A Difficult Neighbourhood. Essays on Russia and East-Central Europe since World War II (ANU Press, 2016), a collection of essays from a leading Eastern Europe specialist and researcher at the ANU Centre for European Studies, Dr John Besemeres, is available as open access at https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/difficult-neighbourhood

Through a series of essays on key events in recent years in Russia, the western ex-republics of the USSR and the countries of the one-time Warsaw Pact, John Besemeres seeks to illuminate the domestic politics of the most important states, as well as Moscow’s relations with all of them. At the outset, he takes some backward glances at the violent suppression of national life in the ‘bloodlands’ of Europe during World War II by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which helps to explain much about the region’s dynamics since. His concern throughout is that a large area of Europe with a combined population well in excess of Russia’s could again be consigned by the West to Moscow’s care, not this time by more and less malign forms of collusion, but by distracted negligence or incomprehension.

Read also ANUCES Briefing Papers on Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe:

• Belarus, Russia and NATO: Bringing Russia to NATO’s eastern flank, by Elena Govor, John Besemeres, Matthew Sussex, Kyle Wilson, Katarzyna K Williams, 2021

• Western Strategic Disarray and the Short-term Outlook for Ukraine, by John Besemeres, 2018

• Ukraine, Russia and the Future of Europe, by John Besemeres, 2018

• Sino Russian relations under Putin and Xi Jinping, by Kyle Wilson, Stephen Fortescue, Rebecca Fabrizi, 2015