A History of Eastern Europe by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

On one level it was comforting hearing again about 1989 and Gorbachev, a time when I felt the future was promising and optimistic, personally as well as politically. Over and over again that has happened in the region when many hoped for greater freedom: in the inter-war period then just after the Second World War and now, growing in the years since this was recorded (back in 2015 - when the lecturer could imply that mass protest had seen off Orban's proposals to restrict the media in Hungary). Having listened to the first third of the series (more interesting to me) in autumn 2019, I was determined to finish these lectures at some point, but of course it didn't help that 2020 was an even more unpleasant time for listening to content about the repeated encroachment of authoritarianism. (It's the same even for medieval Russia, where you'd think there might be more.) I also figured it would tell me something about the countries I know less about (it did, though it sometimes felt like scraps) and that because the lecturer himself has Lithuanian heritage, it would inevitably bring different perspectives from that.

Really, I really wanted pre-19th century history, but I got this because there is no audiobook history about the region in earlier times, material which is still, in English largely restricted to specialist academic books. But too much of this was a rehash of familiar material that I wasn't looking for (especially about the Second World War, where there was too much time spent explaining events most listeners would know, like appeasement and the Anschluss). The lectures are well presented and do add some information I hadn't heard before, especially about countries other than Poland and the USSR. It particularly emphasises the 20th century and beyond - even though the lecturer himself says that medieval and early modern would be worth a lecture series alone! No less than 17 of the 24 lectures are about events that happened since the births of two of my grandparents in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and six are about events I remember hearing about in news from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s. This lecture series might be the most extreme example of this all-too-common phenomenon which I've read or listened to in my years on Goodreads.

Works which purport to be a survey of all of a country's or region's history, but are mostly 19th to 20th century, are a bugbear of mine. Or, a political history of modern Eastern Europe, with a couple of lectures about earlier times tacked on.

A History of Eastern Europe by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius