How a Patchwork of Conflicting Narratives Created Contemporary Eastern Europe

The shift from socialism to capitalism left deep scars across Eastern Europe. Some of them were physical: children born during the transition grew up to be, on average, a centimeter shorter than those born a few years before or after. Similar decreases in height have otherwise been observed only as a consequence of major famines and wars. Other scars were psychological.

During the transi­tion, several Eastern European countries—notably Hungary and the Baltic republics—reported some of the highest rates of suicide in the world. Although those rates declined following a peak in the mid-1990s, for the quarter-century following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe continued to lag sharply behind the West in terms of overall life satisfaction.

This so-called “transition happiness gap” was one of the most robust and frequently confirmed findings in all of social science. Or it was until around 2016, when the effect started to wane. The reason for this seems twofold: Eastern Europeans grew happier as their nations recov­ered from the 2008 recession, while at the same time Western happiness decreased.

By 2018, however, the gap had vanished entirely, as people in Eastern Europe reported a degree of life satisfaction that put them on a par with Turkey, Cyprus, and Greece. Eastern Europe was a gray place no longer.

And yet despite all this happiness, joy has not been a major part of the region’s political life. The story of the past decade in much of Eastern Europe has been one of increased polarization and receding or embattled democracy.

In several countries (Hungary, Belarus, Ser­bia), the state has effectively been captured by a single ruler or political party. Other nations have seen the development of deep social fissures, either between ethnicities (Bosnia-Herzegovina), political orientations (Poland), or a combination of both (Ukraine).

Until recently, Ukraine’s divisions seemed especially stark. These were at once regional and generational, pitting a Russian-speaking east and south against a Ukrainian-speaking west, and an older generation that looked back fondly on the stability granted by the Soviet Union against a younger cohort that pinned its hopes on joining the rest of Europe.

During the Revolution of Dignity, or Maidan Revolution, of 2014, led by members of this second group, protesters managed to oust Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s lavishly corrupt, pro-Russian presi­dent. A subsequent Russian invasion robbed Ukraine of the Crimean Peninsula as well as the territory around Donetsk and Luhansk in the country’s far east. The ensuing war in the Donbas claimed some thir­teen thousand dead over the following seven years.

While this was a huge price in lives, it had the effect of rallying Ukrainian society around a common enemy. Just how far this unification had progressed became evident during the Russian invasion of 2022, when Ukrainians put up an armed resistance far in excess of anything anticipated by Moscow—or the rest of the world, for that matter.

War forged Ukraine into a nation, but its nationhood came at the cost of its territorial integrity. The rest of Eastern Europe has largely managed to avoid armed conflict, at least since the Kosovo war of 1999 in the former Yugoslavia, but it has not been safe from internal dissen­sion. Politics in much of the region has grown ever more contentious with time.

Paradoxically, this increase in tension has occurred even as these same nations have successfully tackled many of the biggest chal­lenges facing them as they emerged from the revolutions of 1989. The current era of partisan squabbling comes on the heels of two decades of hard-won victories in economics and diplomacy, as an era of difficult compromises has been replaced with a scramble for power.

Although the pain of the transition was great, since then most coun­tries in the region have successfully developed market economies and mostly functioning democracies. Geopolitically, the scale of change has been equally impressive. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria have all joined the European Union. All the same countries, plus Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, have also joined NATO. Only Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova remain outside both organizations.

Nineteen eighty-nine proved to be one of the most deeply transfor­mative revolutions in recent history. The scale of what has been accom­plished in the intervening years is immediately visible on a visit to any of the region’s larger cities, especially for anyone who remembers East­ern Europe as it was in the 1980s and early ’90s. But this progress has also been sharply unequal, as vast stretches of countryside, and some­times whole nations, have been left far behind the pace set by the newly glittering capital cities.

The sheer scale of these changes left many Eastern European coun­tries riven by deep divisions of generation and class. The view confront­ing the young and old, the urban and the rural, has rarely seemed more different. The resulting crisis of identity has led many Eastern Europe­ans to look to history for answers to the question of who they really are in a suddenly globalized world.

But history is never singular; it always provides multiple narratives with which to explain the present. In the political vacuum left by the end of Communism, the choice of which story to go with became immensely important. As the heroic phase of Eastern Europe’s transition has come to an end, politics have shifted into a never-ending series of battles about the past.

Many Eastern European nations face an odd predicament. They pos­sess a surplus of history, but a deficit of useful narrative. That is, plenty of things have happened to them, but not enough has been done by them to establish a deeply rooted sense of shared destiny.

In much of the region, national sovereignty has tended to be brief, partial, or intermit­tent. Empire, and the struggle against it, has tended to be the leading story, while opportunities to develop national mythologies independent of their influence have tended to be rather sparse.

Decades of life in the Soviet Bloc slowed the process of narrative-building even more, as histories had to be rewritten to accord with Communist norms. Much of what had been established as national canon in the interwar period had to be scrapped, while the history of the Second World War was obfuscated or told through a narrowly pro-Soviet lens. This left many contentious episodes either untold or unmentionable.

This was why the revolutions of 1989 were accompa­nied by a great unearthing of buried histories. People cast around for new pasts as a way of making up for lost time. Recovering lost graves and reclaiming banished or forgotten heroes was a way of drawing boundaries around new states; it also helped to fracture some old ones.

The years that followed the transition saw the demise of several states and the emergence of a host of brand-new ones. The Soviet Union fell apart, as did Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Slovakia, Slovenia, Croa­tia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Belarus all became independent entities for the first time in well over half a millennium.

Ukraine, which had enjoyed a long history of autonomy and several flickering moments of independence reaching back to the seventeenth century, started a new life as a modern state. Its borders encompassed territory that had previ­ously belonged to the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires.

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In February 2022, Rus­sia invaded Ukraine with the full force of its mechanized army. Their military entered a country that had been struggling for over thirty years to create its own version of a usable past.

Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, it has proven difficult to create a unified story for the country as a whole. Various regions of Ukraine differ not just in ethnicity and language, but in memory. They inher­ited different pasts from different empires. Ukraine’s east had been part of the Soviet Union from its inception, and part of the Russian Empire before that.

It felt close to its former home and tended to be ambivalent about a strictly Ukrainian nationalism defined along eth­nic lines. Until 1939, Ukraine’s far west had been a part of Poland; before that, it belonged to the Habsburg empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

It was here, away from Russian rule, that Ukrainian national consciousness developed most fully in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In more recent times, this part of the country regarded the Soviet Union as an oppressor, and looked back fondly to the Cossack Hetmanate of the seventeenth century as the wellspring of its independence.

In recent decades, the Holodomor, the deadly famine of 1932 to 1934 that claimed some 3.9 million Ukrainian lives, has emerged as a defin­ing event for Ukraine’s national consciousness. But even there, regional differences have shaped the perception of this tragedy. Although eastern Ukraine was more affected by the Great Famine than the west, the west tended to feel its legacy more deeply.

Russia’s attack swept away most of these distinctions and divisions. Confrontation with a real enemy has a way of solidifying a shared iden­tity in a way that no amount of memory politics or play-acting can. Ukraine’s different versions of national memory may diverge, or even contradict one another, but they are also subject to revision and open to change.

The same cannot be said of the vision of Ukrainian history promoted by Russia and the Kremlin. Like many national mythologies, it too is a patchwork of different eras and epochs. It borrows the idea of the “gathering of Rus”—the program for the annexation of all East Slavic lands—from the reign of Ivan III in fifteenth-century Muscovy.

Its diminution of the Ukrainian language as a dialect, and its people as “Malorossiyans,” or “little Russians,” descends from the late czarist era. So does the project for a “New Russia” along the Black Sea coast. Finally, the framing of the war as a campaign of denazification, waged against “fascists” and “neo-Nazis,” is a perverse repurposing of Soviet propaganda from World War II.

But while the sources of this Russian story span the better part of a millennium, the message is always one of total negation. It says that Ukraine did not exist in the past, should not exist in the present, and will not exist in the future.

Soon after the invasion of Ukraine began, the Belarusian intellectual Ihar Babkou described the ensuing conflict as “a war for diversity. A war between Central Europe and Eastern Europe.” I am inclined to agree, with the qualification that Babkou’s Central Europe coincides with the Eastern Europe described in this book.

This Eastern Europe is a land of small countries, wedged between great powers. (Put otherwise, it is Central Europe without Germany, or Babkou’s Eastern Europe without Russia). It is a place that has long been dominated by empires, but it has not, for the most part, inherited an imperial frame of mind. Since the close of the nineteenth century, its politics have been dominated by nationalisms of various stripes.

Its history, by contrast, has been shaped most by the clash of feuding ideologies. But that is only the story of the past hundred or so years. Eastern Europe has a longer history and older traditions to draw on in formulating its future. Largely neglected by historians, there was an Eastern Europe that existed alongside the structures imposed by empire and independent of the hopes fostered by nationalism.

This was a world of multiple faiths and languages, in which many parallel truths lived beside one another. It was a place of shared saints and intersecting stories, where folk cures and prophecies passed among neighbors, and sacred heroes donned one another’s clothes.

It coalesced gradually in the centuries following the introduction of monotheism—the three great religions of the Book—and the decline of paganism, which itself never disappeared completely but simply refashioned itself as the background of all later folk belief.

This Eastern Europe was not a conscious creation, but the product of open spaces and centuries of benign neglect. This was not a place where different peoples deliberately chose to live side by side, but where they did so out of long and practiced habit, enshrined more by custom than by law.

Inequality—especially of class—was part of the bedrock below its foundations. But despite its not being built around principles of universal rights, this order did have its own considerable advantages. Chief among them were plurality and multiplicity—truly impressive virtues, especially if one knows what followed in their wake.

For Eastern Europe, the twentieth century was a century of barely interrupted cataclysms. The old ties that bound people together dis­solved, only to be replaced with murderous aggression. As rival armies flooded into the region from east and west, neighbor killed neighbor. When the wars ended, mass expulsions and population transfers unrav­eled what was left of the old Eastern European tapestry.

Like a house built on top of a lava flow, the history of my family, and that of so many others, was founded on these catastrophes. If not for them, I wouldn’t exist. Across the twentieth century, my ancestors included downwardly mobile aristocrats from Lithuania of Hungarian descent, illiterate peasants from the Polish heartland, patriotic Catholic bookbinders, Orthodox Jewish farmers, and Communist seamstresses.

It took two consecutive, world-destroying wars for these people to meet. If it had not been for the fall of empires, the collapse of feudalism, and the rise of Communism, the various mésalliances and exchanges of sta­tus that went into their relationships would have been not only impos­sible, but inconceivable.

Today, even the memory of an older, more inclusive way of life seems to be ebbing away. And yet that too makes sense, as Eastern Europe is one of the world’s great homelands of forgetting. Travel anywhere in this vast half-continent, and you are apt to come across abandoned temples, untended graves, and vanished sepulchers; foreign gods and other peoples’ dead.

Every now and again, bits of this submerged past bubble to the sur­face, like flotsam from Atlantis. I’ve seen it in the scattered pagan groves and the ancient, honored oaks of Latvia and Lithuania, and in the parti-colored bits of string tied around the shrine to Koyun Baba in the woods above Babadag, Romania; in ghost signs written in Polish, Yiddish, and German in Lviv, Komarno, and the rest of Ukrainian Galicia; in over­grown caravan trails leading to the Vlach metropolis of Voskopojë, and in the shattered steps of the Armenian cathedral in Dumbrăveni.

And finally, I’ve seen it in my paternal grandfather’s native shtetl, Zambrów, where hardly a stone in the Jewish cemetery remains standing, but where the forests still harbor the wild fruits of his childhood: the “Little Dias­pora Apples,” whose dark juice could be used for writing the Torah; the sweet, red Rosh Hashanah apples that ripened every year in time for the new year; and the little green Kol Nidre pears that ripened a week later for Yom Kippur and fed the poorest of the poor.

To me, these fruits are memorials as much as any monument or tomb. They are fragments of a vanished world, an Eastern Europe char­acterized by endless diversity, whose emblems were the kaleidoscope, the chessboard, and the microcosm. Here, many peoples and faiths and languages lived together, arranging themselves in a loose symbiosis, whose bonds were nonetheless strong enough to last for centuries. It was not always a peaceful or happy world, or one devoid of prejudice.

But however humble or haphazard, the mere possibility of coexistence constitutes a kind of ramshackle utopia. For Europe to have a future as a whole, it would be best not to lose sight of its promise, even as we remember the tragedy of its demise.

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Adapted from Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski. Copyright © 2023. Available from Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.