This work examines and analyses the reform attempts undertaken by the Greek Orthodox and Uniate Bishop of Lviv, Iosyf Shumliansky, during his episcopacy (1668-1708). These reforms are seen as a means of facing the intensified confessionalising pressures at state and regional levels in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The analysis focuses on the Bishop’s model priest as illustrated in his handbook for the clergy; the influence the Bishop and the Consistorial Court had over the parish clergy; the types of litigation and the categories of plaintiff in the cases concerning the parish clergy; and the clergy’s behaviour. Iosyf Shumliansky required the clergy to adjust its behaviour and educational standards to be similar to those of the nobility and Roman Catholic clergy. The parish clergy should refrain from dressing like peasants, becoming too close to the villagers and from participating too enthusiastically in village festivities. They should learn Polish and Latin. The Bishop expected the clergy to adopt a style of dress and behaviour that would distinguish and elevate it as a group above the mass of the peasantry. Included in the analysis, are cases from the Lviv and Halych main deaneries but not the main deanery of Kamianets Podilsky. The Bishop and the Consistorial Court had good control over most of the western and central regions of the Diocese. The Court could not control the situation in the eastern territories, as it was unsafe because of wars, Tatar raids and occupation by Ottoman forces. The possibility for Shumliansky to influence the parish clergy through the Court in these regions was limited. Their participation in court proceedings was negligible. The most common type of litigation was official misconduct by the priests. After that came violence, finance and defamation. The most common category of plaintiff was parish priests, followed by nobles and honest/reputable/townsmen. In the study, violence has been treated as a means of interaction and communication. It would appear that the status of the parish clergy was often frail and had to be publicly, vigorously and violently defended. Many of the clergy could not live up to the demands of the Bishop because they lived as and among peasants.

The ritualized memory of genocide has been a cornerstone of Roma political mobilization during at least the last three decades. A uniqueness paradigm has been developing for some time, applying a memorial discourse inspired by the Jewish Holocaust model. While paralleling each other in time, the mass murders of Jews and Roma during the Second World War differed on several points. In the General Government of the Occupied Polish Territories and the territories occupied by Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa, the persecution of Roma took place largely in local initiatives. Consequently, the Nazi policies varied considerably, leading to territories in which Roma were annihilated and those in which about half of the Roma population survived. Considerable differences could also appear within the same administrative unit. In Distrikt Galizien, the southeastern-most district of the General Government, Roma were persecuted violently in the countryside, while the district capital of Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv) saw a different course of events. The picture that appears from the available documents also diverges from survivor testimonies and general accounts of the persecution of Roma as being similar and parallel to that of Jews. Roma were present in Lemberg throughout the Nazi occupation and the authorities were aware of their whereabouts. Roma were not confined to the ghetto, but many, along with Poles and Ukrainians, remained within the territory of the ghetto, parts of which had constituted areas of Roma settlement in Lemberg since the mid nineteenth century. Several Roma also lived in wagons in various locations in 1942–43, as well as in quarters close to the town’s centre. Altogether, several hundred Roma lived in Lemberg, and their treatment by the local courts was different from that of Jews, bearing more similarity to the way in which Polish and Ukrainian cases were handled.

This anthology presents perspectives on the political, social and economic transformation of rural life on the periphery of Western Europe and the Baltic Sea area 1880–1939. Rural populations living in these peripheries adopted various strategies in response to rapid political and economic change, while they themselves were the subject of activist and elite political mobilization and nation-building rhetoric. The anthology discusses the impact of the re-organization of production and distribution of agricultural products and property on gender, ethnic and class relationships, including analyses of the relatively unsuccessful movements such as Agrarianism. We look at the evolution of peasant politics, both in areas with long traditions of peasant political participation (Sweden) and those with short and problematic histories of rural politicization (Austrian Galicia). The anthology also analyzes the rhetoric fuelling peasant mobilization. Imagining and visualizing the peasant by non-rural social classes was an important element of modern nation-building; while a pair of unlikely bedfellows – romantic nationalism and Enlightment thinking – may be viewed as cornerstones in the emancipation agenda of 19th and early 20th century rural activists. The anthology thus provides new, comparative scholarship on the content and impact of modern rural movements, both economic, social and political; as well as the ideologies which sought to mobilize, and incorporate, the peasant population into national politics and history.

In the spring of 1782 a group of peasants of Swedish origin reached their destination on the right bank of Dnipro River in Ukraine. The village they founded became known as “Gammalsvenskby” (Russian “Staroshvedskoe,” English “Old Swedish Village”). In the 1880s links were established with Sweden and Swedophone Finland where the villagers were seen through a nationalistic-romantic prism and in broad circles became known as a brave group of people who had preserved their Swedish culture in hostile surroundings; in the terminology of this volume, a “lost Swedish tribe”. The village remained largely intact until 1929, when in the aftermath of the Russian revolution a majority of the villagers decided to leave for Sweden. When they arrived, there was disappointment. Neither Sweden nor the lost tribe lived up to expectations. Some of the villagers returned to Ukraine and the USSR.

This book offers an alternative perspective on Gammalsvenskby. The changing fortunes of the villagers are largely seen in the light of two grand top-down modernization projects – Russia’s imperial, originating in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the Soviet, carried out in the early 1920s – but also of the modernization projects in Sweden and Finland. The story the book has to tell of Gammalsvenskby is a new one, and moreover, it is a story of relevance also for the history of Russia, Ukraine, Sweden and Finland.