The Great Idea is Dead, Long Live the Great Ideas

The “Asia Minor Catastrophe” cast its heavy shadow over Greek interwar era developments in two fundamental ways: first, there was the terror of the ideological void after the bankruptcy of the Hellenic “Great Idea” due to the military defeat in Asia Minor; and second, the physical arrival in Greece of an almost 1,500,000 refugee population after their expulsion from Turkey. This paper argues that against this background, the issues of national reconstruction and a new cultural orientation for the Greek nation were strongly connected. Moreover, it argues that various projects and discourses emerged in search of the new Great Ideas that would successfully replace the irrevocably lost one. They had as a common denominator the “modernist ethos” of a “new beginning” which was necessary for the nation’s and society’s regeneration to be achieved. Thus, in exploring these projects, it attempts to identify their convergences, their mutual exclusions, as well as their cultural, ideological and political imprints.

Phrasing the Yugoslav Crisis: Jovan Mirić and the Constitutional Debates of the 1980s

In this article, I analyze the debate triggered in Yugoslavia in 1984 by Jovan Mirić’s book The System and the Crisis. Drawing from a wide corpus of sources, mainly from the Yugoslav press and the intellectual production of the time, I argue that the episode sheds light on many aspects of the Yugoslav crisis. First, it shows the ultimate incapacity of certain actors of the Yugoslav political and intellectual elite to accept a compromise with those who pushed for reform. Second, the episode attests to the changes introduced by the crisis on the Yugoslav political and intellectual landscape, which allowed for an intellectual with no political prominence to attain unexpected influence over party politics overnight. Finally, I also argue that the Mirić affair shows that many in the Yugoslav political and intellectual world who could not be identified as nationalists were nevertheless anxious about the way in which authorities were dealing with the Serbian question, which invites us to leave aside black-and-white notions when considering the power of Serbian nationalism and its rise during the 1980s.

Novoselitsa – “An Insignificant Barrier”

This article focuses on Russian Novoselitsa, a small town on the Russian-Austro-Hungarian-Romanian border, which served as the sole border crossing between Russian Bessarabia and Austrian Bukovina. From 1893 it was also an important railway junction between the two empires. Based on diplomatic documents from the Austrian State Archives, the article discusses Austrian officials’ views of ethnoreligious communities in the region, including Bessarabian Romanians, Jews, Russian Old Believers, and Ukrainians. It also examines the activity of the Austro-Hungarian Consular Agency in Russian Novoselitsa (1869–1914). The authors analyze the attitude of the Austrian officials towards ethnoreligious groups, informal practices on the border, and revolutionary unrest. The Novoselitsa case epitomizes the fundamental difference between the supranational Habsburg Empire and the nationalizing Romanov Empire, but also highlights the similarities between the two regimes. It illustrates the notions of “shatterzone of empires” (Bartov and Weitz 2013) and “thick borders”: Novoselitsa, a periphery with regard to both Vienna and St. Petersburg, was a relatively autonomous space and had its own forms of agency, which expanded much beyond the border itself on both sides of the frontier. Cases of corruption and espionage are especially revealing in regard to the uncertainty and confusion specific to the borderlands, which reigned as much at the center as on the periphery. This case study also provides an interesting perspective on everyday life, emphasizing the peculiarities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, as well as the entanglements between the two entities.

Czechoslovak Post-Stalinism: A Distinct Field of Socialist Visions

Recent historical research has looked at post-Stalinism as a specific and distinct historical era. Whereas Anatoly Pinsky points to the post-Stalinist emphasis on subjectivity, Pavel Kolář writes about post-Stalinist indecisiveness resulting from the tension between its inheritance from the past and an anticipated future. Having both approaches in mind, this article sheds light on the anticipatory character of post-Stalinist thought, which, by critically analyzing its present, aimed to achieve a socialist future. The opening part of the article articulates a theory of modernity, which is applied to the history of thought and is employed as a general framework for defining the post-Stalinist era. Second, the authors introduce the category of post-Stalinist reflexivity and analyze internal differentiation within the thought of the party intelligentsia, which led to the birth of various conceptions of socialism (an “internal plurality”). Third, the article analyzes humanist and techno-optimist thought in Czechoslovakia and demonstrates the future-oriented nature of post-Stalinism.

Serving the Empire? The Ukrainian Nobility in the Late Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The focus of this article lays on the Cossack-rooted noble stratum on the Left Bank Ukrainian lands in the course of the long nineteenth century. It is asserted that various aspects of the issue have attracted scholarly attention in recent decades. The author approaches the subject through the examination of literary and historical works as well as private historical collections which the Ukrainian noble families possessed during the period. The evocative role of these artifacts is evaluated from the perspective of the “Cossack myth” and the restoration of the hetmancy in 1918.