January - June 2014
Mail: Vladimir.Solonari(at)ucf(dot)edu
Vladimir Solonari began his fellowship at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in January 2014. He has been Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Florida since August 2009. He was assistant professor at the same university from 2003 to 2009. Prior to working at the University of Central Florida, he was associate professor at the Moldovan Slavic University in Chișinau, Moldova. From 1990 to 2001 he was a Member of the Moldovan Parliament. Solonari has a PhD in modern and contemporary history from Moscow State University.
Vladimir Solonari is currently writing a monograph on the social history of a part of southern Ukraine that was under Romanian occupation from 1941 to 1944. Transnistria, as the region was known at the time, extended over approximately 40 000 square kilometres with a population of 2.2 million people. It was the only part of the Soviet Union that was occupied and administered by a power other than Germany during World War II. The Transnistrian case is interesting not only in and of itself, but also because we can compare developments there with the situation in Soviet territories that were occupied and administered by Nazi Germany during World War II. Such a comparison can provide us with insights into how the occupation regimes influenced the attitudes and behaviour of the local population. This book will cover topics such as the aims and implementation of Romanian policy in the region; the persecution and mass murder of Jews and Roma; tensions between the occupiers and occupants; collaboration and complicity in war crimes; and resistance, both Ukrainian nationalist and pro-Soviet. It is the result of years of research in the archives of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., Yad Vashem, Kiev, Odessa, and Chişinău and its findings will add significantly to our knowledge of the occupation of Transnistria.
Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in World War II Romania. Baltimore, MD; Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 451 pp.
Public Discourses on the Holocaust in Moldova: Justification, Instrumentalization, and Mourning. In: Joanna Michlic and John-Paul Himka, eds., Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013, 377-402.
Ethnic Cleansing or Crime Prevention? Deportation of Romanian Gypsies. In: Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Holocaust of the Gypsies. Oxford, UK: Berghahn, 2013, 96-119.
In the Shadow of Ethnic Nationalism: Racial Science in Romania. In: Rory Yeomans and Anton Weiss-Wendt, eds., Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1939-1945. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 2013, 259-286.
Die Moldauische Sozialistische Sowjetrepublik während des Zweiten Weltkriegs (1941-1945). In: Bochmann, Klaus, Vasile Dumbrava, Dietmar Mueller, Victoria Reinhardt, eds. Die Republik Moldau. Republica Moldova. Ein Handbuch (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitaetsverlag, 2012, 87-97.
Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July-August 1941. In: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8 no. 4 (2007): 749-787. This text is also forthcoming, in a revised edition, in a collection of essays published by University of Pittsburgh Press, in 2013.
An Important New Document on Romanian Policy of Ethnic Cleansing during World War II. In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21 no. 2 (2007), 268-297.
Model Province': Explaining the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jewry. In: Nationalities Papers 34, no. 4 (2006), 471-500.
Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel. Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012. In: Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2013), 175-177.
Jean Ancel. The History of the Holocaust in Romania. Trans. by Yaffah Murciano, ed. Leon Volovici, with the assistance of Miriam Caloianu. The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011. In: Slavic Review vol. 72, no. 2 (Summer 2013), 387-389.
Maria Bucur. Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania (Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press, 2010). In: Journal of Contemporary History, 47 no. 3 (2012), 660-662.
Stefan Ihrig. Wer sind die Moldawier? Rumänismus versus Moldowanismus in Historiographie und Schulbüchern der Republik Moldova, 1991-2006 [Who are the Moldovans? Romanianism versus Moldovianism in the Historiography and SchoolTextbooks of the Republic of Moldova] Balkanistica 24 (2011), 318-321.
Wolfgand Benz, Brigitte Mihok, eds., Holocaustul la pereferie. Persecutarea şi nimicirea evreilor în România şi Transnistria în 1940-1944 (The Holocaust on the Periphery. The Persecution and Annihilation of of Jews in Romania and Transnistria in 1940-1944) (Chişinău: Cartier, 2010) Golokost i Suchasnist' (Holocaust and Modernity, Kiev, Ukraine) no. 1 (7) (2010), 192-198.
For more information on Vladimir Solonari please visit the website of the University of Central Florida