ABSTRACT
In many ways, Eastern Europe was a Cold War creation. More than anything else, it was the post-World War II confrontation between the “free” and democratic West and the “un-free” and communist East that gave rise to Eastern Europe as a specific “place” on the geopolitical map and as a flourishing field of academic inquiry. 1 The political ascendance of Soviet communism prompted and legitimized Western scholarly studies of the region. The new field was supported by substantial governmental funds, a network of institutions, and a sea of publications devoted to studying the Eastern bloc. 2 While providing opportunities for new knowledge and perspectives, the Cold War also delineated the confines of this scholarship. For decades, Eastern European studies waned under the weight of Russian studies, while the pre-communist history of the region received significantly less attention than the post-1945 era. A considerable part of Cold War scholarship was driven by émigré political scientists, who focused on international relations, domestic political leaders, and a top-down suppression of society. The postwar period came to be seen as a radically different and almost unnatural stage in the longue-durée historic developments in the region. What is today’s legacy of these Cold War approaches to shaping the historiography of Eastern European communism? To what extent, if at all, have we departed from that politically driven model of inquiry? Has recent scholarship normalized the communist period as an integral part of the region’s history?
