite, where things just were like in a total standstill of kind of the late summer of state socialism. And he felt like a real, there was a whole literature series called The Other Europe, and it felt like The
What transformations occurred post-socialism in Eastern Europe?
00:06:15
Speaker
Other Europe. The Eastern Europe was this extremely foreign place, almost civilizationally. And that sense of difference, an artificial sense of difference created by
00:06:27
Speaker
the Eastern Bloc or the Warsaw Pact, however you want to describe that, has vanished in my lifetime. And people have tried to shed the label Eastern Europe as much as possible, especially at the level of countries, at the level of diplomacy, anyone who can.
00:06:42
Speaker
has tried to rebrand and escape what's seen as a pretty, you know, negative, the negative connotations of Eastern Europe. So the Baltics are now trying to be the Nordic zone. My part of the world, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, that I studied in graduate school has kind of moved, called itself Central Europe. The Balkans will rebrand themselves differently. The Eastern Adriatic, the Black Sea, just the Mediterranean kind of paper over that. So people are fleeing from Eastern Europe as an idea.
00:07:13
Speaker
When I started the book, I actually felt like there was a lot less, there wasn't much interest academically in Eastern Europe. I was stuck in grad school late years and I'm like, there was just not, funding was vanishing, interest was vanishing, publishers were. Isn't that crazy how times can change? Yes. So it flipped back completely. But it was extremely, like everyone had got, all these countries had gotten into the EU in 2010 and 2013.
00:07:39
Speaker
I had memories of how relevant and how interesting it was to people in the 80s, even the early 90s, and it just vanished. But then there's a deeper meaning,
How did religion shape Eastern Europe?
00:07:47
Speaker
I think, to the title. The book is now split into two parts, two big parts. One is about the religious and political heritage of Eastern Europe, up to 1900, and the other one's 1904.
00:08:01
Speaker
And what I try to do in that first half is say, as much as Eastern Europe is a kind of construct imposed from outside, like it's my lifetime, a description created by or a shared community, the thing that I was holding together was Soviet occupation or Soviet influence, that there is a deeper unity that's been ignored, that's been forgotten, that was destroyed in a way, that there is something actually distinctive to Eastern Europe. And I try to argue that it is
00:08:31
Speaker
historically, socially and culturally different from Western Europe on the one side, Russia and the kind of bigger Eurasian rule on the other, that there's a kind of diversity that existed woven through everywhere, kind of a fractal diversity that you can find in every village. This is the zone of maximum diversity, multiple diversity. It's very different from anything you would find in France or Spain or even Russia or, I don't know, maybe,
00:08:58
Speaker
from China in this kind of zone, this belt from running from Estonia down to Albania. And I try to say, and that's a world that, as someone who kind of belongs to a Eastern European minority and very small minority point of Polish Jews, that really appeals to me and really is important to me, that heritage of diversity, this world that somehow did hold together
00:09:22
Speaker
for a long time, at least until World War II, there's multiple plural world. That's really the world of my grandparents and their parents. And so I was saying goodbye to that kind of deeper past, I can call it a ramshackle utopia at one point, to get into what that means. I think that might be an oxymoron, but that world I'm also saying goodbye to.
00:09:46
Speaker
That's so interesting what you say about escaping the label of Eastern European. So my family, we're part English, then some German, and a lot of Eastern European and Polish. Me and my brother did one of those ancestry tests or whatever. My whole life, my family had the identity of
00:10:14
Speaker
being like coming from like England, like being an English family. And we do have, the last name is an English last name, but we did this ancestry test and we're actually mostly Eastern European. So we found out, but the family still doesn't, it's still like, there seems to be much more Western European recognition than Eastern European recognition. So I thought that's very interesting that you say that.
00:10:41
Speaker
Maybe before we really dive into the history of Eastern Europe, for the audience, could you define what is Eastern Europe? What are those boundaries? I can. And with the caveat that this is my definition. This is contested terrain.
00:10:59
Speaker
even more contested since the Ukraine war. So you have a lot of struggling over what is Eastern Europe, what is Central Europe. I have a big 10th definition of Eastern Europe, although not the biggest 10. Political scientists have the biggest 10. But my definition of Eastern Europe is everything between Germany,
00:11:18
Speaker
On one side, generally the West, Russia. I really mean Russia, not the Soviet Union, but historical Muscovy, Russia, Russian speaking core land to the East and North South Estonia, Albania. I would actually put it in Northern Greece, but we're quibbling quibble on the borders. I think there's a case to be made for Finland kind of being half in half out. I don't actually put it in. So it's that, that world of.
00:11:46
Speaker
maximum diversity in minimum space, that's the Great Kundera Line, and of small states with difficult fates, of countries that are nation states that are small, small relative to their neighbors in battle, have a sovereignty that's been challenged multiple times, have a discontinuous record of independence. So Ukraine's a big country.
00:12:11
Speaker
by, by certainly by European standards, huge by European standards, but it's small relative to Russia and is threatened by Russia and has had a brief history of independence. So, and, and every other country, I think it's, I think it's the biggest in Eastern Europe. So every other country has that sense of fragility of political, you know, extinction. Disappearance is always possible in a way that it's not really going to be with a France or a demon of Sweden or Russia, you know,
00:12:41
Speaker
geopolitical threat, it might be a reality for those countries, but vanishing from the map much less so. Yeah. And it's very easy to, you're absolutely right with, so it's, it's easy to forget, and I was reminded this from your book, but just thinking about Poland, you know, Poland at one point would just like, didn't exist, like the boundaries of the country.
00:13:09
Speaker
And then but then it was a country again. But then like part of that country was taken by the Soviet Union and then part was taken by Germany. And it's easy to forget how recent a lot of the borders in Eastern Europe have changed as opposed to somewhere like Western Europe. I'm trying to think of like what country in Western Europe is maybe I guess like we would be like Irish independence maybe. I don't even know when that was. All sass.
00:13:38
Speaker
flipped hands, changed hands. But yeah, Poland didn't exist for 123 years. And then it essentially vanished again from 39 to 45. It did vanish. So in my grandparents' lifetime, the partitions are very much
00:13:55
Speaker
I was into Polish history as a kid. I grew up in America, but I was going to school in Poland. I was so obsessed with the partitions. I'm like, how could they do that to us? They just carved us up like a dinner plate. And I wasn't alone. Once you identify, you do fixate with these moments of historical loss. Hungary vanished.
00:14:14
Speaker
mostly for a, it depends on how you look at Hungary, but for hundreds of years, Serbia, the same thing. You have these wounds that become very formative to identity. Whereas, the U.S. really doesn't have anything comparable. Yeah, but I guess Ireland being conquered by the English, the 12th century. Well, let's go all the way back to, we'll go back to Roman times, but if you want to go back earlier, we can do that too.
00:14:45
Speaker
What does Eastern Europe look like during Roman times? You're right that it was actually very sparsely populated, a lot of wilderness, the writings that came out of that region at the time were people talking about how they would go days without seeing a person. What was Eastern Europe like, say, during the Roman times? I'll say, I wish we knew. I wish we knew more because Romans didn't really care that much. People on Eastern Europe didn't write.
00:15:16
Speaker
The Romans were aware that there was a lot out there. They were up to the Danube, and then past that, they made some forays. For a while, they controlled most of what's now Romania. And then past that, they knew that there was a lot of amber. It's a very cool material, very light, very beautiful. Tons of it came from somewhere up there. And beyond that, they had some kind of
00:15:44
Speaker
a vague understanding of tribal names, of nomadic peoples that were somewhere, and beyond that they didn't know. They didn't really leave records. They had traders going up there. They had slavers going up there. Clearly slaves were being sent down from there. We actually have archaeological evidence of Roman slaving happening in Poland and the Baltics. They had amber trading. But they didn't really write much
What role did warfare play in Eastern Europe's history?
00:16:06
Speaker
about it. They had very few details.
00:16:08
Speaker
And so we have to go on archaeology and inference. It was, the contrast to the Roman Empire was quite stark. There weren't, as far as we know, any, there's no writing. We don't think there were very large political units, but it's, so when people did go there, Marcus Aurelius went to Slovakia, spent a, spent a couple, couple winters there fighting.
00:16:35
Speaker
The area around Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, he's fighting the macro man, of course, writes a lot while he's there, writes nothing about what's happening around him. Writes all internally. Writes about the struggles of his soul. Writes stoic reflections that we call the meditations. And essentially says nothing about what's around him. So we don't really know. We know it was just plenty of forest. That forest lasted into the 17th and 18th century.
00:17:04
Speaker
It remained underpopulated compared to the West and compared to the South. It remained underdeveloped for the West and the South. That's why certain species don't extinct in Europe.
00:17:15
Speaker
In Western Europe, survived in Eastern Europe for much longer. The wolf, the beaver, they still live there. And the aurochs, if you know what an aurochs is, the mega, it's the wild ancestor of the cow, a giant, like a Volkswagen-sized cow. And they survived in the 17th century. So the Polish kings kept them in their game reserves. And really they actually tried to save them. They died of a disease ultimately. They tried to preserve these incredible animals that went extinct. But the Eastern Europe was wild enough.
00:17:44
Speaker
had enough wild space to preserve some of that. So that's the best discussion I can give you. A lot of it is no question mark. What's like the first writing that we get with somebody traveling to Eastern Europe and writing about who's there and what things are like and the people that he or she sees around them?
00:18:08
Speaker
Depends on what you mean by Eastern Europe, depends on what you mean by writing. I'm thinking about a part in your book, I think it was actually a Jewish explorer who writes about being in Eastern Europe and just finding basically the forest. I'm not sure if you, you probably do name this person and the name escapes me. I think it's Yakub, like it's the Arabic version of my name. Okay. I think of Tortosa. Okay.
00:18:37
Speaker
There's a Muslim traveler and a Jewish traveler, and I don't want to get them confused. But in the 10th century, action kind of heats up in Eastern Europe. It's been my part of Eastern Europe. Bohemia, Poland, the action, there's real trade happening. And some of that trade is furs, and we now are kind of realizing that the dominant part of that trade is slaves. There's an incredible demand in the Muslim world.
00:19:02
Speaker
which is the most advanced economically, civilizationally, socially part of the world, especially the kind of Western Eurasian part of the world for slaves, for labor. And they have a ton of silver, hard currency, huge mines in Iran. And there's this real boom of slaves. And so the word slave comes from Slav. Slav, slave. Slaves were Slavs. Slavs were being imported, exported from what's now the Slavic world.
00:19:32
Speaker
And you have the first literate witnesses or traitors, travelers, Muslim and Jewish, but Jewish from the Muslim world, Jewish from Granada and Muslim from Tortoza, all right, might have those switched. And this is around 960, 959, 60. And they started going to check out these trading hubs. They go to Prague, the traveler you're thinking of, and sees crosses
00:20:00
Speaker
goes for a week without seeing anything, sees forts made out of timber, timber palisades, sees what becomes the king of Poland, then a prince. A Jewish traveler is the first witness to the pre-Christian, the very end of pagan Poland, Poland, pagan. And so that's the kind of the first more expressive, more detailed witness that we have after
00:20:30
Speaker
But the Romans leave almost nothing, so this is the first kind of more detailed version. There's a little bit you could point to a little bit earlier. Cyril and Methodius, I don't want to, you know, quibble too much. There are Christian witnesses. But the deeper kind of travel reflection, that's the 10th century, and that's the kind of height of the slave trade.
00:20:48
Speaker
So one, I was very fascinated to learn that Prague was a slave trading hub, something that I had never heard before. Just to give us maybe a sliver in time, look at warfare. What was warfare like around this time? How was war being waged? Who is fighting who? Maybe what types of weapons are they using? And how violent are we're talking around the 10th century?
00:21:18
Speaker
How violent are things right now? Yeah. There was, so there's this commercial activity coming from the South, all this great Iranian silver carried by Muslim and Jewish merchants up North, get human cargo. And then you need people to round up and you need experts in violence on the other side. You need slavers, you need,
00:21:46
Speaker
bodyguards, and that's kind of the, probably the genesis of most Eastern European states, especially the Bohemia, against Czech land, Poland, not the, this is not the history I grew up with. This is more comes from archaeology and comes from piecing together the world of citrate, because the stories that the medieval chronic was told are very different. They did not like the idea that these dynasties come from, you know,
00:22:10
Speaker
essentially selling their own people or selling very relative nearby people. It's a very unattractive story. So I was pretty buried. But to this day, I had no idea about that history. So still not a narrative that seems to get talked about. Yeah, it's not really the narrative that gets taught. It's now kind of revisionist, medievalist, especially in Poland and Czech Republic have done a lot to do it, but it hasn't
00:22:36
Speaker
because it's not part of the written story, it's part of the archaeological story, but the experts in violence in the North were the Vikings, were the Northmen. They're the ones who, through basically military prowess, could connect the world of the Slavic villages to the world of the Arab Emporia. So that's where you get Russia comes out of this, comes out of the river trade in slaves, mostly Swedish Vikings,
00:23:06
Speaker
I'm going to put Vikings in quotes because of the problems around the genomic nature of Viking, but that is kind of what you should picture. Taking people down the Dnieper and the Dniester, down at the Black Sea, and then similar groups running in the same trade over the Carpathians from Krakow over the mountains to Prague, and then from there west to Venice, which is a big slave trading emporium, out to the rest of the Frankish Empire, out to
00:23:38
Speaker
the Emirate of Cordoba. So actually they were building a highway north from Warsaw.
00:23:45
Speaker
A lot of the great archeological discoveries, a ton has been discovered in the last 20 years in Europe and Eastern Europe because of the EU. And it has one of the most ambitious archeological programs by accident because there was all this money to road construction. You build big roads, big highways, which we really needed in Eastern Europe. You discover stuff in the ground. So they're building a highway north of Warsaw. They found this big cemetery, clearly not Christian from the way the body's replaced.
00:24:16
Speaker
essentially of this mixed, probably mostly northern, mostly Viking bodyguard of the early Polish dukes, but mixed with people, they did DNA work on it, they did sourcing the different implements. There are people from Khazaria, from Central Asia, there are people from West, there are swords from Western Europe. So you have a kind of motley crew of rough and rowdy men, you know, people who found a living
00:24:46
Speaker
in what was a brutal trade. And people who could organize that, probably intermarried locally or were local, but had to find reinforcements. This is a story of safe formation, something similar happened in North Africa later in the northern of the Sahel. This is kind of
00:25:05
Speaker
slave trade turning into bigger states defending themselves, then taking control of this trade, then organizing something out of that, then becoming Christian or Muslim in Africa, and turning to states from that. So it's still a murky story because it was not written so it could be together.
How did Jewish history unfold in Eastern Europe?
00:25:25
Speaker
But it seems like a lot of the fighting at this time was around the slave trade, which in Europe to me is wild to think about.
00:25:37
Speaker
But because you do hear about, I've heard a lot about the North African slave trade and then obviously like the transatlantic slave trade. But I guess that's just like something that really stuck out to me. I'm curious about religion in this part of the world. And I was wondering if you could maybe walk us through
00:26:02
Speaker
Well, first, I was very surprised to learn that Eastern Europe, up until the 14th century, there were still pagan leaders that were in the area. That also seems a little wild because Europe was sending crusades out to other parts of the world, yet Europe hadn't been fully Christianized.
00:26:24
Speaker
Talk about religion in Eastern Europe historically and in the different groups that are in the region. And specifically, I'm interested in Judaism, but if you could talk about maybe the different types of religious groups that are in the area first. So Eastern Europe really becomes Europe's great kind of reservoir of religious diversity, especially as it actually kind of decreases progressively in Western Europe over the course of the Middle Ages.
00:26:53
Speaker
We know about Andalusia and the kind of idea of beautiful Muslim Spain being this wonderful melting pot of Muslim, Christian, and Jew. And that really was true, but with some caveats that historians about it. But that progressively goes away. And you have culminating in 1492, when Eragon of the Steel unified, Ferdinand of Isabella,
00:27:21
Speaker
And what they do, first thing they do, well, they send Columbus out to the new, just somewhere in order, they're sending him, and they expel Spain's, they conquer Spain's last remaining Muslim kingdom, and they expel the peninsula's Jews.
00:27:37
Speaker
And that culmination of a process had been happening in Western Europe for like 300, 400 years. England expelled its Jews in 12th century. France expelled its Jews at the end of the, or the start of the 14th century. She expelled them a couple of times. German states and cities are spelling their Jews and readmitting them and expelling them. But Jews are being driven out of Western Europe. Muslims are being driven out of Southern Europe. And, but they find refuge, especially Jews in Eastern Europe, which is underdeveloped.
00:28:08
Speaker
which is under-populated, which is under-commercialized. And so for the rulers there, siege is a real resource to connect, you know, pre-modern world, most industries is agricultural, but to connect that world to the bigger world of trade. You need people who are cosmopolitan, who move around. And so they start inviting Jews
00:28:35
Speaker
in groups or individually to settle. And it becomes the real kind of arc, kind of Noah's arc of European Jewish life, especially in Poland, Lithuania. And there's also a Muslim presence in kind of two different forms. One is these kind of refugees from the conflicts following Genghis Khan. There are Muslim nomads, nomadic groups. They stop being nomadic, but
00:29:02
Speaker
in front of the Turkic Muslims, who settle in Poland, Lithuania, settle in Belarus, in Lithuania, and pledge to fight for the king to settle in Hungary too, and become a military frontiersman, frontier guards, and then there's the Ottoman Empire pushing in and creating
00:29:22
Speaker
making half of Eastern Europe really, putting it under Muslim rule and increasing converting a lot of Eastern Europeans and people in the Balkans to Islam. So you have those three religions and paganism lasts longer in Eastern Europe than does anywhere else in Europe. It's the last on one hand, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, all Christianized around the year 1000, same as Scandinavia. But then there's this giant forgotten country essentially, Lithuania,
00:29:52
Speaker
which is not the little Lithuania we know about, kind of inherits that. But the Lithuania of the Middle Ages is a huge country that has most of Belarus as part of its territory. Chunkalapia, large part of Ukraine.
00:30:07
Speaker
and is a proudly pagan, defiantly pagan state that's fighting these German crusaders. And the more they fight the German crusaders, the more proudly pagan they become, and the more they fight these encroaching, actually crusading order, the two eutonic knights, the more they organize in response and become much more like a medieval European kingdom in structure, in people, they have dukes, they have organization, they have actually a pretty good army, but everyone's pagan.
00:30:36
Speaker
in 1375, you know, the Renaissance is getting going, the Petrarch is going, they're having pagan burials, they're having pagan priests, they actually have Christians fighting with them, they have Christians in their orbit, but the rulers are all defiantly pagan, and it's a dynastic marriage with Poland that brings them into the Christian fold. Very exciting. I like it. How much of the fighting at this time
00:31:05
Speaker
is just fighting against Christianity, fighting against these, I don't know, they're not crusaders, but they are people who want... Well, they're not crusaders, the shock knights are a crusading order. They started in the Holy Land and they got a great time fighting Muslims and they are like, well, what if we have our own infidels close to home?
00:31:31
Speaker
just a boat ride away. And so they are a crusading order. They are warrior monks who do not marry.
00:31:40
Speaker
mostly German, but they had French and English recruits. And there were crusades, and there's a great book called The Northern Crusades, like Eric Christensen. The Swedes also ranked crusades in Finland and in Estonia. And then the German crusading order was like, we need to convert these people. And these people are very well armed and very good fighters, so we're going to do it with
00:32:05
Speaker
This old phrase of Charlemagne's with tons of steel, tons of iron. They don't convert, we'll just cut their heads off until they start converting. And it is that crusader warfare, crusading warfare that people organize in response to. Now, do they remain, does paganism stay around for so long because maybe the fighters are so fierce or is it just because this isn't the last place that the crusaders came to?
00:32:34
Speaker
Or maybe a little bit of both? A little bit of both, because actually they have Christians also to their east. Novgorod, the Russian municipalities are all Orthodox Christian. Because they've put up a good fight. And I think that kind of crusading warfare, which is actually quite brutal, has its own kind of brutal response. It forces people who were
00:33:02
Speaker
disunified to unify in response and forces you to have an identity. The encroachment strengthens that oppositional identity. Now, when you say it was quite brutal, not to make this into an R-rated conversation, but what do you mean exactly? I was an anecdote I had to cut from the book because I thought it was too distasteful. A group of pagan fighters captured some knights, and the knights were always better armored. They actually had armor.
00:33:30
Speaker
But they could they could be picked off kind of through guerrilla war and pick them off. And they had burned villages, etc. So to punish them, they. Sensitive listeners should skip ahead 15 to 30 seconds, but they cut open their stomachs, took out their intestines, nailed them to a tree and then had them walk it walk around it till they like spilled out their guts. Now that really happened.
00:33:57
Speaker
might be propaganda, but that's the kind of warfare of extraordinary cruelty, guerrilla warfare lasting a century plus, extraordinary acts of cruelty to like frighten them this way. That's really brutal warfare. Yeah. And while we're on the subject of religion and thinking about religious violence, I remember a few stories that you write in your book about violence against Jews in the region.
00:34:26
Speaker
Now, I'm curious actually, so this is a two-part question, how Jews were received by the population. You talked about, you know, they're being expelled from all these other Western European countries. I'm curious if they were welcomed by most people when they arrived in Eastern Europe. And then maybe talk about some of the violence against Jews. And this is gonna be like a big time period, but leading up to World War II. That's a big question. Also, really welcomed.
00:34:55
Speaker
Jewish folk tale and Jewish folk memory, the very woods welcomed them. It's a story that they came to Poland and they heard a voice saying, this is Polin in Hebrew, this is stay here essentially. It's a play on words, but they went into the woods and they found tractates of the Gemara of Jewish law written carved into the bark of trees, probably not, but they felt like the actual woods were welcomed them in a way that was true because there was
00:35:24
Speaker
This space wasn't that people were welcoming them exactly. It's that there was open space. You have to imagine kind of a frontier environment, especially as you push east into Eastern Europe and push north to Eastern Europe, of there being space to settle. And so you could establish communities, establish towns, establish Jewish majority towns as things develop.
00:35:50
Speaker
And, you know, there's actually a historical mystery about that. There's so many Jews eventually in what was Poland, Lithuania, in that area by like 1900, that it's hard for demographers to work out.
00:36:06
Speaker
how there could be so many, starting from what seemed to be so few in the Middle Ages, that either more people arrived in the Middle Ages or the growth rate was just extraordinary. So people did find a real safe haven there. But that was punctuated by terrible moments of violence. 16th, 17th century, people were describing Jewish, writers were describing Pennsylvania as the, actually,
00:36:33
Speaker
Christian writers would call it the Paradisus Judeorum, the Paradise of the Jews. Jews would also describe it as a welcoming place. And that security was really shattered in the mid-17th century in a spectacular civil war that becomes a kind of multipolar war. Starting in 1648, the Kamil Nitzky Rebellion.
00:37:00
Speaker
So if you grew up on Polish historical fiction, there's a guy named Henrik Szyńkiewicz, who writes this cycle of novels that everyone reads. They're very popular. And I grew up reading them, like 9, 10, 11. They're like, what's the equivalent?
00:37:17
Speaker
Tolkien, maybe. So our Tolkien is this historical fiction set in the mid 17th century, these quite brutal wars that kind of end the Polish golden age too. And the first one of them is this big Cossack rebellion.
00:37:32
Speaker
Because what was in our Western Ukraine was then part of this larger Polish-Lithuanian state. And religiously that was complicated because the Polish-Lithuanian state, the dominant religion was Catholicism. But the religion of all the eastern part of it was Orthodoxy. And the Catholic part was trying to impose Catholicism more on the eastern part. And there was this huge rebellion, possibly driven by personal motives, of a Cossack.
00:37:56
Speaker
Cossack leader becomes the Cossack leader, the Hetman, named Chmielnitsky. I say it in the Polish way, there's a Ukrainian way that's more like Chmielnitsky. He's a hero in Ukraine, he's a villain in Poland, and he's doubly a villain to Polish Jews. Because when that war broke out, the main fighting was Polish versus Cossack versus Ukrainian versus
00:38:25
Speaker
Polish-Lithuanian, but caught in the crossfire were all these Jewish communities, which were mostly defenseless, which did not have fighting men, which are not allowed to have fighting men, which Jews weren't supposed to bear arms legally, and they were decimated. There were extraordinary atrocities. There was extraordinary
00:38:44
Speaker
kind of probably the worst bloodshed before World War I, certainly, because there were terrible masters before World War I. But this is the one event that kind of stood out in people's minds for hundreds of years as the great catastrophe, this rebellion, 1648, 1649. The main book written about it has a very evocative title. I have it right behind me. It's The Abyss of Despair by Nathan Hanover. And he describes just the atrocities committed against the civilian Jewish population and created
00:39:14
Speaker
But that didn't, that wasn't a constant. That was a real kind of eruption of violence. And there were moments later, but that was the big devastating moment up to the 20th century.
Why is the Eastern Front of WWI significant?
00:39:26
Speaker
There were others, there were pogroms, there were local things, there were the Haida mocks. There were other wars in which Jews were caught in the crossfires, but nothing on that scale.
00:39:38
Speaker
Well, I hate to skip ahead so much, but that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to skip ahead to World War II, so we're going to blow right past World War I, which started in Eastern Europe. It did start in Eastern Europe. Yeah. In a forgotten way. Well, actually, you know what? I think if there's one thing people should know,
00:40:03
Speaker
What do you think one thing people should know about World War I in Eastern Europe that most people don't know? That's easy. I think that World War I was fought in Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe. There's a whole Eastern front that was quite bloody, quite spectacular, quite
00:40:21
Speaker
Difficult, quite interesting, and maybe more important than the West. I mean, if you're a, this is the War Books podcast, there's so much about the Western Front, and the Western Front is so much dominant in our imagination over World War I, the Somme, the Trenches, Ardent Forest. That's what our, the picture of World War I is, you know, a ditch in Belgium, basically. But there's a whole other war in the East
00:40:51
Speaker
And in the history of the war and the history of the world, that's what ends the Russian Empire. That war, the Eastern War, the Russian defeat there, that's what ends the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even though no one invades Austro-Hungary. No foreign soldiers step on Austro-Hungarian soil, but they get exhausted, depleted completely by that war and by the war of Italy. But there's also another front people don't think about.
00:41:19
Speaker
And actually, there's a whole other conflict in the Balkans that actually, academically, that's what I used to write about was the war in Macedonia. Kind of interesting. And just to
00:41:30
Speaker
To put that beat out there, that's a very interesting conflict, very interesting, very important, and very different. And that turns into a longer war, Polish Bolshevik war, afterwards. You have wars that have massive cavalry charges and a front that moves hundreds of miles one way, hundreds of miles back, back and forth, big movements, massive casualties.
00:41:52
Speaker
a more dynamic war, but a war between kind of two boxers that are, they're, they're expending all the kind of, everyone loses in the East. Which is between Macedonia and who? Well, there's a Macedonian front, actually. So, um, in Macedonia, Northern Greece, modern Macedonia, uh, the British and French are, are fighting the, uh,
00:42:16
Speaker
And Serbians, the exiled Serbian army that gets driven out of Serbia and has this incredible odyssey and then joins up with the friendship with the allies, fights mostly the Bulgarians. And yeah, and there's a long stalemate there and malaria becomes the big victor. Everyone starts getting sick.
00:42:44
Speaker
And I wrote about academically, that's right. I wrote about that front, very forgotten front, the Macedonian front. It's in Macedonia, but completely forgotten, right? Like you, people know what World War I is. There's a whole other World War I out in the East. And that's it. And we'll move to World War II. Well, well, thank you for, uh, for bringing that up because, you know, I could, I'm actually, I'll probably Google when we're done with this, I'll probably Google all about
What were Jacob Mykonowski's family experiences during WWII?
00:43:10
Speaker
it. Um, but I want to get to World War II because
00:43:13
Speaker
I want you to tell the story of your family a little bit because this was, as you said, a personal book for you. Could you just, in terms of World War II, what was your family's experience in, first, who were they, where did they live, and what was their World War II experience?
00:43:36
Speaker
two sides of my family, it's four sides, but there's a Jewish side and a not Jewish side. And I'll talk mostly about the Jewish side. The Polish side, although had two grandmothers who were Polish Catholics, I should know very little about what happened to one of them. It was from Western Poland. The other one was from Vilnius and had sisters and one ended up in the Soviet Union and one ended up being
00:44:05
Speaker
forced laborer, but they mostly still, one I think worked in Germany, one stayed in Vilnius, one in the Soviet Union, so they had their own difficult war as Polish women. But the Jewish side of the family was pretty big, as to my two grandfathers, both in Warsaw at the start of the war, both in kind of the working class, sort of a real ghetto in Warsaw before the war, but the kind of working class slums
00:44:34
Speaker
or neighborhoods of Warsaw. It was an extended family, too. So in writing the book, I drew on a little more than just the grandfather's experiences. But so my family, the part of my family that survived the war, which obviously I'm descended from, survived by going east very soon in the war and by living in the Soviet Union. But my actual grandfathers fought
00:45:02
Speaker
one fought in the September campaign. If I should explain how much World War II I should explain. Well, when you say September campaign, what do you mean? So World War II, the fighting part of World War II, European World War II starts September 1st, 1939, when Germany, Nazi Germany, invades Poland. And that invasion triggers the
00:45:25
Speaker
British and French declaration of war on Germany, and then you're after the races. But so for about four weeks or so, the Germans are invading and conquering Poland right that first day. It was beautiful. Everyone remembers it. It was a beautiful, gorgeous
00:45:44
Speaker
summer. She had the same memories of World War I, which starts in the summer too, a little earlier, that this incredible, beautiful summer that had the last summer of peace, and then war breaks out. But September 1st, all Polish men are called up into the army. My mom's dad actually fought in it, was captured.
00:46:04
Speaker
And my dad's dad kept going east trying to get to his rendezvous point as the Polish army was being pushed east very quickly. And he never reached it because on September 17th, 17 days later, the Soviet Union invades Poland from the east because of a secret agreement, the Malta-Ribbentrop Pact.
00:46:28
Speaker
to partition Poland again, that they won't stop the Germans, won't stop the Nazis, and they will in fact take their own kind of cordon sanitaire of Poland. They wait until most of the fighting is done, and for reasons that are a little unclear, they actually have to fight the Polish army that's now being caught from two sides. They have to fight it somewhat. It's a pretty broken force by then. And at that point, it has no chance. So my other grandfather,
00:46:58
Speaker
is trying to reach his unit, but by the 17th, he's just in Soviet territory. The grandfather who was in German captivity, as she ran away, got out of some kind of very temporary, you know, POW encampment, got back to Warsaw, and alert told his family, like, we have to go east. And most, and some of them said yes, and some of them said no.
00:47:27
Speaker
this out. I had a cousin who had worked in Vienna and who had been in Warsaw during the German occupation of 1917, if you remember that 20, just over 20 years before, people who lived in Warsaw had been under German occupation in World War I. So I mentioned it before. And they acted really well. The memory of the German occupation of World War I was Germans paid for cash for everything. They didn't loot.
00:47:53
Speaker
They had blackouts and martial law, but they were a very behaved, well-behaved, very professional army that didn't really commit atrocities, especially behind enemy lines and that respected civilians. And, you know, we can do that again. 20 years later, how much could have changed? And to run away, to go to the Soviet Union, which had just declared war on Poland, which was, I mean, it was a pretty scary place and a pretty difficult place to live.
00:48:21
Speaker
was pretty daunting. So I had relatives who just said no, but my actual grandfather then went and took part of his family to Minsk. First to Biała stock, which was just over the new border, and then to Minsk. So this is Soviet Belarus, where they were from 39 to 241. And so you write one of the things in Eastern Europe. So when we think of
00:48:49
Speaker
the Holocaust, like Auschwitz comes to mind, concentration camps, which obviously is a very big and important part of the
How did the Holocaust impact Eastern Europe?
00:49:01
Speaker
Holocaust. But you're right, this is actually a much more intimate Holocaust for people in Eastern Europe in that people would be shot in the streets. People would be gunned down in ditches individually.
00:49:18
Speaker
Talk about the more intimate experience that people suffered through, Jews suffered through in Eastern Europe in the Holocaust. Yeah, I think Auschwitz has become very much kind of the synecdoche of the Holocaust as a whole for us, for Americans, for the West. And I mean, the one is that it's the largest concentration camp. The other is that that's how most Western Jews weren't shot where they lived. They were
00:49:48
Speaker
rounded up by collaboration forces and shipped somewhere far away, shipped somewhere scary. And an Auschwitz family from that town, distant family from that town had great railway junctions and you could ship people, you could transport people from all over Europe there. But in Eastern Europe itself, where most of the Jews lived,
00:50:12
Speaker
Most of the Jews who lived in Europe, period, lived in Eastern Europe, didn't know far Eastern Europe, and most of the Jews were killed, were killed in Eastern Europe. The concentration camps played a role, but only a partial role. There was a much wider scope of killing, and it really started in 1941. It started the Holocaust, as we know it, as we think of it, it's ramped up goods to the high gear,
00:50:43
Speaker
when Germany breaks the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invades the Soviet Union. Double-crossed Hitler, double-crossed Stalin, June 22nd, 1941, sneak attack on the Soviet Union, spectacular gains for a few months. Incredible kind of German progress and then stalls out. And then that moment,
00:51:08
Speaker
right from the start of the invasion, and then especially as the invasion stalls, and as the hunt for what the kind of Nazis see as communist collaboration, as the Jewish menace behind their lines now, they start killing Jews en masse. Right in that first invasion though, wherever they find them, shooting them in the streets, shooting them in squares, and it's called the, there's a French researcher who names the Holocaust by bullets.
00:51:39
Speaker
So literally, and the concentration camps haven't really been instituted yet because the idea that has, they haven't quite figured out what they're going to do. The idea is it will just, just choose where we find them. And they probably shoot about one, 1 million, 1.5 million. It's a little hard to get precise numbers on this. Although people are working hard on it.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yeah, I've read that book and it's jaw dropping to read those stories about, you know, just even like children who would be taken to like fill in these ditches where all these people were just shot, you know, tens of thousands of people just shot, pushed into ditches and then those ditches then covered up using child labor and really just like what an awful, terrible
00:52:27
Speaker
It's just a part of the Holocaust that I'm glad you brought up in your book because it's one that doesn't get talked about maybe as much as it should. Can you give us a sense of the scale? I think it might have been Warsaw.
00:52:46
Speaker
but it could have actually been an entire country where after World War II, because so many people had been exterminated by the Nazis, like 92% of the whole town was gone. Give us a sense of the scale of just like, what did like a normal town in Eastern Europe look like once the Nazis had left? Yeah, I can actually, so I read a lot about my dad's dad.
00:53:14
Speaker
Well, partly in Warsaw, partly in this kind of family, shtetl, family small town of Zambro, which actually now my aunt lives next to. So I've been there a lot. It's a very quintessentially typical Eastern European town. Nothing super exciting about it. It's something that my grandfather's from there. It's just on the road. Just drive two hours east of Warsaw, small town. That's about 20,000 people. It was about 4,000, 8,000. Back then,
00:53:44
Speaker
It's just kind of the family, the hometown. In World War II, they were in the Soviet zone, 39, 40, 41, and then they were close to the border, so two days into World War II. In two days, I call it World War II, but two days until the start of the Eastern Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, they're in German territory. And then the real terror starts. In fact, Soviet occupation had its
00:54:13
Speaker
It was difficult in some ways, but there's a few weeks go by and they start rounding people up and they start having them dig ditches. I'm actually a family of Jewish farmers, which is rare, and a German soldier was so shocked. He talked to my great-grandfather.
00:54:37
Speaker
grand uncle, I think, about, he's like, what's your profession? He's like a farmer. He's like, you lied you. And someone told him, no, he's actually a farmer. He's like, well, he kind of won his respect because that seems like such an un-Jewish profession. He's like, well, you know what? Don't come back to this ditch digging site tomorrow. This isn't going to be great for you. Because then they start shooting the Jews of Zambroof. I think in October of that year, then they create a ghetto
00:55:06
Speaker
inside the towns, a small town, and they round up people from the countryside, from the remaining surviving Jews, remaining Jews, and they start doing this all over Eastern Europe, all over Eastern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and smallish towns get their own ghettos, kind of walled or barbed-wired areas where Jews are crammed in, surviving Jews, and Jews from the countryside are sent. And then a few months later,
00:55:34
Speaker
or about a year later in 1942, they start liquidating those ghettos. So they have death marches, and then they march people towards trains to, they've by now started building the network of camps, and they'll shoot part of the people on site or in wooden woods, and they'll load others into trains, and then they have some survivors to clean up the remnants, and they shoot those. And then the remaining Jews that are in the countryside in the small towns,
00:56:05
Speaker
if they're alive, they're hiding in cellars or they're in the woods at the mercy of everybody. But by then, 80-90% of people are dead by late 1942. And the towns
00:56:18
Speaker
Most small towns in, say, kind of that Jewish heartland, which is East from Poland, it's now Western Ukraine, most of Belarus, a lot of Lithuania, probably down into Northern Romania, it's Moldova. That's the kind of world, the shtetl, the world of the small towns. Most small towns were majority or plurality Jewish. It's typical for small...
00:56:46
Speaker
countryside was Christian, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox was peasant, and the towns were mixed. Towns were between 40 and 80% Jewish. Small towns, especially. That kind of social division is that the small town activities, the trades, carpenter, tailor, grocery store owner, those are the kind of typical jobs, small town jobs were in Jewish hands.
00:57:14
Speaker
And they're now largely, you know, depopulated. There's a lot of houses up for grabs. Locals grab a lot of the houses. But then, honestly, when the war comes back around the other side since it happened in Sambroove, is that
00:57:30
Speaker
two years later, 44, the whole Red Army is coming through, fighting, you know, eventually the Germans push the Red Army up out towards Stalingrad, out towards the Leningrad, out towards near Moscow, but then flips, and so 44, the Russian Army is going through the same area, the front turns back around, and these towns are mostly made out of wood,
00:57:55
Speaker
I'm also burnt to the ground. So Zambravina and 45 people went, there was just almost nothing. On one hand, there's this wave of destruction of the Jewish community in 42, but then in 44, it just caught in the crossfire of the
00:58:12
Speaker
conflict between the Behrmach and the Red Army. And that world of the country, that is such a gigantic conflict. Millions of soldiers on both sides, those towns just get completely steamrolled and mostly destroyed, mostly get destroyed. So really, that's part of the, and so by 44, you're looking at 45, you're looking at ashes, bits and pieces. How much do you think, just kind of thinking about the comprehensive history of
00:58:42
Speaker
Eastern Europe. How much do you think World War II defines the history of Eastern Europe? Maybe it's just because it's so recent and not even 100 years ago it happened, which is why we focus so much, but the scale was just incomprehensible. I wonder how much you think that that is now tied to Eastern European identity.
00:59:11
Speaker
It's definitely important and probably crucial. It is the moment when the kind of older world of Eastern Europe vanishes the world of, you know, for the Jewish Europe. Although it doesn't vanish completely. Some people will say there are no Polish Jews left. I'm a Polish Jew, there's some left. And there are Jews across Eastern Europe. It's not the total end. My family is a total product of World War II, these Jewish soldiers.
00:59:39
Speaker
the one who was a partisan in Belarus, a Red Army partisan, paratrooper, fought behind enemy lines and had a very difficult war in Belarus, and the other one was the Polish units attached to the Red Army. It's a complicated story, but on the bottom of Berlin. And it came back to Poland and Mary Polish them, and that wouldn't have happened before World War II, so it's really like a World War II family. And at the same time, so it's very important, and at the same time, I'll say, I think it's overemphasized.
01:00:09
Speaker
From my point of view, it swallows so much of the airspace of the history writing about World War II. I think it's crucial and it's some of the most difficult stories in my family and I go into some of the
01:00:24
Speaker
really extraordinary stuff. The family that left mine in Warsaw, I have testimonies from the Ringelblum archive, the milk can archive that was buried in Warsaw. They're really important. So it's crucial in my life, but at the same time, you know, there's that idea of the bloodlands.
01:00:40
Speaker
And I think an idea in contemporary history writing or history imagination, I'll say that, maybe not writing, that all there is in Eastern Europe is this charnel house, is this world of brutality and carnage. And I think that drives out everything else. So for my book, I have a chapter on World War II, and I try to give it its space.
01:01:07
Speaker
But I do want people to think that there's more, that something survives the war, and that there was a lot there before too, and not to have it eclipse.
01:01:19
Speaker
everything came before and came after. Because it is such a black hole. It is such a powerful, extraordinary, extraordinary in the sense of, you know, beyond any previous, I think, human or Western experience. It is so far on the extreme of war in a house of instantry. But there is more Eastern Europe. There's more Eastern European life. And it's not just bloodlines. So I was like, it's super important.
01:01:47
Speaker
And yet it was almost overemphasized. That's so interesting that you say that. I had, as a guest on this show, a historian, his name is Peter H. Wilson. And he wrote a book about a 500 year history of German military warfare. And in his seven, 800 page book, World War One and World War Two get 50 pages. And I'm like, why did you only get 50 pages?
01:02:15
Speaker
He's like, well, if I had my say, I would give it zero pages, but you can't write a book about German military history and not talk about World War I and World War II. But he had a similar answer as that you gave. It's like, you know, we focus a lot on those conflicts and we forget about some other very important history. So that's very interesting to hear you say. That's interesting. He's a 30 years war. Yeah. So that's interesting.
01:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much a military story. Yeah, there is, it sucks so much of the oxygen out of the room. It is so, and it is, you know, even writing about it, you get so wrapped up and then I am kind of like, well, at the same time, writing history of Eastern Europe, I don't just want this to be a history of a football that's being kicked between Hitler and Stalin. And a lot of narratives are so driven by that, by that external history.
01:03:09
Speaker
that you lose set of the internal. So striking that balance is difficult. Well, kind of lastly here, maybe we can look at history to pivot a bit towards the future.
What is Ukraine's historical context with Eastern Europe?
01:03:21
Speaker
And I want to ask you about Ukraine because obviously a very relevant topic right now. But from your perspective, from somebody who's written a history of Eastern Europe, I'm curious what your thoughts are right now as it relates to
01:03:40
Speaker
the Russia-Ukraine war about what maybe people are getting wrong in the West, what people are getting right in the West. Maybe your assessment right now from a historian's angle of the Russia-Ukraine war. That's a good question. And I wish history was more useful predictably, because I could actually have a direct use. So I don't have a lot of quite predictive
01:04:10
Speaker
I think it's so unpredictable. I found the whole Progosion episode so shocking. I thought I knew what was going on. So let's just say history isn't good at prediction. I'm curious. Go ahead. I was just going to ask, the relationship between Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe is something that I find I really don't know so much about. And I wonder how much that might color right now.
01:04:37
Speaker
the war and how you see things progressing because it doesn't seem like there's one Eastern European identity. I'm curious on your thoughts. It's interesting how that's evolved. I think people aren't at all aware of the kind of them. During World War II, there are many wars inside of World War II. Wars fought
01:05:07
Speaker
between local groups under the umbrella of the larger Allied Axis conflict. People might know about Yugoslavia and that there was fighting between Tito's partisans, Communist partisans, and local royalists, Chetniks, Serbian royalists, kind of not quite fascist, but on that side Croatian fascists and then Muslim groups, that there was a civil war kind of happening
01:05:38
Speaker
underneath the dome of German time occupation. Something similar was happening in the Polish Ukrainian borderlands. Brutal conflict. Brutal ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians by Poles and Poles by Ukrainians. There's an intermixed borderland that belonged to Poland before World War II. The local majority was Ukrainian.
01:06:07
Speaker
but the economic powers and the political powers, mostly Polish. And Ukrainian nationalists tried to drive out the Poles and Jews. And the Polish partisans would try to drive out the Ukrainians and Jews. And just brutal fighting. And Volhynia, a place I know people have heard about, but this is once Eastern Poland, now Western Ukraine, and Podkapracia. Terrible fighting level of villages, you know, neighbor on neighbor.
01:06:37
Speaker
Ukrainian squads, founding of Polish villagers, killing them all. And reprisal killings of the same, the Poles on Ukrainians. A lot of bitterness left after that. A lot of memory, like just a couple of years ago, it's a wave of bringing up bloody Volhynia is the term in Poland, of trying to commemorate this and explore it and trying to get it, you know, commemorate as much as possible, make it a pillar of memory politics on the Polish side and the Ukrainian side.
01:07:06
Speaker
Those nationalist groups are this pillar of Ukrainian resistance against Soviet power, trying to recreate a Ukrainian state against also Polish domination. A little bit ambiguous how they treat some of those leaders. So a lot of this, there's a real source of tension. And that vanished mostly with this war. You would say like, well, obviously those relations are going to be bad.
01:07:33
Speaker
You know, that well is poisoned. No. Poland is the biggest supporter of Ukraine now. They have a shared enemy. They have incredible social solidarity, incredible outpouring of help. Not the level of government, but the level of people, people just like millions of Ukrainians coming to the start of the war. My family was hosting Ukrainian families. And in the light of a bigger enemy,
01:08:03
Speaker
those past conflicts really, really have been shunted aside and for not for honestly forgotten, but the de-emphasized. And there isn't much of Eastern Europe, a pretty united front against Russia, but then part of Eastern Europe, especially Hungary, Serbia, there's an absolutely a unit kind of a mini united front in favor of Russia.
01:08:28
Speaker
So yeah, that's interesting. I forget often that those governments exist in Hungary and in Serbia, Hungary specifically, because Viktor Orban, of course. But I think of Belarus as like the kind of the outlier, of course, because, you know, it's like
01:08:48
Speaker
They've got Europe's last dictator, isn't that? The guy who's in charge there. I would say Putin. I think Putin. There's that. I'm literally saying, where is Russia? I was just talking to a Russian journalist about this. But yeah, that's a fascinating crux, though, because historically, Belarusians and Ukrainians have excellent relations.
01:09:10
Speaker
really see each other as both as kind of similar and as like equally hard done by by Russians on one hand and actually polls by the other so they there's I think huge reluctance to to commit I mean Lukashenko knows that being incredibly unpopular to actually sound like Belgian soldiers but at the same time
01:09:34
Speaker
who's holding who's puppet strings.
Conclusion and reflection on Eastern European history
01:09:38
Speaker
I think it's actually changing, but you have this history that can be determinative, but it can also flip on a dime. Yeah. Well, Jacob, this has been a wonderful interview. We've gone over our time. I could keep talking to you. We could do a whole separate episode on World War I because I feel bad now that we didn't give it the
01:10:04
Speaker
attention maybe it deserves. I appreciate it. World War II, for my family, there's a lot of like really interesting exciting World War II history, which isn't true in World War I. I just wanted to give it a plug. There's, you know, forget the psalm, look at the look at the siege of Przemyszt. There's a great book about that if people want. That's some exciting war history if you go forward. Well, I had actually, I had a
01:10:29
Speaker
fiction author, his name's Alexander Hemann. He recently wrote a book about World War I starting in Bosnia, but it goes east instead of going west because usually in our Western history, the only time you hear about Eastern Europe really is Franz Ferdinand being assassinated. And then all of a sudden we're in France. And his novel was very fascinating, I thought, because instead of going west, you go east. So
01:10:57
Speaker
Luckily, it seems like people are paying a little bit more attention. And they go to those like Eastern trenches that I find kind of interesting in the mountains. That's great stuff. Well, Jacob Mykonowski, goodbye Eastern Europe, an intimate history of a divided land. Not a bad one.
01:11:22
Speaker
Go buy a coffee, go check it out from your library. What a fascinating story. And Jacob, thank you so much for your time today. Well, thank you so much. It's been fantastic. Thank you, Adrian.