Intermarium: The Land between the Black and Baltic Seas is a 2012 book by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz about the history of Eastern Europe. It has received mixed reviews.
Intermarium: The Land between the Black and Baltic Seas is a 2012 book by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz about the history of Eastern Europe. It has received mixed reviews.
Karl A. Roider Jr. reviewed Intermarium for the Sarmatian Review . He describes the main theme of the book as a struggle between the democratic Polish model and the Russian totalitarian model over the Intermarium which per Chodakiewicz's includes the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. While attempting to appeal to an American audience, the book demands the reader know quite a bit about Eastern European history. Much of the book focuses on the post-1989 Intermarium, describing a struggle between patriots and post-communist Russophiles. The Russophiles being described as "in cahoots with Western deconstructionists, feminists, environmentalists, gay rights advocates, nihilists, and postmodernists who are entrenched in American and Western European universities". Roider's review is relatively negative, as he states that "there are conspiracies everywhere in this book, but the author offers no names, no institutions, no objectives, and no strategies" other than undermining the Intermarium's return to the pre-1772 Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Chodakiewicz calls for an alliance between the Eastern European countries to contain Russia, however according to Roider such a call is likely to fall on deaf ears as the United States' attention is focused elsewhere. [1]
Peter Stachura published his more positive review of the book in The Slavonic and East European Review . He calls the book an
"impressively ambitious, panoramic examination of a substantial part of Central and Eastern Europe". [2]
Silviu Miloiu's review of the book in Journal of Baltic Studies was also favorable; in his conclusion Miliou's noted that
"On the whole, the book is one of the most competent and well-written accounts of the Intermarium that I have read. It is based on an impressive range of sources. It sheds new light on historical and present-day processes". [3]
In his critical review of Intermarium in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs , Dovid Katz is highly critical of the book author, and refers to the book's final chapter as a
"hatchet job against Jewish partisans... [that] resorts to a number of abuses of academic structure to mask the genre of nationalist polemic." [4]
Alexander Prusin reviewing the book for the Slavic Review noted that it seems to be rather derivative of and of lesser significance and quality to similar works published recently by scholars such as Timothy Snyder, Kate Brown or Piotr Wandycz although "it will certainly find propitious ground among those who favor a new cordon sanitaire in Europe". [5]
Donald E. Pienkos in his review published in The Polish Review in 2018, notes that the book's main argument and "a good point" is that "the intermarium nations comprise a significant outpost of western civilization (versus Russia) and thus merit much more attention than they have ever received" in Western scholarly and political thought. He notes that the historical overview of the region constitutes a "worthy, if not flawless, publication", but is more critical of its polemical part in which "the author castigates western scholars for their alleged ignorance of the region and their Russofilia", concluding that the polemical part significantly lowers the overall quality of the book. [6]
The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, elderly and children, many of whom were locked in a barn and burnt alive. At least 40 ethnic Poles carried out the killing; their ringleaders decided on it beforehand with Germany's Gestapo, SS security police or SS intelligence and they then cooperated with German military police. According to historian Jan T. Gross, "the undisputed bosses of life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans," who were "the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews."
The Sarmatians were a large confederation of ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples of classical antiquity who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD.
The Poleshuks, also known as Polesians are an ethnic group that lives in Polesia. Their language, Polesian, forms a dialect continuum with the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. In addition, Polesian includes many local variations and dialects, or sub-dialects.
The Our Moldova Alliance was a social-liberal political party in Moldova led by Serafim Urechean, former mayor of Chișinău. It merged into the Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova (PLDM) during April 2011.
Intermarium was a post-World War I geopolitical plan conceived by Józef Piłsudski to unite former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lands within a single polity. The plan went through several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion as well of other, neighboring states. The proposed multinational polity would have incorporated territories lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name Intermarium.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.
Western Belorussia or Western Belarus is a historical region of modern-day Belarus which belonged to the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period. For twenty years before the 1939 invasion of Poland, it was the northern part of the Polish Kresy macroregion. Following the end of World War II in Europe, most of Western Belorussia was ceded to the Soviet Union by the Allies, while some of it, including Białystok, was given to the Polish People's Republic. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western Belorussia formed the western part of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Today, it constitutes the west of modern Belarus.
Tadeusz Piotrowski or Thaddeus Piotrowski is a Polish-American sociologist and author. He is a professor of sociology in the Social Science Division of the University of New Hampshire at Manchester in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The Koniuchy massacre or the Kaniūkai massacre was a World War II massacre of civilians, mostly women and children, carried out in the village of Koniuchy on 29 January 1944 by a Soviet partisan unit together with a contingent of Jewish partisans under Soviet command. At least 38 civilians who have been identified by name were killed, and more than a dozen were injured. In addition, houses were burned and livestock was slaughtered. It was the largest atrocity committed by the Soviet partisans in present-day Lithuania.
The Vistula is the longest river in Poland and the ninth-longest river in Europe, at 1,047 kilometres in length. The drainage basin, reaching into three other nations, covers 193,960 km2 (74,890 sq mi), of which 168,868 km2 (65,200 sq mi) is in Poland.
The West Polesian language is the East Slavic language spoken in southwestern Belarus, in northwestern Ukraine and adjoining regions of Poland. There is controversy regarding whether West Polesian is a dialect of Belarusian or Ukrainian, or a separate microlanguage.
Motolian is a West Polesian dialect spoken in Belarus. Motol and Tyshkavichy are the principal settlements in the area where it is spoken. There are approximately 15,000 daily speakers of Motolian. One of its most well-known speakers is Alyaksandr Valadzko.
Rafał Gan-Ganowicz was a Polish soldier-in-exile, mercenary, journalist, member of the National Council of Poland, and political and social activist, dedicating his life to anti-communism.
The Three Seas Initiative, known also as the Baltic, Adriatic, Black Sea (BABS) Initiative or simply as the Three Seas, is a forum of twelve states, in the European Union, running along a north–south axis from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic and Black Seas in Central and Eastern Europe. The Initiative aims to create a regional dialogue on questions affecting the member states.
The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz is a 2019 book which presents research by British writer Jack Fairweather, a former Washington Post war correspondent, into the life of Witold Pilecki, a Polish soldier and Home Army resistance fighter who infiltrated the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. The book was met with positive reception from critics and won the Costa Book Awards – Book of the Year prize that year.
Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (2014) is a book by the Polish historian Anna Cichopek, based on her PhD thesis at the University of Michigan, which examines Holocaust survivors in postwar Poland and Slovakia and how they went about regaining their Aryanized property, obtaining citizenship in their country of residence, and dealing with violence from non-Jews.
The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944 is a 1986 book by Richard C. Lukas dealing with the topic of occupation of Poland during World War II, with particular focus on the sufferings of ethnic Poles in occupied Poland in 1939–1945 during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Lukas' most famous work, it has been subject to mixed reception.
"What! Still Alive?!": Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming is a 2017 book by historian Monika Rice that deals with the memories of Jewish Holocaust survivors of their first encounters with ethnic Poles after liberation from Nazi German rule. The testimonies were all found in archives at Yad Vashem and the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland.
Central and Eastern Europe
This is a select bibliography of English language books and journal articles about the history of Poland. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included. Book entries have references to journal articles and reviews about them when helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter-length bibliographies. The External Links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities and national libraries. This bibliography specifically excludes non-history related works and self-published books.