Not all casualties of war die on the battlefield. In the wake of World War II, Yugoslavia purged its territory of the ethnic Germans who had formed a part of its human mosaic. Tarred with their ethnic origins and the conscription of their fighting-age men into the Waffen SS, the Volksdeutsche, as these settlers were called, were rounded up at the war's end and herded into concentration camps. Those who were not murdered or did not die from the harsh...

From Ethnic Conflict to Stillborn Reform is the first complete treatment of the major post-communist conflicts in both the former Yugoslavia— Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia—and the former Soviet Union—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. It is also the first work that focuses not on causes but rather on consequences for democratization and market reform, the two most widely studied political outcomes in the developing...

What does a religious community do when confronted by a political regime determined to eliminate religion? Under communism, Hungary’s persecuted Lutheran Church tried desperately to find a strategy for survival while remaining faithful to its Christian beliefs. Appealing to the Lutheran Confessions, many argued that the church can do whatever is necessary to survive provided it does not compromise on its essential ministry, while others, appealing...

Students of democratic theory have watched the dramatic transformation of Eastern Europe from communism to various forms of democracy in the last two decades. With her unique blend of theory and empirical analysis, veteran observer Sabrina P. Ramet offers clear insight into the processes, challenges, and accomplishments of this area. Drawing on a classical understanding of “liberalism” based on a philosophy of Natural Law, she probes the issues...

In his introduction, Alexander Obolonsky notes that Russian history and life are full of paradoxes, most of them rather sad. Why, he asks, have the Russians, who have not only been endowed by nature with enormous natural, human, and intellectual resources, but who have also developed a great literary and scientific heritage and made significant contributions to world civilization, proved unable to arrange the conditions of their own existence to realize...

The fall of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe raised the complex question of how social services were to be distributed and administered in countries with legacies of highly centralized state. In Poland, a series of reforms attempted to modify and decentralize social service programs. Yet with Poland’s second round of decentralization, long-held and clearly specified reform goals were undermined from the very outset.In this insightful, detailed,...

Travel to post Soviet Siberia and the Russian Far East with author Sharon Hudgins as she takes readers on a personal adventure through the Asian side of Russia—an area closed to most Westerners and many Russians prior to the 1990s. Even today, few people from the West have ridden the TransSiberian railroad in winter, stood on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, feasted with the Siberian Buryats, or lived in the "highrise villages" of Vladivostok...

In 1671, Dutch diplomat and scientist Nicolaes Witsen published a book that served, among other things, as an encyclopedia for the “shell-first” method of ship construction. In the centuries since, Witsen’s rather convoluted text has also become a valuable source for insights into historical shipbuilding methods and philosophies during the “Golden Age” of Dutch maritime trade. However, as André Wegener Sleeswyk’s foreword notes, Witsen’s...

Sometime around 1446 A.D., Cardinal Prospero Colonna commissioned engineer Battista Alberti to raise two immense Roman vessels from the bottom of the lago di Nemi, just south of Rome. By that time, local fishermen had been fouling their nets and occasionally recovering stray objects from the sunken ships for 800 years. Having no idea of the size of the objects he was attempting to recover, Alberti failed. For most of the next 500 years, various attempts...

A delightful and illuminating journey through the early years of Winston Churchill, From Winston with Love and Kisses: The Young Churchill weaves together strands of Churchill’s early writing, mature recollections and reflections on childhood, and the comments of the author, Churchill’s granddaughter. Together with a rich store of images and ephemera from the family archives, this book provides an enthralling composite view of the lonely and sickly...