Rampart Nations

Political myths of the state as a ‘bulwark’ against external or internal threat are, the editors of this volume concede, ‘important elements of cultures of memory and provide a unifying story for “imagined communities”’. Given the burgeoning canon around memory and nationalism studies of Eastern Europe, exemplified by the 2013 collection Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (ed. U. Blacker, A. Etkind and J. Fedor, rev. ante, cxxxiii [2018], 500–501), the volume at hand is less filling a ‘research gap’, as claimed, than serving as a useful thematic addendum to a wider set of historiographic preoccupations. Over thirteen case-studies, grouped loosely by theme and chronology, editors Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher have brought together a readable collection, with a welcome coherence, thanks to its narrowness of theme—which is unpacked in two prefatory essays and a conclusion. This helps make a bridge between the more obscure subjects—for example, parochial thinking

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