Politics, Religion, Gender, and Historiography: Eastern European Perspectives

Almost concomitantly with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in eastern Europe, scholars earnestly began to explain the post-communist condition both in terms of every day experience and as an opportunity for the societies in the region to come to terms with their troubled past.1 To the discomfort of many, it soon became obvious that communism was, in fact, more influential in shaping national identity than generally assumed. Moreover, not only was communism difficult to discard from society, culture and politics, but it emerged that, in many ways, it upheld many of the ideas about the nation developed by pre-1945 fascism. Such discoveries gnawed at the intellectual credibility of those scholars in the region who viewed these two totalitarian movements as mutually exclusive as well as foreign to the historical tradition of their countries.