ABSTRACT

A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change is a wide-ranging single volume history of the "lands between", the lands which have lain between Germany, Italy, and the Tsarist and Soviet empires.

Bideleux and Jeffries examine the problems that have bedevilled this troubled region during its imperial past, the interwar period, under fascism, under communism, and since 1989. While mainly focusing on the modern era and on the effects of ethnic nationalism, fascism and communism, the book also offers original, striking and revisionist coverage of:

* ancient and medieval times
* the Hussite Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation
* the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburg Empire
* the rise and decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
* the impact of the region's powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours
* rival concepts of "Central" and "Eastern" Europe
* the 1920s land reforms and the 1930s Depression.

Providing a thematic historical survey and analysis of the formative processes of change which have played the paramount roles in shaping the development of the region, A History of Eastern Europe itself will play a paramount role in the studies of European historians.

chapter |34 pages

Introduction

part |2 pages

Part I The ‘Balkanization’ of South-eastern Europe

part |2 pages

Part II East Central Europe prior to the Habsburg ascendancy

part |2 pages

Part III East Central Europe during the Habsburg ascendancy

chapter 8|19 pages

The rise of the Habsburg Empire

chapter 9|39 pages

An empire in crisis

chapter 10|22 pages

The empire strikes back: 1849–1914

chapter 12|31 pages

War, nationalism and imperial disintegration

part |2 pages

Part IV Eastern Europe between the two world wars

chapter 13|13 pages

The aftermath of the First World War

chapter 14|8 pages

The 1930s Depression and its consequencesf

chapter 15|16 pages

The plight of the peasantry

chapter 16|9 pages

The failure of democracy

chapter 17|31 pages

The lure of fascism

part |2 pages

Part V In the shadow of Yalta: Eastern Europe since the Second World War