Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe

In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment. Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia-one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest-by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.

Winner of the 2010 George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. The struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly over Transylvania's future, and Germany and Italy were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what "Europe" means. Tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new perspective.

Genocide in the Carpathians presents the history of Subcarpathian Rus', a multiethnic and multireligious borderland in the heart of Europe. This society of Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, Magyars, and Roma disintegrated under pressure of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia and, during World War II, from the onslaught of the Hungarian occupation. Charges of "foreignness" and disloyalty to the Hungarian state linked antisemitism to xenophobia and national security anxieties. Genocide unfolded as a Hungarian policy, and Hungarian authorities committed mass robbery, deportations, and killings against all non-Magyar groups in their efforts to recast the region as part of an ethnonational "Greater Hungary." In considering the events that preceded the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, this book reorients our view of the Holocaust not simply as a German drive for continent-wide genocide, but as a truly international campaign of mass murder, related to violence against non-Jews unleashed by projects of state and nation building. Focusing on both state and society, Raz Segal shows how Hungary's genocidal attack on Subcarpathian Rus' obliterated not only tens of thousands of lives but also a diverse society and way of life that today, from the vantage point of our world of nation-states, we find difficult to imagine.