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The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999

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This is THE book for all those interested in a better understanding of Eastern Europe. It is a model of its kind, unique in scope, shows a mastery of multiple langauge sources, and is a scholarly yet readable account of the history of the largest European country of its day, the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealthy of 1569. Prof. Snyder's account is masterly, even-handed, and scrupulously fair with a clear and valuable thesis. It brings the complex strands of a neglected part of Europe into focus and explains while Poland and its Eastern neighbors were able to reach a peaceful accommodation after the downfall of the soviet Union. Tragically, the Balkans did not enjoy the longterm fencebuilding that kept this corner of the world at peace. Snyder's account of the Polish-Ukrainian conflicts during World War II is groundbreaking and fills a vital gap in this story. Not since "God's Playground" has the story been told so well. Wonderful book. Buy it.

You will be hard-pressed to find a better English-language history of the past 150 years in Vilnius and in Volhynia/Galicia. Snyder goes into great detail about the history and ironies of Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalism (Belarussian history and nationalism, described as a "national failure" by Snyder, gets shorter shrift). The modern history of these until-recently contested regions is quite complicated and arouses great passions from Poles/Lithuanians and Poles/Ukrainians to this day. Snyder does an excellent job of trying to approach the history here as something fresh, rather than try to amalgamate different competing national mythologies.

A warning: this is not a comprehensive history of the region, and is not even really a comprehensive history of modern Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationalism. A great many events, places and people are mentioned in passing, and if you do not already have a firm grounding in East European history you can easily get lost as the tides of history swirl by. The book is best understood as having, at its heart, a history of the Vilnius guberniya and a history of the Volhynia guberniya and Galician Koenigreich from about 1900 to about 1950. The chapters on Volhynia during the Second World War are at once both the most harrowing and also the most illustrative as to how individuals and groups were able to switch back and forth between ideologies and how persecutions and atrocities were able to build one on top of another. This goes a much longer way than many other recent histories in explaining just how genocide and ethnic cleansing was able to occur in Europe in the 20th century.

The last third of the book, dealing with Polish foreign policy, is the weakest (and the most poorly-edited). It felt a bit like a thesis paper spun out into 100 pages of a book: the same argument was largely made over and over again as to how Polish foreign policy post 1945 was able to be shaped by emigres, and how this foreign policy achieved peace in Eastern Europe post 1989. Honestly, this had little to do with the rest of the book, except as an epilogue, and would probably have been better handled in a separate book. It felt a little too idealistic, a little to Poland-centric (and largely focused on the ideas of a few elite, at that) and definitely controversial. For all of Snyder's arguments, no explanation is really ultimately given for why Poland was able to adopt such a forward-looking foreign policy, especially after all the conflicts and persecutions that he just finished documenting a few chapters earlier.

In any event, the book is a good read, covers a good breath of history in a wide area, and will be a welcome supplement to anyone interested in the region's history.

Well, being born in one of those Central Belarussian towns I would say I agree with 95% of material and it's analized with good skills. I highly recommend this book to anyone with interest in Eastern Europe history and to descendents of Poles, Belarussians and Ukrainians.
It is worth to remember that Commonwealth expirienced Ortodox( Uniates), Catholics, Protestans, Muslims(Tatar) living together in unity and friendship, while in Europe religious cleansings were at the peak.
I was also surprised I didnt found any information about Sluck Fight against Bolsheviks( since it is very important to Belarus history) and general Stanislaw Bulak-Balachowicz, who declaired compliance with first Belarus Government in 1919, not with Poles...and after forcibly evacuating to Polish territories was unarmed by polish "friend" Pilsudski.

This was one of the books I had to read for my Eastern European History class. Although I was only required to read part of it, I finished the whole thing.

If you are interested in knowing and understanding what happened in Eastern Europe this is the book for you. Not only is it well researched but it is very well written.

I look forward to see what else Timothy Snyder publishes in the future.

As the author puts it right at the beginning of the book "The subjects of this book are the transformation of national ideas, the causes of ethnic cleansing, and the conditions for national reconciliation"

Previous reviewers have already more or less given an overview of the contents of this book... I'll not weigh this forum down with too much more of the same, but I WOULD like to add another voice in favor: This is really an exceptionally insightful and well-written book, and will undoubtedly leave you looking at the idea of nationalism, what national identity means, and even how we view history itself in a different light.
...I especially appreciate the subtlety with which the author outlines the development of distinct modern National Ideas in the region, with all the vague, selective interpretations of facts and moral shades of gray inherent in the building of an exclusive national mythology. Though we largely just take national identity for granted today as simply defined by some mixture of land of birth, language, and maybe to some more limited extent ancestry, the author shows not only how drastically the understanding of what national identity means has changed over a relatively short period of time (is belonging to the "nation" a privilege reserved for the ruling classes? Is it determined by religious affiliation? Language(s)? Volition alone?), but also how truly unclear, and even artificial national definitions (imposed upon mostly peasant populations for political ends) often were right up until the mass deaths, inter-communal slaughters, and forced population transfers of the Second World War compelled otherwise rather indifferent and often largely undifferentiated local populations to choose one loyalty or another, and finally form neatly divided nation-states for the first time.
...There's a lot more to it, but I'll leave it at that...
An extremely fascinating book.
I absolutely recommend it, though it might be helpful to have a decent understanding of Central and Eastern European history before reading to be able to best appreciate this book...

ALSO: I've found the book in PDF format at this website, where it can be read or downloaded...
[...]

Cheers!

This is a very good book on very controversial topics, that are not really dealt with in English publications. It deals with four nations and history of their nationalism. In essence, it traces how four modern nations carved up and divided territory and historical legacy of medieval monarchies. It is quite unique look, tracing history of broad region to present-day situations. The book offers some different perspectives. For example, conflict over Vilnius/Wilno is usually portrayed only as Lithuanian-Polish matter. The book offers a third contestant - Belarus.

The only nitpick I have that the author sometimes is too quick to judge. I understand that covering 400 years of entangled nationalism of four nations in less than 300 pages is a miracle in itself, but sometimes judgments and event descriptions are too quick, too general with not enough supporting detail. While sometimes it is very refreshing to read a big-picture summary of controversial and convoluted events written from neutral perspective (both sides are usually equally guilty and equally wrong), but sometimes more facts and less rhetoric would be preferred.

Overall message is quite clear - nationalism is crazy and destructive. No nation is any better than the next. However, it is very easy to misquote the book. Many quotes from this book can be taken out of context and glued together to show that nation x is the worst, angriest, most irrational, etc. The same is true for nations y, z, and w.

There is something very Polish about this book; not merely in the fact that the last third of it is a generous, and somewhat indulgent account of Polish foreign policy since 1989. There is a tendency within Polish culture towards very black humor; one thinks of Gombrowicz, Kosinski, and Polanski. What we have here is a story of nationalist obtuseness and narrow-mindedness. Then, during the Second World War, this nationalism degenerates into murder and mass slaughter. But after 1989, there is a happy ending, at least for Poland. It is as unconvincing as a Hollywood film but no less real than that. Basically Timothy Snyder's book about nationalism in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus deals with a conflict between two rival nationalist conceptions. 1569 saw the formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which covered most of what are now those four countries. In offered religious tolerance to all and civil rights to the political nation. The catch was that the "political nation" was the nobility, and the vast majority of people in the Commonwealth were peasants. Over the next two centuries the Commonwealth declined and was partitioned out of existence in the 1790s. As Polish nobles thought about trying to win back their independence, many of them wanted to win back the tolerant, federalist ideas of the old Commonwealth. However in the 19th century a new, more modern idea of nationalism began to take shape. In a more democratic age the nation consisted of the people. Instead of a compromise between various elites, the people, usually defined by language, would form their own nations. First in Poland, then in Lithuania, then slowly in Ukraine and only very partially now in Belarus, would the second idea triumph.

Snyder amusingly shows the many ironies as the nationalists sought to get their way. One is that Poles had the habit of referring to their former country as "Lithuania," a coinage immortalized in the most famous lines of the national poet, Adam Mickiewicz. Mickiewicz himself never imagined a Lithuania separate from Poland, and never set foot in the Polish heartlands of Warsaw or Cracow, yet his poetry was used by both Lithuanian nationalists and Polish chauvinists to justify partition. Another irony is that Lithuanian nationalists wished to retake their "national city" Vilnius and make it their capital, a desire not hampered in the slightest by the fact that less than 2% of Vilnius' residents in 1920 could speak Lithuanian. There are a whole host of prominent politicians from all four countries who, notwithstanding their patriotic protests, are actually from somewhere else or have relatives and wives from one of the other groups. Snyder goes on to discuss the Vilnius question in the twenties and thirties. In the early twenties Poland easily occupied the city, much to the impotent anger of the Lithuanians. However, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact the Soviet Union gave Vilnius to Lithuania. One would think that the Lithuanians would spend their last days of independence before the Soviet annexation in 1940 trying to find a way of defending themselves. Instead they spent much of their time quarrelling over Polish theatres and the possible threat from a defeated and dismembered Poland. Nor were they entirely wrong to do so. For decades Lithuanian nationalists had feared Polish culture more than Russian. Oddly enough, Soviet occupation vindicated that judgement. Notwithstanding the fact that the Soviets deported 5% of the Lithuanian population in the forties, the proportion of Vilnius that was Lithuanian increased from 2% to 50% by 1990.

If Polish-Lithuanian relations were strange, relations with Ukraine were kind of sick. By the late thirties a small, quasi-fascist group, known as the OUN had formed. At the time it was much less popular in Polish Ukraine than socialism, moderate agrarianism, or Soviet communism. Not even the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine had dimmed Russophilia. But then the Germans conquered all of what is now the Ukraine and the OUN saw its chance. After working with the Nazis to slaughter Jews, in 1943 it saw its chance with German weakness to strike out on its own. As part of its anti-German and anti-Soviet/Russian strategy it sought, not to attack the Germans, or the Soviet partisans, so much as to slaughter the Poles living in Volhynia region, a process both evil and insane. The pages describing this are truly stunning, backed up with archival evidence, as the OUN butchered 70,000 Poles. The Poles responded, often with substantial brutality (they killed perhaps 20,000 Ukrainians), with both the Home Army and Polish Communists involved. After the war there was a "transfer" of Polish and Ukrainian populations.

However, once 1989 came along Poland followed a policy of supporting the independence of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine and keeping their present borders. Any concerns over national minorities would not get in the way of basic civil relations. The other three countries were not wild about this, but they accepted it as a way of getting close to Europe. Snyder is very informative but I have some cavils. First, the struggle is largely between different ideas of nationality; other conflicts, whether between classes, over political mobilization, and over religion, are not as well treated. Second, Snyder does not really explain why Russian and later Soviet culture had so little impact on the Lithuanians and Ukrainians. One would not know, as Stephen Kotkin reported in 2002, that perhaps a majority of Ukrainians regret independence and certainly show much less enthusiasm for it now. Third, there is something disconcertingly apologetic about the treatment of the Greek Catholic/Ukrainian metropolitan Sheptyts'kyi. He may have sheltered Jews, but he supported using the more "moderate" OUN faction as a potential Ukrainian army by becoming an SS division. His denunciation of slaughter in 1942 came after 17 months of the systematic slaughter of Ukrainian Jewry.

A masterly study on the complexes of nation building and comu¡munal life in mixed linguistic and ethnic territories.

With a fine,elegant narrative it is not only a deep scholar research but a pleasant reading, avoiding the extremes of some compresive academic works.

Be you in favor or against the views of Mr Snyder a suggest the reading of book, especialy if you have any personal link with the area or if you are interested in the cruel realm of bloody ethnic and linguistic nationalism and how it destroys plural, mixed communities.

In some ways this is a marvellous book, dealing with the life and death of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and with the states which succeeded it. This Republic of nobles and gentry has often been ridiculed for its weaknesses and its inability to resist its more powerful neighbors, but as long as it lasted there was more freedom, religious, political, and social, within its borders than anywhere else in Europe. It was not only the powerful empires of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary which did it in; it was also destroyed by the growth of nationalism, the idea that a state should be more or less the same as a nation. Snyder shows with devastating irony how artificial nationalist ideologies really are, but also how powerful they can become and how deadly. Certainly the world of Eastern Europe would have been better under the inspiration of the great "Lithuanian" poet Adam Mickiewicz and the last great Polish politician Josef Pilsudski, but this was not to be.

Snyder, however, closes his book on what can only be called Polish propaganda, that is the claim that the Poles, of all the East Slavic and Baltic peoples, have learned the lessons of history. Many would dispute this. He attributes far too much to the role of the Poles in preventing hostilities at the end of Soviet rule from degenerating into Yugoslavian civil war. Thus a very fine historical analysis ends on a weak and a false note. But you would have to go far to find a better history of ethnic conflict and accomodation in Eastern Europe. You might have to go to the potboiler novels of Polish history of Henryk Sienkiewicz (the author also of Quo Vadis)but I don't recommend this. They will bore you to death.

Snyder should take his publisher to task for many errors in grammar and punctuation and for mere carelessly. Yale University Press did a good job getting Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic names spelled correctly (no mean trick) but it seems to have had some problem with simple English.

If you ever wanted to understand the exact political reconstruction that occured between Poland, Belarus, and surrounding countries, this book tells you more then you care to know in a way so difficult to comprehend that you'll feel less knowledgable after reading it. Not for casual historians.