Transformative Podcast

Welfare States and Social Justice in 20th Century Central Europe (Radka Šustrová)

Studying social justice reveals the promises a regime - liberal or otherwise - makes to its citizens. It also reveals how citizens interpret these promises. But to what extent should we use the term “social justice” to understand societies excluding entire cohorts - most notoriously Jews and Roma in territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II? By focusing on exactly this period, and taking the example of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Radka Šustrová discusses not only how welfare states (as much as culture, literature, or media) have historically cemented nationalist projects, but also how thoroughly illiberal concepts of social justice have historically been. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she reflects moreover on the extent to which this wartime inheritance impacted the postwar welfare states celebrated in Central Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Radka Šustrová is the author of Nations Apart: Czech Nationalism and Authoritarian Welfare under Nazi Rule (Oxford, 2024). She is a researcher at RECET and a lecturer in social history at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the history of the welfare state, social justice, social and labour rights, women's activism, and nationalism in twentieth-century Central Europe. From 2020 to 2022, she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow and supervisor in history at the University of Cambridge. In 2022, she was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Vienna. Her further publications include three books, several edited volumes, and articles in English, German, and Czech.

Inferiority Complexes in Soviet Development (Alessandro Iandolo)

To what extent were Soviet engagements with the Third World characterized by solidarity during the Cold War? And to what extent did these same engagements conceal imperial ambitions? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alessandro Iandolo (UCL) talks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how concrete development projects could be viewed quite differently by the different actors involved. He also talks about how his own perspective on these projects has changed, as he approaches them in his new research from different angles. If all of those involved came to be almost in agreement on one point, he argues, it was that the world-building exercises they were involved in were somehow second best when compared to the material and intellectual resources of an imagined West.

Alessandro Iandolo is a lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, specializing in the history of the Soviet Union in the world. His first book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968, explored the Soviet Union's economic partnership with three newly-independent countries in West Africa during the Khrushchev era, winning the W. Bruce Lincoln prize for the best first monograph in Russian History, and the Marshall D. Shulman prize for the best monograph on the internationalrelations of the USSR from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Dismantling Authoritarian Rule in Poland (Jan T. Gross, Magda Szcześniak)

This episode captures (the beginning of) a conversation between cultural studies scholar Magda Szcześniak (University of Warsaw) and historian Jan Tomasz Gross (emeritus, Princeton University) who – while studying Polish contemporary history during the past decades – published a book co-authored by Stephen Kotkin on "uncivil society" in 2010. It offered a powerful explanation for the implosion of communism in 1989. Not long ago, we witnessed an election defeat of a non-communist authoritarian regime in Poland and are observing a tough and twisted process of dismantling that regime. The discussion is initiated and moderated by János Mátyás Kovács (senior researcher, RECET).

Jan T. Gross studies modern Europe, focusing on comparative politics, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, Soviet and East European politics, and the Holocaust. After growing up in Poland and attending Warsaw University, he immigrated to the United States in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University (1975). His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation, appeared in 1979. Revolution from Abroad (1988) analyzes how the Soviet regime was imposed in Poland and the Baltic states between 1939 and 1941. Neighbors (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He joined the Princeton History Department in 2003 after teaching at New York University, Emory, Yale, and universities in Paris, Vienna, and Krakow. Professor Gross is the Norman B. Tomlinson ‘16 and ‘48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus.

Magda Szcześniak is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. Author of Normy widzialnosci. Tozsamosc w czasach transformacji [Norms of Visuality. Identity in Times of Transition, 2016] and Poruszeni. Awans i emocje w socjalistycznej Polsce [Feeling Moved. Upward Mobility and Emotions in Socialist Poland, 2023].