The 20th century in the Baltic region had it all. The turbulent century did not spare the small territory and its population, which was visited by practically every calamity the modern era had to offer. At westward edge of the Russian Empire, the region was subjected to the harsh Russification drive of the late imperial era. With diverse religions and nationalities and its geographic buffer between the Empire and the German Reich, it was also the crucible of key battles during and mass refugee crises following World War I. In the interwar period, the rise of the independent Baltic States precipitated myriad political experiments and population politics together with constant maneuvering to preserve their fragile and ultimately short-lived sovereignty. World War II ushered in a period of unprecedented extremes with waves of brutal occupations, deportations, the Holocaust, the subjection of the territory to the communist experiment, and ultimately, the decimation of state sovereignty for the next four decades. The almost unavoidable outcome of this course of events has been the focus on the region from the point of view of the large powers that sought to dominate and shape it. The rather limited number of foreign scholars who command Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, fortified this orientation in the writing of the history of the region. The present volume seeks to shift the attention to the local point of view through the writing of Baltic scholars. By no means a comprehensive expose, the essays nevertheless explore key junctures in the history of the three Baltic countries as viewed "from within," both then and now.

For centuries, human perfection has been a powerful goal, but only in the twentieth century were national states able to achieve the capacity to impose radical change on entire societies in the name of rooting out imperfections. The contributions to this volume constitute an ambitious attempt to study a number of significant efforts by twentieth-century states to reshape - either through social policy or brute force - their societies and their populations according to ideologies based on various theories of human perfectibility. The cases examined include Germany during the World War I, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet regime, Germany under the Nazis, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, French anti-abortion policies in the interwar era, the treatment of Japanese Americans during the World War II, attitudes toward postwar Soviet Jewry, the changing role of Israeli war widows, and the particular difficulties facing east central European governments from the World War I until 1956.

For centuries, human perfection has been a powerful goal, but only in the twentieth century were national states able to achieve the capacity to impose radical change on entire societies in the name of rooting out imperfections. The contributions to this volume constitute an ambitious attempt to study a number of significant efforts by twentieth-century states to reshape - either through social policy or brute force - their societies and their populations according to ideologies based on various theories of human perfectibility. The cases examined include Germany during the World War I, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet regime, Germany under the Nazis, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, French anti-abortion policies in the interwar era, the treatment of Japanese Americans during the World War II, attitudes toward postwar Soviet Jewry, the changing role of Israeli war widows, and the particular difficulties facing east central European governments from the World War I until 1956.

In "Making Sense of War, " Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.

The book explores the creation of the myth of the war against the historiography of modern schemes for social engineering, the Holocaust, ethnic deportations, collaboration, and postwar settlements. For communist true believers, World War II was the purgatory of the revolution, the final cleansing of Soviet society of the remaining elusive "human weeds" who intruded upon socialist harmony, and it brought the polity to the brink of communism. Those ridden with doubts turned to the war as a redemption for past wrongs of the regime, while others hoped it would be the death blow to an evil enterprise. For all, it was the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result of Weiner's inquiry is a bold, compelling new picture of a Soviet Union both reinforced and enfeebled by the experience of total war.