Sexual policies were a core component of the National Socialist racial policies, both in the Altreich (territories considered part of Nazi Germany before 1938), as well as in the occupied territories. In occupied Poland the Germans imposed a ‘prohibition of contact’ (Umgangsverbot) with the local Polish population, a restriction that covered both social as well as sexual encounters. But this model of absolute racial segregation was never truly implemented. This paper attempts to show that there existed a wide range of sexual contacts between the occupiers and the local inhabitants, with the focus here being on consensual and forced contacts (sexual violence) as seen against the backdrop of National Socialist policies. This article positions itself at the intersection of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), the history of sexuality and the gender history of the German occupation of Poland – perspectives that have rarely been used with regard to this region.

The Stasi continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the most effective espionage agencies in the world, especially in the area of foreign intelligence gathering. This article employs the case of Gerhardt Ronneberger, one of East Germany's most capable spies, to challenge assumptions about the Stasi's operational successes, economic relevance and methodological proficiency. In particular, it argues that East German intelligence gathering was undermined by an institutionalisd distinction between sight, or the work of observation, and vision, or the process of signification. In Ronneberger's case, the spy agency wasted considerable time and resources trying to make sense of his operational performance and political reliability. In the end, however, even his most spectacular successes, which included smuggling a laser-guided navigation system into the GDR and acquiring proscribed computer chip and microprocessor designs from Toshiba, did not matter, since they did not change East Germany's inability to narrow the technological gap with the West.

This article recounts a little-known episode in which Yugoslav partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, rescued some 2,500 Jews from the former Italian camp for Jews in the northern Adriatic in the autumn of 1943. By focusing on this historical event, the article argues for broadening the notion of rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Rather than locating ‘rescue’ in the motivations of individuals, the article takes as a point of departure the collective aspect of rescue and investigates the importance of the ideological considerations of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in its decision to rescue the Jews. Rather than in abstract ethical notions, the partisan rescue of the Jews was rooted in their political vision of the future socialist federation, of which the Jews were part.

Put briefly, the phenomenon that historians need to address is the uniformity and stability of western Europe in the period 1948–73.

This article contributes to the recent transnational turn in labour history with a case study of West German and British trade union politics at Ford between 1967 and 1973. It demonstrates that international economic interdependence became a major concern for organised labour in both countries because of the emergence in 1967 of the Ford of Europe holding company. Paradoxically, however, this was accompanied by the accentuation of national allegiances and action frameworks, in particular with regard to the framing of labour market interests and industrial relations policies. These processes played out differently in the two countries, not only because national contexts were different but also because the new international challenges interacted with national contexts in specific ways.

The article attempts a detailed analysis of the post-1956 purges in the field of economic research. It tries to identify and assess the role of patronage in protecting the field from lasting damage. Such damage was threatening in the form of both losing several young talents from the field as well as weakening the position of the empiricist research programme successfully launched in the immediate post-Stalin years of 1954–6. The analysis devotes great attention to the dialectical relationship between purge and patronage, that is, to the inevitability of certain senior communist patrons administering purges in order to be able to act as patrons.

Statistics, as all other sciences, used to be a class-science in the service of capitalists and that is what it should remain to be in the interests of socialism as well. (Szabad Nép, 21 July, 1949)

Serbian nationalism has rarely been the subject of theoretical analysis. For the most part, recent work on Serbian history implicitly supports the ‘modernist’ position among nationalism theorists, which holds that nationalism is a modern phenomenon that serves the interests of the politically powerful. In this article, the Serbian nationalist movement of the 1980s will be examined in light of the major theoretical approaches to nationalism (modernism, perennialism and ethno-symbolism). Using a small group of nationalist intellectuals (Dobrica Ćosi, Borislav Mihajlovi Mihiz and Mića Popović) as its subject, it concludes that the restrictive modernist approach leads to misunderstandings of the nature of modern Serbian national identity.

Marian devotion has long been a central component of Catholic spirituality, in part because the image of the Virgin has been accommodated effectively within so many diverse cultural contexts. In modern Poland, Marianism gained much of its power from the way it linked seemingly contradictory models of femininity together within a national (or even nationalist) worldview. Mary, the Queen of Poland, has been offered to the faithful as a model for conceptualising the feminine within the nation, a model which is flexible enough to endure because it rests on a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant, protector of Poland; on the other, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She provides an image of authority and power which ultimately (perhaps paradoxically) poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity – indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining conservative gender relations and the other on attaining victory in the international realm.

This article explores the complex dynamics that informed Soviet policies on the western frontier – the territories stretching between the Baltic and Black Seas annexed by the Soviets in 1939–40 – and involves several interlocking aspects: the permeability of borders prone to irredentist pressures by socialist satellites, mass tourism from the West and the Soviet bloc, and the increasing flow of information from foreign media sources; the conflicting sentiments that led locals to embrace or reject reforms based on different pre-Soviet memories, the experiences of the Second World War, postwar sovietisation policies and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956; the impact of Romanian and Czechoslovak policies on the authorities and populations of the western republics and the Kremlin's concerns over the region as key factors in the decision to invade Czechoslovakia; and, finally, the domestic and international consequences for an aging, self-styled revolutionary regime choosing between youthful reform and stagnant stability.

Hungary, after the 1956 revolution, played a special part in the dispute that broke out between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and continued with varying intensity for several years. This eventful story was an important part of the process that decided the fate of the East-Central European region. The immediate cause of political contention between Belgrade and Moscow was their differences over the Hungarian question, especially the fate of Imre Nagy, who had been prime minister during the revolution. The intrinsic conflicts lay deeper, however. Although the Nagy affair remained an important factor in the disagreements throughout – from his kidnapping to the ‘war of the protest notes’ that followed his execution – it acted mainly as a catalyst. The Nagy affair was an insurmountable problem for all the players concerned. It provided ample fuel for the debates, and each side found that it could be used to put pressure on the other. Due to the system of relations between the three communist countries, the Hungarian side played the least active part. János Kádár, having come to power through the crushing of the uprising of October 1956, was left in no doubt that Hungary had to follow faithfully the Kremlin's foreign-policy line and accommodate itself to Soviet regional policy requirements. Nonetheless, the story remains interesting from Hungary's point of view as well, because it reveals more than the constraints on a small, exposed country. It also shows how Kádár, as he zigzagged between the conflicting demands of Tito and Khrushchev, trying to keep on good terms with both, was gathering experience that would be useful in his later foreign policy.

Despite the present-day attraction of ‘security’ as an attention-grabbing word in politics and the public sphere, the study of security is a missing chapter in many state-of-the-art surveys of historical literature. Its central relevance for the modern statehood has been obvious for centuries in the European context. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-seventeenth-century Leviathan, written in the context of the devastating English civil war and previous religious wars, government was given the fundamental role in guaranteeing security. Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals have constantly debated Hobbes's ideas and concepts about security and societal peace. Especially after the second world war, security has found major attention in the fields of International Relations and its sub-discipline security studies. Security studies evolved during the nuclear age and were originally foremost about the study of the threat, use and control of military force, as one proponent of security studies, Stephen Walt, stated. They were mainly concerned with military strategy and giving policy advice to the military. Since the cold war, the study of security has come a long way. Most importantly, as Emma Rothschild has reminded us, during the past two decades or so, the concept was first extended downwards from states to individuals, upwards from the nation to the biosphere and horizontally from the military to the economic, social, political and environmental. It is the reflection of this dynamic change in theory, methodology and empirical research that connects most of the books under review in this article.

In February 1990 a major conference dedicated to the recent history of the East of Europe was organised at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. The revised papers, edited by Joseph Held, comprise The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. It is the first major Western-language compendium discussing a broad region of Europe which brings together the talents of prominent specialists and exhibits thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship. Such an undertaking was predestined to yield a volume of significance. The kaleidoscopic developments over the last few years make this work extraordinarily timely and important beyond its obvious scholarly merits.

In the history of interwar international monetary and financial affairs one could hardly find any other single figure than Montagu Norman whose ideas and ambitions proved so influential in the process of Europe's monetary stabilisation.

The question today is the same as that of twenty years ago: what do we call the events that transformed eastern Europe in 1989? Our improved perspective has not necessarily generated better answers. The most popular term is ‘revolution’, but many observers still hesitate to apply it to largely non-violent change. Can there be a ‘liberal revolution’? Timothy Garton-Ash's evocative neologism ‘refolution’ (meaning ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’) captures well the ambivalence many feel about describing a gradual transition to democracy as ‘revolutionary’. The processes of civil society formation he observed in the 1980s by no means concluded with 1989; in south-eastern Europe in particular the transition to democracy has not been revolutionary but slow and painful. Perhaps ‘democracy’ is not even the right word.

This paper is a frankly subjective effort to return to questions posed about the nature of communist rule and the sudden collapse of communism in the light of the intervening two decades. It asks, first, why feelings of elation about the transformations of 1989 faded relatively quickly, second, why the communist system collapsed so clamorously, and, third, how might we best describe its earlier operation. The paper suggests that there will always be a sense of let-down after intensely hopeful political activity. It endeavours to provide a model of social complexity that communist rule with its Marxist archetypes of social development could not really master. But it also rejects the idea that ‘society’ under communism can be judged autonomously apart from the regime that sustained and structured it. Efforts to do so will trivialise the degrees of repression and surveillance. Finally the paper proposes that the nature of communist rule in the decades after Stalin must be described in terms of a ‘life cycle’ metaphor, such as the idea of ‘late style’ provides for artistic creation. It is fruitless to describe an ideal type of transformative political regime that makes no allowance for change over time. Hence, returning to the first enquiry, the paper argues that efforts to reclaim communal fulfilment will always exist or revive alongside efforts at individual emancipation.