An extraordinary journey into the past and present of the lands east of Poland and west of Russia - an area defined throughout its history by colliding empires, and only now emerging from the clamp of Soviet rule. Traveling from the former Soviet naval center of Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Anne Applebaum encounters a rich range of competing cultures, religions, and national aspirations as inhabitants of the borderlands attempt to build a future grounded in their ancestral legacies. In reasserting their heritage, neighbors often unearth old conflicts: in Vilnius, a Lithuanian professor charts a historical conspiracy against his language by the Poles, while his Polish neighbors rail against the Lithuanian determination to deny their ancient claims to the city.…
"In this book, Anne Applebaum goes into the area between the old Russian Empire, Germany and the old Turkish Empire, and sees how it has developed. In 1800, there wasn’t what I would call a Ukrainian – or still less a Belarusian – nation. They become nations when their educated classes came together and formed a nationality, more or less late in the 19th century. I’ve got a railway map in my home of Europe in the 1840s. You can see all the countries, but similarly for the Balkans and Turkey, it just says ‘various nomadic tribes’. That happened to a lot of people. At some points people didn’t know who they were, or where they really came from. At those times, would you have known that Belarus would become an independent country? I’ll bet you didn’t. The borders all changed. And that is a cultural point which is quite extraordinary. If you went from West to East Germany, after the wall had fallen, in ten miles you were into a completely different country. The same with Finland and Vyborg. Anne Applebaum captures the feeling of regression under the Soviets so well."
