russ.10693

BOOK REVIEWS

LITERATURE AND FINE ARTS

Vishlenkova, Elena. Vizual'noe narodovedenie imperii, ili “Uvidet' russkogo dano nekazhdomu”. Historia Rossica. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011.384 pp. R286.00. ISBN 978-5-86793-862-8.

How did Russians imagine themselves and how were they imagined by others in the secondhalf of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Vishlenkova seeks to answer thesequestions by investigating a wealth of “graphic [relating to pictorial representation] images”(graficheskie obrazy) of the peoples of the Russian Empire. These appeared in a widevariety of media: gravures, caricatures, depictions (on porcelain plates, cups, and otherutensils), medals, ethnographic portraits, lubki, cartouches on maps, toys, and the like. Shefocuses on what she calls the “pre-philosophical and pre-photographic” stage of the debatesover identity because, she argues, at that time visual images were dominant in shapingcultural perceptions of the empire’s peoples, especially so given the low level of literacyamong the mass of the population. Vishlenkova undertakes to decipher these images interms of their production techniques, their creators’ aims, the message(s) projected, andtheir circulation between cultural settings (say, from literary journals read by the educated,sophisticated urban milieu to the lubki and caricatures usually more popular among theuneducated or barely literate masses of the provincial peasantry). The end result is a denselywritten but fascinating peregrination in the visual imaginings of Russians and (to a lesserextent) of other peoples of the empire produced by natural scientists, caricaturists, artists,and engravers at the dawn of the era of nationalism.

Vishlenkova deserves praise for attempting to trace these images throughout their“life story”: from generation and circulation, through adaptation and replication, to oblivion.As she readily admits, most of the images she studies were created in an elite culturalsetting. For example, she analyzes the costume portraits (and the albums compiled thereof)accompanying ethnographic reports by foreign scientists in the employ of the RussianAcademy in the eighteenth century; or the engravings appearing in literary journals, suchas Syn Otechestva, in the beginning of the nineteenth century. She also investigates theirsubsequent replication, adaptation, and reuse by both domestic and foreign engravers andpublishers. On occasion she even delves into their transmission to the average provincialinhabitant of the empire via flyers, ephemera, and even toys. In what is surely the mostinteresting part of this book, Vishlenkova discusses the manipulation of the visual imagesand, therefore, the revision of their messages (both for technical reasons and so as to makethem more meaningful to the masses or to fit the needs of the moment). In that sense,Vishlenkova does a splendid job deciphering what the messages were, that is, what theintellectuals (the elite) thought about Russian identity and about what it meant to be Russian(russkii) or a Russian subject (rossiiskii). She argues that the “costume albums” portrayedthe Russian Empire as a community of separate peoples identified as such by their outwardappearance and clothing. The actual process of depiction both validated existing imagesof these groups and redefined the taxonomic nomenclature of the empire’s peoples at a

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time when Russian scientific terminology was in its infancy. Later on, in the beginning ofthe nineteenth century, other authors and artists associated the costumed peoples withparticular morals and ways of life. Still others were influenced by physiognomy theories intheir depiction of ethnic groups. As a result, for some observers the Russians ought to have“Asiatic” characteristics, whereas others categorized them with the Europeans. A furtherdevelopment occurred during the struggle against Napoleon, when classical images of civicduty were synthesized with Russian and Slavic folkloric characters to produce hybrid portraitsof the Russian village as a heroic community defending itself from the marauding andthieving invaders. Finally, right after the war and in the 1820s, there was a “de-heroization”of the Russian peasantry through its portrayal as a peace-loving, hard-working group.Throughout these developments, Vishlenkova concludes, the meaning of the term narodchanged according to need. It could denote a social stratum, refer to local identity associatedwith regions of the empire, designate the subject peoples of the crown, or signify a culturalnation or even an ethnic group. The projection of the Russian state’s imperial characterwas a bit more stable. The empire was depicted as an agglomeration of distinct elementsunder the monarch’s protection or (and here there was a lot more variety) in allegoricalterms, especially in the cases of sculpture or architecture.

It is particularly striking, though not surprising, that the majority of the pictorialmessages were in fact government-approved and even sponsored. From the “costumealbums” of the late eighteenth century or the portraits of individual inhabitants of the RussianEmpire in the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the caricatures of the enemy duringthe Napoleonic invasion or the postwar return to an image of Russianness exemplified inthe calm and naturalistic portraits of sturdy, hard-working peasants (men and women) createdby Venetsianov and his students—in all of these cases it is very clear that the imperialgovernment tried to have a say in what was published and where, and what its messageought to be. Simply put, the title’s vizual'noe narodovedenie was in fact manipulated,directly or indirectly, to fit the imperial government’s needs of the day. A case in point wasthe caricatures of 1812 which depicted a binary model of us (the Russian village community)vs. them (the Europeans, not necessarily only the French). Once the war was won, caricaturesfell out of use and instead an image of Russia as the sacred empire of the Slavs was projectedin a variety of media (for example, medals and porcelain products). Vishlenkova’s book,therefore, focuses on the visual images produced by the elite under the government’s watchfuleye. And despite her tantalizing efforts at tracing how some of these images were in fact“translated” into lubki or into toys for the lower classes, the extent to which the peasantswere receptive to these messages or to which they absorbed them necessarily in the wayintended by their creators still remains open to question.

Vishlenkova knows her primary sources and modern theorizing about the visual well.In fact, she firmly situates her investigation in the framework of the new imperial histories,advocated in the field by, among others, the journal Ab Imperio. She shows clearly that“Russianness” (russkost') in the context of the Russian Empire was a contested, malleable,and ultimately time-conditioned notion that was negotiated, argued about, and facilitatedprimarily by the empire’s educated classes. And she makes a cogent and convincing argumentthat the visual images and their imaginings were instrumental in the associated efforts.

Nikos Chrissidis, Southern Connecticut State University

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Cross, Anthony, ed. A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture.Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012. xvi + 330 pp. £14.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-909254-10-7.

For people interested in how Great Britain reacted to Russian culture, this book is a realtreasure chest because it has so many valuable pieces (twenty-one all in all) and its scope isso impressive.

A People Passing Rude covers two centuries, starting with the early 1800s (“Byron,Don Juan, and Russia,” by Peter Cochran) and finishing with the 1990s (“The BritishReception of Russian Film, 1960–1990: The Role of Sight and Sound,” by Julian Graffy).The volume offers us glimpses into responses to Russian literature (among them a thoughtfularticle by Rachel Polonsky on how, in a fit of jealousy, Katherine Mansfield’s husband andeditor J. M. Murry chose to excise most of her references to Chekhov from the posthumouspublications of her letters), folklore, painting (including icons, on which there is an excellentarticle by Richard Marks), music (“An ‘Extraordinary Engagement’: A Russian OperaCompany in Victorian Britain” by Tamsin Alexander is a true gem here), as well as film,religion, and foreign affairs.

The book opens with a masterful introduction by the editor, Anthony Cross, one of themost prominent British Slavists. The introduction takes us through awareness of Russia inEngland prior to the nineteenth century and explains the book’s title: the words belong toGeorge Turbervile, a sixteenth-century poet who served as secretary to Sir Thomas Randolphwhen the latter was ambassador to Muscovy. The full line reads “a people passing rude tovices vile inclin’d” (p. 3). While Mr. Turbervile was obviously not particularly impressedby the Russians or their culture, how things changed through the centuries! By the early1900s, one may argue, no other culture influenced the sensibilities of the British intelligentsiaas powerfully as Russia’s—whether through the Ballets Russes and the English translationsof Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky, or, later, the Soviet Constructivists and the silentSoviet film of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin.

While the Ballets Russes and the Russian literary giants are frequently mentioned(there is even an article, by Muireann Maguire, on the influence of Dostoevsky’s Crimeand Punishment on English murder mystery writers), A People Passing Rude concernsitself primarily with more marginal but no less interesting manifestations of “The RussianInfluence” (as Virginia Woolf called it), like the artist Filipp Maliavin (Nicola Kozicharow)or the Russian-Jewish literary figure John Cournos who sometimes contributed to T. S.Eliot’s Criterion (Olga Ushakova). It also focuses on the English agents who spread thisinfluence through the British Isles, among them William Henry Leeds, who reviewed worksof Pushkin in the early nineteenth century (Anthony Cross); Rosa Newmarch, a popularizerof Russian music in England at the turn of the twentieth century (Philip Ross Bullock); JaneHarrison, a rare female scholar at Cambridge who largely taught herself Russian and becamealso an accomplished translator (Alexandra Smith); and Stephen Graham, a student andadmirer of Russian Orthodoxy who eagerly shared his love for “Holy Russia” with hiscountrymen (Michael Hughes).

The contributors to the volume range from very seasoned scholars—like AnthonyCross and Philip Ross Bullock—to very recent Ph.D.s and even pre-Ph.D.s. Since thevolume is based on the papers presented at a 2011 Cambridge Colloquium in RussianStudies, most of the participants are from British universities, but Russia is represented bythree scholars, and there are also two American contributors: Marilyn Schwinn Smith, whosearticle on the English translators of Aleksei Remizov features new archival materials, and


Scott Ruby, whose piece on the Russian display at Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in1851 introduces us to Pavel Sazikov, a Russian silversmith whose company was one of thefirst to employ a mechanized process in the production of silver in Russia.

This is definitely one of the strongest collections of articles I have had the privilege toreview.

Galya Diment, University of Washington

Baudin, Rodolphe. Nikolaï Karamzine à Strasbourg: Un écrivain-voyageur russe dansl’Alsace révolutionnaire (1789). Études Orientales, Slaves et Néo-helléniques.Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2011. 321 pp. €18.00 (paper).ISBN 978-2-86820-463-9.

In letter 47 of his Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, the account of his famous journey of1789-90 to Western Europe, Nikolai Karamzin describes the day and two nights he spent inStrasbourg. At first sight it might appear that Rodolphe Baudin, a researcher and lecturer atthe University of Strasbourg, devotes an exaggerated amount of attention to this brief episode,which constitutes such a tiny fraction of Karamzin’s work. In fact, Baudin’s book is amaster class in scholarship, well worth the attention of students of the eighteenth century,of Franco-Russian cultural relations, of Russian literature, and of Karamzin.

The book is divided into seven chapters. In chapter 1, Baudin examines the Pis'mathemselves: their origin and the complicated history of their publication. Baudin insists onthe division between the narrator and Karamzin the traveler, and the dual function of thePis'ma as an exercise in the genre of the traveler’s account and a partly factual record of thetumultuous events to which the Russian was a witness. Baudin’s second chapter offers adescription of Strasbourg in the eighteenth century, with a focus on its Russian visitors,especially students who studied at the university. In many ways Strasbourg was unique,especially because of its status in France, its bicultural and biconfessional nature, and itsimportance as a way-station for Russian travelers on their Grand Tour.

In chapters 3 and 4, Baudin examines Karamzin’s account of his stay in the city as afactual document. He takes issue with Lotman’s assertion in Sotvorenie Karamzina (1987)that all was quiet in Strasbourg on August 6, 1789, confirming, on the basis of historicalrecords and testimony, Karamzin’s account of riots on the streets. Baudin further refutesLotman’s assertion that after the Strasbourg stay “Karamzin disappears somewhere for aminimum of two weeks,” which Lotman posits could have been used by Karamzin for aflying visit to Paris to see his friend Aleksander Mikhailovich Kutuzov (1748–90), themystic and Mason, and an associate of Radishchev and Novikov. At the same time, Baudinsuggests that Karamzin almost certainly did not visit the attractions he describes—thecathedral, the monument to Maurice de Saxe, and the botanical garden—plagiarizing othertravelers’ accounts instead, and he speculates as to why Karamzin does not mention thename of the hotel he stayed at—hypothesizing that, since the letter was published only afterKutuzov had become a persona non grata, Karamzin wanted to hide such sensitiveinformation from the Russian authorities and might even have met Kutuzov in Strasbourg(p. 125).

In chapter 5, “A Poetics of Revolution,” Baudin begins his analysis of Karamzin’s textas a literary and cultural artifact. In Karamzin’s description of the revolutionary chaos onthe streets of Strasbourg, Baudin sees carnivalization as Karamzin’s solution to the generic

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problem of integrating revolution into the sentimental genre of the travel account. In thenext two chapters, which are devoted to the “Strasbourg text,” Baudin first examinesdescriptions of various Russian visitors to the city (most notably the Countess Golitsyn),and then situates Karamzin’s Strasbourg in the context of the emerging aesthetics ofsentimentalism and preromanticism, in particular pointing to the cathedral as the writer’sfirst experience of the Gothic style, and to his rejection of Pigalle’s Baroque monument toMaurice de Saxe in favor of neoclassicism. In a final summation, Baudin argues forKaramzin’s rejection of revolution in favor of progress through enlightenment.

The only frustration I had was the system of footnotes, which are not keyed to thebibliography. The latter, bizarrely, is not exhaustive, so that one has to hunt among thefootnotes for information on sources. Nevertheless, Baudin’s book is scrupulouslydocumented and argued, elegantly written, and richly illustrated. It is an important additionto the study of Karamzin.

J. Douglas Clayton, University of Ottawa

Forrester, Sibelan, ed. and trans. The Russian Folktale by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp.Foreword by Jack Zipes. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. xxviii +387 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8143-3466-9.

Vladimir Propp was a seminal figure in the history of folklore scholarship and hisMorphology of the Folktale (1928) set the parameters for studying the wonder tale in thetwentieth century. Instructors of classes on Russian folklore and the international folktalewill find Sibelan Forrester’s translation of The Russian Folktale (Russkaia skazka, 1984) awelcome addition to Propp’s works in English. The Russian Folktale is not a scholarlymonograph presenting the master’s final word on the folktale. It is instead the book versionof his course at Leningrad State University, which was unfinished at the time of his death in1970 and was augmented by lecture notes from his students. This explains the conversationaland repetitive nature of its language as well as the many insertions into the text of marginaliaand examples on which Propp likely spoke impromptu in class, but did not live to integrateinto his book. In his preface to the Russian edition, K. V. Chistov suggests that the “livingvoice of the teacher” can be heard in this work, and one must try not so much to readattentively as to listen attentively (p. 22).

Though confined to the folktale, the course that Propp offered was standard fare forSoviet Russia, and on occasion his surveys of the history of collection (chap. 1) and thehistory of interpretative schools (chap. 2) will remind readers of Iurii Sokolov’s RussianFolklore as well as of sections of Mark Azadovskii’s History of Russian Folkloristics (Istoriiarusskoi fol'kloristiki). Propp’s fundamental concerns, however, are precisely those on whichhe expended the greater portion of his scholarly activity: the classification and genesis ofthe folktale. In The Russian Folktale he carefully separates the folktale from such genresas myth, legend, memorate (bylichka), and tradition (predanie), while at the same timenoting instances in which clear demarcation is difficult. He finds the Aarne-Thompsonindex of tale types inadequate because it tends to classify on the basis of theme or motif,which can result both in missing the overall plot of a tale and listing it under several headingsor in dissecting a single plot and giving separate headings to its component parts (pp. 37-41and elsewhere).


Propp likewise attempts to mark boundaries between sub-genres of the folktale, ofwhich he gives four: the “wonder” (also “magic” and “fairy”) tale, the “novellistic” (also“realistic” and “everyday life”) tale, the “cumulative” tale, and the “animal” tale (chaps.3–6). He thus removes tales with “chain” structures from the sub-genre of animal tales.The great strength of the book lies in its survey of the sub-genres of the folktale; here Proppgives an overview of plots comprising the Russian repertoire, retelling a number of themwith new insight. In the section on wonder tales, the structural breakthroughs of Morphologyare presented in a clear and user-friendly manner.

Forrester’s translation reads smoothly. As she says in her introduction, she on occasionremoved some of the redundancies characteristic of oral delivery. The book is nicelyannotated and equipped with a bibliography, an author index, and an index of subjects andtales; there are, however, a few typos. One can only hope that this important volume willfind its way into the American classroom and that English-speaking students will have anopportunity to enjoy the personable “voice” of Propp the teacher.

Linda Ivanits, The Pennsylvania State University

Reid, Robert, and Joe Andrew, eds. Aspects of Dostoevskii: Art, Ethics, and Faith. Studiesin Slavic Literature and Poetics 57. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. xiv + 306 pp. $89.10.ISBN 978-90-420-3514-0.

This excellent collection of fourteen articles addresses the most gripping conceptsinseparable from any interpretation of Dostoevskii’s work. As Robert Reid, one of theeditors and the author of a highly informative introduction to the volume, observes, “art,ethics and faith” are “areas which constantly overlap and interact in his [Dostoevskii’s]work.” Similarly, the three major thematic areas overlap and interact in critical interpretationsthat are presented throughout fourteen chapters of the book. Each essay approaches thoseaspects of Dostoevskii’s oeuvre from a specific, sharp, and often innovative angle,concentrating (with one exception) on a singular work of fiction. The Brothers Karamazovhas drawn special attention of the scholars; the novel is the subject of five articles in thebook.

Cleo Protokhristova discusses this novel on the most theoretical level in terms of therelationship between time and narrative, concluding that the tension between the two resultsfrom its author’s “obsession with temporality and his ambition in this last novel to ultimatelyrationalize the human condition in chronotopic terms” (p. 302). The remaining four paperson that novel fall into two groups of two, each group dealing with a similar set of issues.The discussions by Robin Feuer Miller and Richard Peace are concerned with Dostoevskii’streatment of theodicy and divine justice. Miller, by analyzing Ivan’s retelling of theapocryphal “The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell,” Zosima’s disquisition on theBook of Job, and Grushenka’s folktale about the old woman and the onion, points out thatin each case God emerges on the one hand as open to persuasion, and on the other “somewhatless attractive” and “seeming to act according to whim” (p. 276 ff.), which contradictsDostoevskii’s basic message of God’s infinite love and goodness. Miller does not attemptto resolve such a theological predicament and ends her essay with a question mark. However,the nature of this dilemma is perhaps reflected in the words given by Dostoevsky to Zosima:“in the fact that it is a mystery.” Grushenka’s fable also figures in Peace’s contribution,where it serves as the centerpiece in the argument that for Dostoevskii judgment and justice

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involve the dialectic of giving (caritas) and accepting (humility), and that these are “qualitieswhich might ultimately have the power to save” (p. 291). Joe Andrew and Katherine JaneBriggs examine the role of women in The Brothers Karamazov and arrive at oppositeconclusions: according to Andrew, the author marginalizes women in his last novel, andthus his “final vision of reality should be accounted as being deeply patriarchal” (p. 232),while Briggs argues that Dostoevskii offers “a perceptive and sympathetic portrayal of theexperience of women in terms of their spiritual development and their striving againstmoral, personal and institutional evil” (p. 258).

It is up to the reader to judge the persuasive force of their arguments. I personallyfavor Briggs’s position on this issue. Hristo Manolakev dissects the plot of Crime andPunishment into symbolic spaces “of the body” and “of the soul,” the first exemplified byPorfirii, and the second by Sonia, while the “saint Lizaveta,” metaphorically speaking throughthe latter, allows Raskolnikov to recognize that in actuality he “killed himself” and helpshim to move toward salvation. In her treatment of photography and painting in The Idiot,Olga Soboleva emphasizes the literally iconoclastic aspect of Dostoevskii’s attitudes andhis deep skepticism toward the idea of absolute representation, since otherwise “the dialoguewith the world will have to cease” (p. 110). The same author, in co-authorship with RobinMilner-Gulland, delineates the polysemanticism of “Bobok” and the array of itsinterpretations, from parody to “anti-symposium” or “mystery story.” Diane OenningThomson moves into almost untrodden territory in her insightful reading of the Koranicvision of transcendence in The Idiot and The Demons. As in some of her other works, oneof the leading Dostoevskii scholars points toward a significant thematic undercurrent ofIslamic motif hidden within the narratives of these novels. Sarah Hudspith interpretsDostoevskii’s Underground Man along the lines of the need to be mocked so that he couldreach the higher plane of humanity; and the Ridiculous Man is looked upon by RobinAizlewood, in philosophical terms, as concerned with the phenomenal rather than thenoumenal, but at the same time seeking “to make space beyond for the metaphysical, forimmortality, for faith and for God” (p. 181). Leon Burnett tackles the paradox of suicide in“The Meek Girl,” seeing in it a deliberately construed enigma that, unlike a puzzle, a priorilacks a solution. Katalin Kroó comes up with a complex argument regarding the rapport, insemantic terms, of the epigraph and structure in The White Nights; and Audun J. Mørchviews the “utopian” chronotope of freedom as a contrast to the cluster of other “dystopian”chronotopes in the House of the Dead.

The present publication of the most recent scholarship on Dostoevskii’s works is awelcome addition to the unceasing research in the field. It is also a good model of aninterconnected scholarly discourse. The high quality of individual contributions results inan informed and organic “polylogue,” a professional round-table, which should be the aimof any such collective scholarly endeavor.

Marina Kostalevsky, Bard College

McPeak, Rick, and Donna Tussing Orwin, eds. Tolstoy on War: Narrative Art andHistorical Truth in “War and Peace.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. x +246 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-4898-0.

The 200th anniversary of 1812, the year of Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia, hasinspired seasoned Tolstoyans Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin to organize and edit


a collective retrospective response to the great novel in which that invasion is so vividlydepicted. What makes this symposium especially interesting is the diversity and internationalrange of the eleven participants: six literary scholars, mostly Tolstoy specialists; threehistorians; and two political scientists. The literary scholars are McPeak and Orwinthemselves, with Orwin contributing two fine essays, “War and Peace from the MilitaryPoint of View” and “The Awful Poetry of War: Tolstoy’s Borodino”; McPeak’s is “Tolstoyand Clausewitz: The Duel as a Microcosm of War”; Gary Saul Morson’s contribution appliesto War and Peace insights gained from his recent work on “short genres”; Elizabeth D.Samet (a professor of English at West Point) speculates on what she calls “The Disobediencesof War and Peace”; Jeff Love under the title “The Great Man in War and Peace” gives adazzling (but to me unenlightening) display of esoteric erudition; finally, Dan Ungurianuably analyzes “The Use of Historical Sources” in the novel.

The historians are Alan Forrest, who examines the novel’s treatment of “The French atWar”; Dominic Lieven, author of a splendid recent history of these same events, Russiaagainst Napoleon, accusingly subtitled The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace;and Alexander M. Martin, with an essay on “Moscow in 1812: Myths and Realities,” whichlikewise faults Tolstoy for ignoring the entire non-aristocratic population of the city. Thepolitical scientists are Andreas Herberg-Rothe, who has another vigorous go at Clausewitz(who actually fought in this war); and David A. Welch, who finds in Tolstoy an “InternationalRelations Theorist” avant la lettre. There are six Americans, two Britons, and one eachfrom Germany, Belgium, and Canada. Alas, there are no Russians.

It is impossible in this limited space to do justice to these diverse essays, but thevolume does embody justice in another sense. If the author chooses, as Tolstoy did, toventure beyond the safe, anything-goes realm of fiction, he leaves himself open to be judgedby the professionals whose territory he has invaded. War and Peace not only representsreal historical figures and real historical events but also contains lengthy digressive essayson such questions as historical causality. The professionals’ judgment of Tolstoy quahistorian is on the whole severe. His grasp of causation is “weak,” “almost juvenile.” Thuswhen he ventures outside the realm of fiction, where he was an unparalleled master, intodiscursive prose, Tolstoy becomes something like a country crank, ready to pontificate onany topic that strikes his fancy. However, when he calls upon his stupendous talent forfiction to represent how war actually feels to the men fighting it, the results are masterful. Itseems that no one has ever done that better, as even the social scientists acknowledge.

Yet in dealing with the overall development of history, Tolstoy adamantly refuses toacknowledge any power in “great men,” who in fact are only puppets pretending to governhappenings that would have happened anyway. The real causes of large historicalmovements, Tolstoy at times maintains, are the combined wills of all the participants, andin this calculus the will of Napoleon counts no more than that of the lowliest private in hisarmy. Another more elusive “cause,” seemingly incompatible with the first, to which Tolstoyattributes the outcome of major events, he labels “Providence,” presumably a supernaturaldeity ultimately in control of “history,” pursuing inscrutable ends of its own. Such notionsof course find little sympathy among historians.

What none of the essays in this book makes any attempt to explain—it was not theintent of a volume focused on 1812 and war—is the reason for the enormous, seeminglyeverlasting popularity of this book, despite its sins—its inordinate length, its partlymisleading accounts of battles and war, and its self-indulgent philosophizing. Readerstolerate these excesses, if they are bothered by them at all, because of their absorption inthe unforgettable representation of the lives of six marvelously realized fictional young

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Russian aristocrats engaged in the eternal “mating game” in the midst of the history inwhich they find themselves immersed.

Hugh McLean, University of California, Berkeley

Stanton, Rebecca Jane. Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism.Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xii + 205 pp. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN978-0-8101-2832-3.

Rebecca Stanton’s stimulating book takes as its terrain a group of writers, born in the 1890s,who have in common an identification with the city of Odessa and an approach to first-person narrative that problematizes the border between truth and fiction. As the book’stitle indicates, Isaac Babel, the most prominent of these writers, is the focal point: two ofthe four chapters (chaps. 2 and 3) are devoted to stories that belong to his ostensiblyautobiographical cycle The Story of My Dovecote. This central part of the book is precededby a chapter (“City through the Looking Glass: Literary Odessa”) that provides a history ofOdessa as a literary image and explains how this image is reshaped in Babel’s definition ofhis literary project. Having contextualized Babel, Stanton goes on in the second half ofchapter 1 to delineate the features of what she terms “Odessan Modernism”: a carnivalesque“aesthetic inversion or subversion of conventional dichotomies and hierarchies” (p. 33);the use of a trickster figure; a sense of “exilic anxiety and nostalgic longing” (p. 37); and atendency to “roguishly manipulate the boundaries of autobiographical discourse” (p. 41).

From the introduction (“Stories That Come True”) onward, Stanton pursues theargument that works of fiction—especially first-person narratives—can so fully commandthe reader’s credulity that they come to be understood as being true. The works of theOdessan modernists, she argues, are particularly striking examples of this phenomenon.The intricate play between fiction and authenticity that a given short story can set in motionis analyzed with intensity and persuasive power in chapter 2, “Isaac Babel: Stories That LieLike Truth.” Two stories—“Childhood: At Grandmother’s” and “The Story of MyDovecote”—are examined here, with particular attention to the storytellers within themand their pretensions to credibility. This close reading is the strongest part of the book; thetreatment of Great-Uncle Shoyl, builder of the dovecote and fabricator of stories, is especiallywell done.

The discussion continues in chapter 3, “Babel’s Bildungsroman and OdessanModernism,” with a study of three other stories—“First Love,” “In the Basement,” and“Awakening”—that also raise questions about “the aesthetic qualities, epistemological status,and ethical boundaries of fiction” (p. 74). Stanton analyzes the texts with sensitivity andimagination (her interpretive judgments may not all be persuasive, but they are alwaysthought-provoking). Her argument, that events seen by the protagonist through the windowin “First Love” could be understood as tinged with fantasy, is productive, as is Stanton’sanalogy to the realm beyond the windows in the paintings of Chagall. In the final part ofthe chapter, Stanton briefly looks beyond the five stories that she includes in Babel’sbildungsroman and touches on their relation to other stories that Babel wrote in the pseudo-autobiographical mode, as well as to the Odessa Tales. One wishes that she had expandedthis discussion to include even more of Babel’s oeuvre, particularly those stories that extendhis narrator’s story beyond Odessa and into the Soviet era.


The tension in many autobiographical narratives written in the Soviet period, betweenexploring the authentic inner self and evoking elements of an identity forged to suit prevailingcircumstances, is one thing at issue in Stanton’s concluding chapter, “Reinventing the Self:Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha.” Here she turns to two contemporaries who, unlikeBabel, survived Stalinism and wrote works of autobiography near the ends of their lives. Inexamining Kataev’s My Diamond Crown and Olesha’s No Day without a Line, Stantonengages the problems of making a literary career within the constraints of the Soviet situation,as well as the preoccupation of both writers with their place relative to the literary tradition.In the context of the writings of Kataev and Olesha (and of Konstantin Paustovsky, alsodiscussed here), Babel comes to be seen as both contemporary and precursor. Stantonexplores the ways in which the autobiographical writings of all these figures “borderedupon and implicated one another,” and “in inventing themselves,” she argues, “they werealso inventing a narrative of each other, of Odessa, and of Soviet literature that wouldcompete for authority with the ‘scientific’ version advanced by historians” (p. 41).

Stanton’s writing is clear and lively. It can be vivid at times, as when she describes thenarrator’s exultant and panicked recitation of Shakespeare in “In the Basement” as a caseof “declamatory berserkism” (p. 86). She brings to her topic a broad frame of referenceand a thoughtful approach to strategies for reading autobiographical prose. Isaac Babeland the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism makes a valuable contribution to theunderstanding of truth and “truth” in storytelling, of Babel’s childhood stories in particular,and of Odessa as cultural crucible and cultural construct.

Carol J. Avins, Rutgers University

Freidin, Gregory, ed. The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2009. xvi + 270 pp. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-8047-5903-8.

It took nearly six years since an international conference on Isaac Babel was held at Stanfordin 2004 for the edited volume based on that event to appear from Stanford UniversityPress. A number of articles in the volume have come out as part of other books, in Russianand English, in the intervening period. The conference itself has since been unforgettablydescribed by Elif Batuman (whose article on Babel as clerk and clerkship as metaphor inhis work is featured in the current volume) in her essay “Babel in California,” first publishedin n+1 (2005) and, later, in Batuman’s The Possessed, a memoir of her time in graduateschool at Stanford (2010). True to Babel’s famous quip in “My First Fee” that “real life isonly too eager to resemble a well-devised story,” The Enigma of Isaac Babel, coming outas it does after “Babel in California,” might tempt a nosey academic to read the scholarlyvolume for the unmasking of the identities of the Stanford conference participants disguisedin Batuman’s whimsical memoir prose. Nonetheless, the volume gathers together important,if uneven, critical perspectives on Isaac Babel that stand very well on their own.

The volume is broken down into three parts. Part One, titled “Attempting a Biography,”consists of contributions by Patricia Blake and Gregory Freidin. Blake, who died in 2010before completing her biography of Babel, was a journalist in the Soviet Union in the1960s when the tale of her “adventures and misadventures” (p. 3) of researching Babel’sbiography is set. Blake’s piece is a memoir about an attempted biography rather than a

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biography itself; it precedes Freidin’s reading of Babel’s play Maria as an autobiographictext, which, at forty pages in length with several additional pages of illustrations, is thevolume’s centerpiece. An ambitious intertextual reading, Freidin’s contribution traces someof the most enigmatic aspects of Babel’s biography, such as his purported work for theCheka in the immediate postrevolutionary period, across Babel’s life and texts. Freidin’sessay looks for concealed biographical clues in fiction and then ties fiction back to anattempted biography: a productive and far-reaching approach in its own right and one thatis certain to result in a significant contribution to the field once Freidin completes hismonograph-length biography of Isaac Babel.

Part Two places Babel in various contexts of Russian history. Oleg Budnitsky’s essayconsiders the treatment of Jews by Red Army soldiers during the Russo-Polish War of 1920that Babel wrote about in his masterpiece, Red Cavalry, and that he would have witnessedhimself as a wartime journalist. Carol J. Avins’ article is also a look at the issue of Jewishnessin Babel’s work, which retraces some of the same ground (particularly Babel’s writingsabout postrevolutionary Petrograd) that Freidin addresses in his essay; her particularemphasis is on the story “The Journey,” which, according to Avins, connects the Jewishexperience of the Revolution with that of the Romanov royal family’s experience of theupheaval. Michael S. Gorham considers the Soviet state’s early attempts at the cultivationof public language and its permutation in two works of fiction about the Civil War, Babel’sRed Cavalry and Dmitrii Furmanov’s Chapaev. Finally, Marietta Chudakova’s contributiontraces the allusions in Babel’s unique stylistic idiom to immediate prerevolutionary Russianliterature and, subsequently, the “thinning and diluting” of Babel’s own stylisticidiosyncrasies in the work of Babel’s contemporaries.

Part Three, “Babel in the World of Letters and On Stage,” is a pastiche of six articles,which could have been further subdivided into more focused and less expansive sections.Essays by Robert Alter, Alexander Zholkovsky, and Zsuzsa Hetenyi consider Babel’s workin the context of works by other writers: Flaubert’s aestheticization of ugliness, “debut”narratives by Nabokov, Chekhov, and Sholem Aleichem, and childhood narratives of HenryRoth, respectively. An essay by Carl Weber, an internationally renowned theater directorand a professor of Drama at Stanford, recounts his work with Stanford students on theproduction of Babel’s late play Maria (the subject of Freidin’s essay) that ran during theBabel conference in 2004. In addition to Batuman’s contribution that addresses therelationship between “clerk and writer, mimesis and imitatio” (p. 162) in the fiction ofBabel (as well as Proust and Cervantes), Efraim Sicher rounds out the volume with anessay on Jewish intertextuality in Babel’s work, such as comparison of Babel’s prose to thework of Odessa-born modernist Hebrew poet Bialik.

In addition to a volume edited by Harold Bloom in 1985 (Isaac Babel) and the recentNorton Critical Edition of Babel’s work (edited by Gregory Freidin, 2010), The Enigma ofIsaac Babel is sure to become an invaluable addition to the bookshelves of scholars ofIsaac Babel and, given Babel’s centrality in Russian letters, of Russian literature and culturemore broadly.

Sasha Senderovich, Rutgers University


Shatskikh, Aleksandra. Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2012. xviii + 346 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-14089-7.

This book invites high expectations. Aleksandra Shatskikh is an authority on Malevich andhas numerous Russian-language publications to her credit. Further, she uses recentlyavailable materials from the Khardzhiev-Chaga archive—combined with close scrutiny ofexhibition reviews from the artist’s lifetime—to dispel many vexing uncertainties that haveobscured the chronology of Malevich’s paintings. To establish his own priority in thehectic process of innovation that propelled avant-garde painting, Malevich deliberatelybackdated a number of his works. Thus, Shatskikh describes Malevich’s disingenuousattempt to associate his iconic Suprematist work Black Square with his own 1913 set designsfor the opera Victory Over the Sun. In addition, Shatskikh demonstrates that the BlackSquare was not the artist’s first Suprematist painting but was preceded by other, morecomplex compositions. Indeed, the title of the volume under review savors of irony sincethe author ousts Malevich’s Black Square from its presumed position as the progenitor ofSuprematism. In Shatskikh’s account, a sketch made in early summer 1915, Suprematism:Large Black Trapezoid and Red Square, has a stronger claim to be the first Suprematistcomposition.

Although the book is as much a chronicle as a cohesive narrative, one important themeruns throughout: Malevich’s desire to extend the Suprematist idea into a comprehensivearray of art forms, including music and the decorative arts. Particularly interesting are thelengthy excurses on two individuals involved with Malevich in these efforts: NataliaDavydova, founder of the Verbovka center for handicraft production, and Nikolai Roslavets,Malevich’s childhood friend, who became a modernist composer with a successful careerbetween 1912 and 1932. Malevich actively propagandized among his composer friendsfor a Suprematist music that would abandon the structural conventions of classical—andavant-garde—music in favor of pure sound. Alas, neither Roslavets nor Malevich’s friendMikhail Matiushin fulfilled these hopes. Roslavets, in particular, disappointed Malevichby persistently producing art songs, “nice little poems” that mirrored the movements of anindividual psyche rather than evoking the measureless space of the cosmos.

Shatskikh’s discussion of Davydova reveals the extent to which Suprematism’s briefhistory was entwined with the decorative arts. One month prior to the dramatic unveilingof Suprematism at the 0.10 Exhibition in December 1915, Suprematist drawings appearedalong with a selection of products from the Verbovka workshop: Shatskikh cites thisexhibition as confirmation that Malevich’s “leap” into pure abstraction preceded that ofother claimants. She gives priority to Malevich in other ways as well, suggesting that the“Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde (Ol'ga Rozanova, Aleksandra Exter, Liubov' Popova,and Nadezhda Udal'tsova) all required the experience of working in decorative arts to leadthem into abstraction, while Malevich, pioneer of non-objectivity, was able to cross thefigurative/non-figurative boundary without such prompting.

To avoid bibliographic confusion, it should be stated that the volume under review isnot an English-language version of Chernyi kvadrat (2001), a book edited by AleksandraShatskikh. It is an English-language reworking of Shatskikh’s Kazimir Malevich iObshchestvo Supremus (2009). A reader may wish to have the Russian publication onhand when tackling the current edition since it has considerably fewer illustrations than theoriginal. This is a significant source of irritation whenever the reader finds strikingimportance attributed to a little-known drawing that is not reproduced.

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The most problematic aspect of Black Square is its translation by Marion Schwartz.Although the English text is accurate enough, Schwartz’s word-for-word translation isconsistently clumsy; and Shatskikh’s scholarly style, with numerous appositions andoccasional ex cathedra pronouncements, does not translate smoothly into English. Thetranslator clearly wasted no time evaluating the readability of her end product. Phrasessuch as “houses with their trapezoidal roofs piled in rhythmic groups on a backdrop ofcubized icon ledges” (p. 159) send one back to the Russian text for clarification. Translating“na fone kubizirovanno-ikonnykh leshchadok” as “against a background of cubified shapesresembling the flattened tops of small hills that appear in icon painting” would have beenmore comprehensible, though scarcely more graceful.

Black Square will be essential reading for those already well acquainted with Malevich’scareer. Unfortunately, it cannot be recommended for undergraduate students or for theliterate general public. Unless a reader is already familiar with the subject, the book’swelter of detail is likely to be confusing rather than enlightening. In sum, Black Square isa valuable contribution to Malevich scholarship; one can only wish that pains had beentaken to render it more user-friendly.

Janet Kennedy, Indiana University

Schulte, Jörg, Olga Tabachnikova, and Peter Wagstaff, eds. The Russian Jewish Diasporaand European Culture, 1917–1937. Institute of Jewish Studies/Studies in Judaica.Leiden: Brill, 2012. xiv + 443 pp. $182.00. ISBN 978-90-04-22714-9.

This book is a collection of essays by leading scholars of modern Russian Judaica in Europe,although one American is represented. The names of scholars gives an impression of theseriousness of the project: Glenda Abramson, François Guesnet, Harriet Murav, LeonidKatsis, Viktor Kel'ner, Susanne Marten-Finnis, Olaf Terpitz, Boris Czerny, Alexander Ivanov,Efim Melamed, and Vladimir Khazan. The editors also have essays in the book.

Here one finds three main categories of articles, Hebrew literature, art and music, andhistoriography/politics. The uniting theme concerns Jews from Russia in the post-1917emigration in Western Europe. Most of essays focus on Paris and Berlin, but a few authorstreat relations with the Yishuv in Palestine. Overall, it is possible to speak of a renaissanceof Russian-Jewish creativity in the interwar years by leading artists in multiple genres andwriters in many languages. The authors focus on such figures as Chagall, El Lissitzky, BerRyback, Dovid Bergelson, David Vogel, Hayim Nachman Bialik, Elisheva, Leah Goldberg,Shimon Dubnov, Lev Shestov, and Vladimir Jabotinsky, and also treat such institutions asthe ORT, the Ostjüdisches Archiv, the journal Zhar Ptitsa, and the Schwartzbard Affair.

It would be impossible to describe every contribution in a review as short as this one,so I will concentrate on those few that caught my interest. I was impressed by the sectionon Hebrew literature and especially Glenda Abramson’s article “Vogel and the City,” inwhich she describes the way David Vogel’s urban depictions emerge from his experiencesof poverty and homelessness. She quotes Vogel, who describes the bohemian down-and-out atmosphere where much of this creativity was taking place: “We have again been inParis for about a month. We have had many moves and innumerable tribulations in the pasttwo years. My return to Berlin was useless—no flour and no Torah. We escaped fromthere while we still could and travelled around Poland for two months. I was hoping to findsome concrete advantage in all this, but even there I didn’t succeed and left empty-handed.


Now Paris. ... In the difficulty of these times it seems that there is no place in the world forpeople like us” (p. 43).

A wonderful article by Zoya Kopelman concerns borrowings from Russian in Hebrewliterature titled “Marginalia of the Hebrew Renaissance: The Enrichment of Literary Hebrewthrough Calques of Russian Phrases in the Works of Elisheva and Leah Goldberg.”Examining the way famous phrases from Russian poetry (Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, andthe like) found their way into Hebrew poetry through translation, she shows how the Russianlanguage composed a substratum of the poetic language, and therefore has become part ofmodern Hebrew without revealing its origins.

I also found Jörg Schulte’s study of Nahum Slouschz exciting because so little hasbeen written about this scholar who wrote one of the pioneering books on modern Hebrewliterature. Friends with Ben-Yehuda, Tchernichowsky, and Bialik, Slouschz was part of theOdessa crowd that insisted on a Hebraic revolution in the diaspora. His task was to lambastthe criticism that Hebrew was a dead language and draw attention to growing number oftalented writers and their production.

Finally, one might pay attention to the continuing work of Leonid Katsis on the unknownoeuvre of the early Vladimir Jabotinsky through the decoding of pseudonyms andcontextualization. One result of this research is the image of a writer more engaged withthe political events of his time and more professional in his activity as a journalist.Apparently, Jabotinsky often wrote on minor events in Russia’s southwest, and on cultureand politics for a local reader.

One could point out minor flaws, but I will restrain myself to perhaps the largest one,which is the exclusive emphasis on Germany and France to the exclusion of Eastern Europe(Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans) and England. The subject matter of course wasdefined not by the editors but by the contributors.

The volume as a whole is an embarrassment of riches. For researchers of EasternEuropean Jewish history and culture this book can serve as a resource thanks to thebibliographies at the end of each article. Because of the volume’s high price, it isunlikely any single individual would buy it, but I suggest that readers ask their libraries topurchase it.

Brian Horowitz, Tulane University

Russian Film Posters (1900–1930). Introduction by Maria-Christina Boerner. London:Vivays Publishing, 2012. 200 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-908126-15-3.

Except for the introduction, expanded catalogue description, and artists’ biographies, thisbook is an exact reprint of Nina Babarina, The Silent Film Poster: Russia 1900–1930(Moscow, 2001). The title of the 2012 collection is misleading because the actualchronological parameters of the reproductions are different: the earliest poster dates from1908 and the latest from 1935, when avant-garde style had been displaced by SocialistRealism. Of the 161 posters included in the book, approximately 70 percent date from the1920s, with an expectedly heavy dose of the Stenberg brothers’ work; the remaining posterspertain to the silent era through 1917, and just a few realist works from the early 1930sclose the collection. Dr. Maria-Christina Boerner has provided a short but informativeintroduction for the general reader which outlines similarities to lubok in the earliest filmposters, then moves on to the influence of European book art, illustrated magazines, and

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Art Nouveau on posters for early silent films, such as Bezdna, and devotes most of theessay to the ways in which the Soviet avant-garde took up the film poster as an appliedmedium for the expression of new ideas. Of central importance was the Stenberg brothers’integration of cinematic and constructivist effects (montage, dynamism, fades, lightingeffects, graphic-photo combinations, geometric shapes) into their film posters. RussianFilm Posters (1900–1930) is a nice coffee table book for film lovers, but Slavists shouldnot expect any revelations. Those interested in 1920s works are better served by SusanPack’s Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde (1995).

Rimgaila Salys, University of Colorado, Boulder

Herrala, Meri. The Struggle for Control of Soviet Music from 1932 to 1948: SocialistRealism vs. Western Formalism. Lewiston: Mellen Press, 2012. $179.95. 680 pp.ISBN 978-0-7734-2611-5.

In her descriptive and lengthy tome, Finnish historian Meri Herrala uses Soviet opera as alens to examine the nuanced relationships between the Union of Soviet Composers, operatheaters, Muzfond, and other Soviet musical-cultural institutions between 1932 and 1948,focusing on the significant and oft-discussed scandals of 1936 and 1948. By analyzing theroles of individuals within these institutions, who often operated according to their ownpredilections and personal politics, Herrala illuminates the ways in which they respondedto the demand for clear definitions of socialist realism and formalism in Soviet music. Heranalysis thus reveals how centralized control of Soviet music never came to fruition.

Herrala’s sources reveal her extensive research in Russian archives and engagementwith current historical scholarship. She builds upon the research of similar histories writtenby Leonid Maximenkov and Kiril Tomoff by examining several state agencies; yet herapproach exposes interconnectedness between those multiple agencies instead of a top-down push, illuminating a network of musical politics. Herrala shows this complexity byanalyzing how leaders of major agencies mediated between each other, high-ranking partyofficials, composers, and musicologists. Such administrators, who were also composersand musicologists, constantly moved in and out these positions for various reasons, addingto the instability and inconsistency that marks the cultural politics of this time. Herrala’sanalysis effectively, though sometimes inefficiently, teases out these inconsistencies to reveala complex network of interaction between entities and individuals to create the ideal Sovietopera; a goal that, as she argues, was never successfully achieved.

Herrala especially excels in providing a fascinating and grounded discussion of themusicologist Boris Asafyev and his role in the 1948 resolution that deeply affected severalcomposers including Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, and Nikolay Myaskovsky.In her analysis of hand-written drafts and other documents, Herrala challenges long-heldcriticisms of Asafyev’s engagement in the discrediting of these composers by demonstratingthe extent to which Asafyev was involved in the authorship of the infamous speech againstmusical formalism. In so doing, she offers a sensitive and detailed account of his participationin the collectively authored speech, revealing a grief-stricken figure that, as she implies,was haunted by a series of events that appeared to spiral out of his control. AlthoughAsafyev and the 1948 resolution were indirectly part of her discussion about opera andcultural politics, her self-proclaimed focus for the book, this chapter is an example of her


attempt to create a nuanced reading of this particular event and the difficulty of the artisticindividual’s negotiation with the state in its multiple manifestations.

Herrala’s book is a worthwhile contribution to English-language scholarship. Althoughwritten in a difficult style, marred with errors in organization and language, and lackingreference to much musicological literature in the West, the content and substantial researchstill makes this book an interesting and valid read for scholars engaged with Soviet culturalpolitics.

Joan Titus, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Leving, Yuri, ed. Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov’s Puzzles, Codes, “Signs andSymbols.” New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2012. xx + 410 pp. $34.95.ISBN 987-1-44114-263-4.

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” is one of the most moving and evocative storiesthe author ever wrote. Just a few pages long, the story concentrates on the anxiety andfrustration felt by an elderly émigré couple whose son has tried to commit suicide in amental institution. At night, as the couple considers what to do about the son, the phonerings. It is a wrong number. The phone rings again: the same wrong number. The womanexplains the dialer’s mistake, and, as the couple sits down to tea, the phone rings onceagain. Here the story ends. Much ink has been spilled over the question of what the thirdphone call means, and critics have combed through the plethora of details provided in thestory searching for clues to decoding its ultimate message.

In this new volume, Yuri Leving reprints the original story, and adds to it an extremelylarge and diverse body of critical material. Over thirty scholars are represented here, somewith articles published years ago, and others with pieces written especially for this edition.The volume begins with a roundtable discussion involving a psychiatrist, a literary scholar,a mathematician, a theater scholar, and a screenwriter. It continues with the correspondencebetween Nabokov and Katherine White, his editor at The New Yorker, where the story firstappeared in 1948. Following this is an essay by J. Morris discussing the revisions Nabokovmade for the magazine. Several essays comment on specific objects featured in the story:trees and birds, photographs, cards, and the jelly jars that occupy a central position in thestory (they are mentioned in the story three times, and there are three essays devoted tothem in this collection). Several articles deal with the significance of certain symbols andnumbers in the story, particularly the numbers zero, two, and three.

There are, of course, many essays devoted to the central question of how to interpretthe story and its ending. Several of these dwell on the meaning of the third call, and theyarrive at conflicting interpretations. Some, like John Hagopian and Gennady Barabtarlo,assert that the phone call signals the fruition of the parents’ deepest fear—that the son hassucceeded in killing himself. Others, such as William Carroll and David Richter, argue thatto attribute such a meaning to the call indicates that the reader has succumbed to the youth’sown illness of “referential madness” and is thus implicated in the act of killing the boy inone’s imagination. A third group, including Leona Toker, maintains that Nabokov intendedto leave the story (and the boy’s fate) open-ended. There are also some striking minorityopinions. Alexander Dolinin evaluates the signs planted in the text and determines that theboy has killed himself, but has arranged the call from the beyond to send a message ofassurance to those who can decode it. Alexander Drescher declares that the boy escaped

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the mental hospital and is calling the parents from a nearby gas station. Other essaysconcentrate on different parts of the story and are concerned not so much with the phonecall as with the story of the parents and the family itself, seeing in the son’s malady “amorbidly condensed expression of the Jewish experience in Europe at the time of theHolocaust” (Toker, 211; see also the essays by Leving and Drescher). The majority ofthese essays are of high quality, and the implicit dialogue conducted throughout the collectionmakes for fascinating reading. Nabokov’s story is well served by such a project.

Julian W. Connolly, University of Virginia

HISTORY

Brisbane, Mark, Nikolaj Makarov, and Evgenij Nosov, eds. The Archaeology of MedievalNovgorod in Context: Studies in Centre/Periphery Relations. Oxford: Oxbow Books,2012. xviii + 500 pp. $120.00. ISBN 978-1-8421-7278-0.

This work is the third a series of four planned volumes dedicated to the archeology ofmedieval Novgorod and its lands. As are the first two tomes, the one under review is apriceless addition to the study not only of medieval Russia but also of European archeologyof the Middle Ages as a whole. The present book is a collection of twenty-four articles,written by major Russian, Swedish, German, Irish, British, and American specialists intheir field, which are concerned with a broad set of issues related to Novgorod and itshinterlands. While some of the subjects addressed in this collection already have beentreated in Russian-language literature, this volume is the sole one in which these topicshave been examined in English. A CD-Rom with data and figures is included with thevolume.

Taken as a whole, the vast majority of the subjects addressed in the volume relate inone way or another to the complex economy of Novgorod and its lands, spanning some sixhundred years (ninth to fifteenth centuries). The topics include the study of the natural andmanmade environment of Novgorod and its rural sites through palynological, paleobotanical,climatological, entomological, osteological, topographical, geological, and pedologicalinvestigations; settlement patterns; the manufacture of pottery; extraction, production, andworking of iron; copper smelting and production of copper jewelry and bronze objects;woodworking and types of wood used; textile production; and, the typology of glass beadsfrom certain rural sites. Other topics addressed include the fur trade in the far north ofNovgorod and what the birch-bark texts reveal about crafts in the city. Overall, the essaysshed a great deal of light on many subjects of Novgorodian agriculture, animal husbandry,hunting, gathering, fishing, craft production, and trade—topics that are generally overlookedin traditional written sources. For this reason, this collection of essays is invaluable for thestudy of the economy of Novgorod and its lands.

One of the most interesting conclusions of the volume concerns the rural Novgorodiansettlements. Contrary to common perception in historiography, the authors of the introductionobserve and stress that rural Novgorodian settlements in the far north were economicallyand socially vibrant sites during the tenth through the first half of the thirteenth centuries:they possessed developed craft production, trade connections with the outside, and a highlevel of material culture (including high-status and imported objects), similar to that found


in urban centers (p. 9). The authors do not address in much detail what occurred with theserural sites in the second half of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, although it isstated that they declined during this period (p. 56). This reader is thus left wondering whyand how these settlements withered away during the Mongol era of Russian history. Thisimportant issue needs to be better addressed.

On a technical level, the one detraction to the volume, as to the series as a whole, is thepuzzling insistence of the editors to translate the Russian-language literature into English.To whose benefit this is done is not at all clear: non-Russian readers cannot benefit muchfrom having the titles translated, while Russian readers will have to translate the worksback into Russian with the hope of finding the proper, exact translations, so as to locatethem. Furthermore, due to the translation, it is not at all clear what articles and books wereactually written in English or Russian. Specifically, a reader may look to find the workNovgorod’s Trade in the 14th–15th Centuries by A. L. Khoroshkevich, but will be disappointedto learn that the actual title is Torgovlia Velikogo Novgoroda v XIV–XV vekakh (sic!—not14th–15th), written in Russian. What is more, Khoroshkevich is found in the bibliographynot only under her proper name, but also as Choroshkevich, making things all the moreconfusing. With this observation made, it must be stressed that the volume’s contents intheir totality are unquestionably of the highest merit and deserving of great praise. Thiscollection of essays, found in a single volume and printed in English, is a vital tool forarchaeologists, historians, and other specialists interested in premodern Russia and medievalEurope in general, and particularly for those who are interested in the economy.

Roman K. Kovalev, The College of New Jersey

Svak, Diula, ed. Rol' gosudarstva v istoricheskom razvitii Rossii: Materialymezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii budapeshtskogo Tsentra Rusistiki ot 17–18maia 2010 g. Knigi po rusistike 27. Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2012. 345 pp.ISBN 978-963-7730-63-4.

Svak, Diula, and Iu. O. Tiumentsev, eds. Rusistika Ruslana Skrynnikova. Knigi po rusistike30. Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2011. 285 pp. ISBN 978-963-7730-65-8.

The books under review were edited by Gyula Szvák, a historian of Budapest University inHungary, specialist in Russian premodern history, and author of a monograph on Ivan IVand Peter I (IV. Iván és I. Péter utóélete [2001]). These two books appear in the sameseries, “Books on Russistics,” and both volumes bring together articles by scholars fromEast and West in Russian and English (in one case Polish). The two volumes from thisseries give the non-Hungarian-reading scholar an insight into Hungarian scholarship onEastern Europe in Russian. This is their main appeal in the scholarly discourse.

Despite appearing in the same series, the two books could not be more different. Rol'gosudarstva is a conference volume on the question of “the role of the state in Russia’shistorical development.” Given the rather broad thematic of statehood and the rather broadperiod that reaches from early Kievan Rus' via the Petrine Period to the present, the varyingscholarly standards of the essays are explained. I will focus on the Hungarian scholars’articles, since these are otherwise not readily available and give the Western historian avaluable insight into their work and research field.

Ágnes Kriza’s article on the curious topic of flying icons of the Mother of God(pp. 100–120) studies the perception of icon legends. In Byzantium as well as in Muscovite

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Rus', icons of the Virgin Mary took their task as an emblematic shield of a town seriouslyby levitating and flying through the streets. Szergej Filippov works on the idea ofcaesaropapism in patriarch Nikon’s Refutation (pp. 164–78). Beáta Varga looks at theforeign policy of Bogdan Khmel'nitski in the early time of state building of the Ukraine(pp. 179–99). Györgyi Bebesi discusses Alexander I’s plans for a first Russian constitution(pp. 283–91). The Chinese historian Huan Lifu looks for the reasons behind nonmobilityin the Soviet Union and compares them to the economic, political, and social situation inPutin’s Russia.

The volume on the development of statehood leaves the reader with much informationand as many questions that hopefully will lead to further scholarship. Broadly speaking,historians of different epochs and schools have frequently found the Russian state in needof modernization. However, there is no common denomitator for preceding periods aboutthe definition of what the Russian state actually was and how it may be described.

Rusistika Ruslana Skrynnikova is dedicated to the scholarship of the St. Petersburghistorian Ruslan Grigor'evich Skrynnikov. It is the fifth book of this kind since 1993 (p. 7),all of them edited by and containing articles by Skrynnikov’s pupils or close scholarlyfriends. The current volume is edited by Gyula Szvák and the Volgograd historian Igor' O.Tiumentsev. The scholarly standard of this volume may be judged by Skrynnikov’s ownstandards, which Szvák’s biographical sketch identifies as a thorough reading of the sourcesand the lack of fear to destroy old myths (p.15).

In this volume we find a fine collection of articles supported by thorough source studies.In the first part, Skrynnikov’s pupils publish material on his scholarly career. The last partis dedicated to the publication of new sources. Stanislav V. Mirskii publishes a letter of thePolish officer Jan Wislouch about events of the Time of Troubles before 1605 in the Polishoriginal and a Russian translation (pp. 254–65). Igor' Tiumentsev and Natal'ja Rybalkopublish the archive of Jan Sapieha from 1608 to 1611. The eight published sources completeSapieha’s well-known diary of the Time of Troubles (pp. 266–83).

The middle section consists of scholarly articles by historians from both the East andWest, all based on analysis of various primary sources. Janet Martin shows a case ofinheritance of service estates in a family from Novgorod and Livonia (pp. 68–75). AnnKleimola works on the influence of the prince’s widow and mother Efrosinia Starickaia onpolitics in the time of Ivan the Terrible. She comes to the conclusion that, unlike herdepiction in scholarship, Efrosinia was free of the usual demands from a woman by virtueof the oath that her son Vladimir Starickii swore, in which he refused to listen to his mother’sadvice (pp. 76–88). Charles Halperin gives an account of invectives in sixteenth-centuryepistles and Ivan IV’s canine invectives in particular, with a special focus on Ivan’s privateattitude to dogs (pp. 89–108).

Vasilii I. Ul'ianovskii gives a superb analysis of the biblical sources and meaning ofreferences to poverty and wealth in the Izlozhenie of the Kievan metropolitan Spiridon(pp. 118–40). Igor' Tiumentsev analyzes the “Epistle of a nobleman to a nobleman” andconcludes that it is not only a source of the uprising of I. I. Bolotnikov but a source on themovement of the Territorial Armies in the Time of Troubles (pp. 159–63). Andrej P. Pavlovwrites about the service and promotion history of the petty noble family Streshnev, whichcame into wealth and service in Moscow after Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich married EvdokiiaLuk'janovna Streshneva in 1626 (pp. 203–19). Maureen Perrie gives an interpretation ofthe biblical provenience of the eagles in the Muscovite coat of arms in the middle of theseventeenth century. Russian and Ukrainian books’ depictions of the two-headed eaglewere used and perceived in different ways by Orthodox and Old Believers (pp. 231–39).


Pavel V. Sedov writes of the perception of the term law (zakon) in the second half of theseventeenth century. He reviews the protocols of lawsuits and concludes that peopleappreciated the outcome of a lawsuit as just when the judge decided in their favor, butpeople did not believe that written law would work for their purposes (pp. 240–53).

The volume dedicated to the Russistics of Ruslan Skrynnikov gives many new insightson Muscovite Rus' through the analysis of sources from the fifteenth to the seventeenthcenturies. It is proof of the great international impact that St. Petersburg historian had onthe research in the field of medieval Russia.

Cornelia Soldat, Universität zu Köln

Norris, Stephen M., and Willard Sunderland, eds. Russia’s People of Empire: Life Storiesfrom Eurasia, 1500 to Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. xviii +349 pp. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-253-00183-2.

The editors of this collection of biographies had an ambitious goal: “to use each individualpresented herein to open up a view on the long-running effects of what it meant to live in adensely multicultural neighborhood” (p. 8). With the scale of the Russian Empire and itstremendous ethnolinguistic diversity, this is no small task. With thirty-one biographiesspanning from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, this collection comes quite close toits objective. Though the biographies preponderantly cover men of empire (there are onlysix women), the regional and chronological coverage is rather impressive on the whole,beginning with the famous Cossack Ermak and concluding with contemporary politicianVladislav Surkov.

Though the editors aspire toward a common theme in the introduction, the broad tapestryof the individual experiences defies simplification. The volume provides approachable(and short) narratives to march in progression with an undergraduate survey of Russia’stransformation from imperial system to Soviet empire. Well-known figures such as Catherinethe Great and Stalin sit alongside men and women with notable careers but whose liveswere otherwise unnoticed from the historical record. The contrast will open a worthwhilediscussion about whose biography has value to history. In addition, the style of thebiographies changes from author to author, from straightforward narratives to exploratoryessays on the problem of biographical writing and some personal reactions to uncoveringthe past. The collection opens a discussion of a seemingly simple yet perplexing question:who was “Russian,” and what did it mean to be a subject of the empire? At the same time,the underlying issue is the ongoing methodological challenge: how do we relate life stories?In this way, it is possible to envision this book as useful to a Russian survey as much as ageneral historiography course.

Within the volume, there is a biography for everyone. I was particularly struck byMarianne Kemp’s life of Jahon Obidova (1900–67), a Tajik- and Uzbek-speaking woman,born in the region northeast of Tashkent, who was married at the age of 13, escaped fromher husband and his family, and joined the Communists during the revolution in CentralAsia. Benefitting under the new system that provided educational opportunities, she hadan amazing party career at a high level—becoming a member of the Uzbek Central ExecutiveCommittee, a term as mayor of Tashkent, a long span as a deputy director of Uzbekstan’strade delegation, before ending up as the director of Tashkent’s tobacco factory. It isunquestionably a remarkable life.

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Obidova also reflects one of the challenges of the volume. For any individual’s life tobe recovered, that person must leave enough of a historical imprint for later discovery, andit is unlikely the average and unexceptional will do so. All of the thirty-one individualsmade some unusual and noteworthy contribution to the history of the empire. This likelyhas produced the gender imbalance, as men generated more of the historical record thanwomen in Russia’s past. Barbara Alpern Engel’s biography of Ekaterina Sabashnikova-Baranovskaia (1859–?) is as close to an ordinary person as we see, but Baranovskaia existsin the archive as a plaintiff suing her husband to reclaim her sizeable family fortune (a casewhich would involve the personal intervention of Pobedonostsev), which hardly constitutesa “typical” history. On closer inspection, even the ordinary lives are extraordinary, whichcould inspire an engaging discussion on the challenge of reclaiming lives from historicalobscurity.

This book will engage students with its lively narratives of figures from the past, serveteachers with varied examples reflecting the diversity of the empire, and challenge researchersto think about the difficulties of restoring the individual to broad narratives. The editorsand the contributors are to be complimented for their accomplishment.

Matthew P. Romaniello, University of Hawai'i at Mââââânoa

Martin, Russell E. A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in EarlyModern Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2012. xiv + 380 pp. $48.00. ISBN978-0-87580-448-4.

Russell Martin has written an excellent book on a topic, royal marriage in early modernRussia, that has not received much attention of late from historians. Martin briefly discussesbride-shows in various world cultures at various times. Separate chapters then discuss theorigins of the Muscovite-bride show and the quite practical reasons that led to its adoption,the process for picking brides for members of the royal family, the intimate connectionbetween the conduct of bride-shows and court politics, the vexed question of the manywives of Ivan IV, the fascinating and intricate stories of Romanov bride-shows up until tothe 1680s, and, finally, a discussion of the disappearance of the bride-show, together withthe changes in court politics that caused that disappearance. An epilogue traces bride-shows in later periods of Russian culture, particularly in nineteenth-century painting, music,and literature. Appendices provide new editions of important texts and crucial genealogies.The excellent index will allow readers to find easily the many characters that appear inMartin’s narrative.

Martin’s book is a remarkable contribution to the flourishing literature on early modernRussia. It is based on a huge quantity of archival work. Indeed, the author had alreadypublished a lengthy survey of archival evidence on his subject. His command of thesecondary literature is equally impressive. Best of all, he transforms his large volume ofheterogeneous evidence into a highly readable account (a page-turner in the later chapters)that integrates his findings with the scholarship of his colleagues in Russia and the West.He thus transforms the pioneering prerevolutionary scholar Ivan Zabelin’s somewhatromantic picture of bride-shows as demonstrations of unbridled royal power by into asociopolitical examination. He looks at the institution in the context of a close investigationof clan rivalries at court at the time of each bride. This task demands an extensive knowledge


of the genealogies of court clans as well as a careful reading of the often slender evidencewe have of court politics, particularly in the sixteenth century.

What this book does, then, is bring a mass of hitherto largely neglected but highlyrelevant evidence to bear on the twin questions of the nature of royal power and therelationship between the Muscovite ruler and his most powerful subjects that havepreoccupied historians for centuries. His rejection of the interpretation of the bride-showas evidence of royal despotism can hardly be more emphatic: “The bride-show custom, asperformed in Muscovy for nearly two centuries, was simply incompatible with an autocraticor despotic monarchy” (p. 18). He reaches this conclusion by showing both how the bride-show process allowed great court aristocrats to control the candidates that the ruler saw,and, for each particular bride-show, how these mighty courtiers manipulated the process toadvance the political interests of their own clans and allies. This would appear to be a clearexample of “the façade of autocracy,” as the author himself observes (pp. 244–45): whatappears on the surface to be a self-explanatory demonstration of unlimited royal power infact turns out to have the fingerprints of boyar clans all over it, both in the design of theprocess, and in each separate case.

There are minor things to criticize. One small point is that the translation of d'iak as“scribe” vastly understates the power of that office. More important, I would love to haveread more of the highly complex wedding rituals that Martin obviously knows well, andhow these rituals functioned within the court culture. But these are minor points, andweddings are not bride-shows. Martin’s book is a major contribution to our knowledge ofearly modern Russia and to the fraught topic of autocracy in Russian history.

Daniel Rowland, University of Kentucky

Avrutin, Eugene M., and Harriet Murav, eds. Jews in the East European Borderlands:Essays in Honor of John D. Klier. Borderlines: Russian and East European JewishStudies. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. ii + 285 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-936235-59-9.

John Doyle Klier’s untimely passing at the age of 62 in 2007 was a blow to all those whoworked within the field of Russian Jewish history. John’s erudition, generosity, and goodcheer inspired countless young scholars; his scholarship leaves a legacy that will continueto influence for many years to come. Jews in the East European Borderlands: Essays inHonor of John D. Klier brings together some of those scholars whose work was impactedby John’s career. The volume emerged out of a 2009 conference held in John’s memory atUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where John completed his doctorate andcaptained the fencing team.

The volume comprises twelve scholarly essays, as well as an introduction and abibliography of John Klier’s work. The introduction, by the volume’s editors, HarrietMurav and Eugene Avrutin, begins with a sensitive portrait of John’s life, taking the readerthrough the challenges that John faced as a Catholic studying Russian Jews in the 1970sand 1980s. The editors also make a convincing argument for the importance of John’smajor works in opening what has now become a vibrant field of study. The editors shouldalso be commended for compiling the bibliography of John’s works, a resource that will beof benefit to future scholars.

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The essays represent some of the range of scholarship that has emerged in RussianJewish history. Several of the articles included in the volume are drawn from importantbooks that have recently been published: Gabriella Safran’s article on S. An-sky is derivedfrom her biography of the writer, Sam Johnson’s piece on the pogrom in the Anglo-Americanimagination comes out of her book on British attitudes toward Eastern European Jews,Oleg Budnitskii’s article on anti-Semitism in late imperial Russia emerges from his bookon Jews and the Russian Civil War, David Shneer’s piece on Soviet Jewish photographycomes out of his book on the same topic, and Marat Grinberg’s piece on Boris Slutsky alsoemerges from his critical study of the poet. These pieces will hopefully direct readerstoward the more complete books from which they are derived.

Other articles included in the volume are parts of larger projects in development:ChaeRan Freeze’s study of a shelter for converted Jewish children reveals much about theways in which voluntary associations adopted the language of the state to remake Jews intoproductive citizens. Gennady Estraikh shows how Yiddish became integrated into what hecalls, perhaps overly generously, “Russia’s Jewish civil society.” Olga Litvak presents aconvincing argument that Sholem Aleichem (“Sholem-aleichem” in her rendering) developedhis writing against the background of Russian realism. Alice Nakhimovsky and RobertaNewman look at Russian and Yiddish writing manuals and argue that their differencesreflect the varying lifestyles of their intended readers. Robert Weinberg examines visualdepictions of Jews in the Black Hundreds’ press, showing how they drew upon conventionalanti-Semitic tropes made popular throughout pan-European anti-Semitic publications. ShaulStampfer’s revisionist speculations that there was no mass Ashkenazic migration to EasternEurope from German lands is intriguing. Joshua Karlip demonstrates that the historianSimon Dubnow adopted a variation of the lachrymose narrative of Jewish history in orderto argue for political emancipation and Jewish cultural renewal.

The volume as a whole shares some of the shortcomings of many conference volumes—the papers presents a haphazard potpourri of scholarship, many have been previouslypublished in more complete forms, and others present only a suggestive taste of scholarshipto come. But the book holds it worth as a tribute to John Klier and as a testament to thevariety and depth of scholarship he inspired.

Jeffrey Veidlinger, Indiana University

Adler, Eliyana R. In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 2001. xviii + 196 pp. $44.95. ISBN 978-0-8143-3492-8.

The subject of this meticulously researched, convincingly argued, and lucidly written bookhas until recently failed to attract scholarly attention, mainly for two reasons: first, Jewishhistorians tended to share the traditionally heavy bias in favor of male religious education,and, second, the scarce available sources offered little information about the education ofthe other half of the Jewish people. Eliyana Adler’s pioneering study tells the forgottenstory of private schools for Jewish girls in the Russian Empire from their beginnings in1831 to the 1880s, when Jewish education in Russia underwent a radical transformation.Most of Adler’s sources come from the various central and provincial archival collectionsin the former Soviet Union which have become available to foreign scholars only after


1991. This diverse body of materials is woven into a sophisticated narrative which opensa new page in the historiography of the nineteenth-century Russian Jewry.

Starting in the 1830s in Vilna and Odessa as schools for the new urban bourgeoisie,private educational establishments for girls gradually became a popular and affordableoption for many middle- and lower-middle-class families. The majority of over one hundredprivate schools in the Pale of Jewish Settlement offered instruction in Russian, Yiddish,German, and French, as well as in arithmetic, basics of Judaism, and “women’s crafts.”Some of their graduates continued their education in Russian secondary schools, otherswent straight into apprenticeship or domestic service, and eventually nearly all of them gotmarried and had children. The marginal position of girls in the Jewish education systemhad its advantages: “while Jewish boys remained in unchanging hadarim [traditional religiouselementary schools], Jewish girls took part in a dynamic educational experiment” (p. 94).As a result, Jewish women often played a more active role than men in the process ofmodernization and acculturation, passing their knowledge and worldview on to their children.A good illustration of this thesis can be Osip Mandelstam’s mother, who was educated in aRussian school in Vilna and instilled her love of Russian literature and admiration for theRussian intelligentsia into her son’s tender mind and soul, in contrast to the terrifying imageof “Judaic chaos” associated with the father.

In the first part of her book, Adler carefully reconstructs the curriculum, sources ofsupport and financing, and the operation of the schools. The second part of the book placesthese schools into broader cultural and social contexts of Russia’s and its Jews’ transitionfrom the rigid autocratic rule of Nicholas I to the reforms of Alexander II. Adler’s workbelongs to the recent trend in East European Jewish historiography which seeks to expandthe methodological arsenal and extend the thematic horizons of Jewish social history. Byfirmly embedding the story of girls’ education in the social, economic, religious, and culturalframeworks of Russian Jewish life, Adler convincingly demonstrates its centrality in theformation of a new modern Russian-Jewish identity. Yet this book should be of interest notonly to Jewish historians. It raises intriguing questions related to Russian imperial policy,such as the role of Jews, and particularly, of Jewish education, in the process of Russificationin the western imperial borderlands. Was it merely an accident that the first Jewish schoolfor girls was opened in Vilna in the year of the first Polish uprising? Adler mentions in afootnote that the Polish language was taught only in a few schools and was taken out ofcurriculum after the second Polish uprising of 1863–64. Does it indicate that Jewisheducators acted as agents of Russification, which in this particular case had an additionaland significant gender dimension? The fascinating romance between Jewish women andRussian culture in the nineteenth century, and their role in promoting Russian culture, isonly one of many subjects of future research, for which Adler’s book will be an indispensablepoint of departure.

Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan

Khristoforov, I. A. Sud'ba reformy: Russkoe krest'ianstvo v pravitel'stvennoi politike doi posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (1830–1890-e gg.). Moscow: Sobranie, 2011.368 pp. ISBN 978-5-9606-0105-4.

The sesquicentenary of Alexander II’s enactment of the abolition of serfdom in 1861 wasnot marked by a large quantity of publications. The high quality of the book under review,

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however, goes some way to compensate for this. Igor Khristoforov offers an incisive analysisof the reform from the perspective of the Russian government and educated society. He setout initially to analyze the fate of the reform in the decades after its enactment, but realizedthat in order to do this he needed also to look back to its origins. Thus, in line with otherhistorians’ assessments, he considers the elimination of serfdom in Russia as a processspread over several decades. This long-term perspective allows him, for example, to drawinstructive parallels between Kiselev’s reforms of the state peasants of the 1830s and theStolypin reforms after 1906.

Khristoforov’s book nicely complements his earlier monograph on aristocraticopposition to the Great Reforms by focusing on disagreements not between advocates andopponents of reform, but among the reformists. He identifies a division between bureaucraticrationalizers and romantic Slavophiles, which shaped both the measures of 1861 anddiscussions of the reform process over subsequent decades. This approach offers usefulanalyses of key figures such as Nicholas Miliutin and Iurii Samarin. Men such as thesedisagreed over whether the freed peasants should become rational, market-orientated,landowning farmers or patriarchal members of communes and bearers of historical traditionswho would create a special, Russian, path to the future. They further disagreed over whetherthe former serfs should be subjected to vigilant supervision or left to run their own affairs.Khristoforov argues for the importance of pan-European social, economic, and politicaldoctrines in influencing the differing views. Reform-minded Russians adhered, variously,to classical liberalism, a more dirigiste liberal bureaucratism, and romantic denials ofrationalism. The influence of such contradictory doctrines did not bode well for consistentdirection of the reform process.

Another important contribution of this book is the close attention to “infrastructure”—or rather the lack of it—in rural Russia. Khristoforov notes that below district (uezd) level,Russia lacked the legal and administrative infrastructure necessary to implement a reformon the scale of the abolition of serfdom, in particular working out the land settlement andtax assessment. He goes on to note that in the decades after 1861, the government did notsatisfactorily address this problem. The lack of infrastructure, together with laissez-faireliberalism and romantic attitudes to the peasant commune, all contributed to the importancefigures in the Russian government and society assigned to the commune, and shaped debatesover its future.

The book—as befits one written by a Russian scholar from the Institute of History inMoscow who spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—is solidlygrounded in the relevant international historiography. The author locates his arguments inthe contexts of the prerevolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian and Western historicalliteratures. He acknowledges his debts to his mentor, Larisa Zakharova (and PetrZaionchkovskii). He also engages with recent western works, such as Tracy Dennison’siconoclastic The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (2011), which addresses theissues of infrastructure and romanticized attitudes to institutions in rural Russia at the locallevel. Khristoforov could, perhaps, have developed the points he does make (on pages193and 325) about the argument of Francis Wcislo’s Reforming Rural Russia: State, LocalSociety, and National Politics, 1855–1914 (1990), which to some extent covers similarground to his book. Nevertheless, this is an fine book that offers significant contributionsto our understanding of the reform process in late-tsarist Russia.

David Moon, University of York, UK


Kappeler, Andreas. Russland und die Ukraine: Verflochtene Biographien undGeschichten. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2012. ii + 395 pp. €39.90. ISBN 978-3-205-78775-4.

Andreas Kappeler’s biography of the little-known academics Aleksandra and PetroIefymenko presents the couple as an example of Russo-Ukrainian histoire croisée. Petrowas born in Taurida Province in the south of what today is the Ukraine in 1835. He wasinvolved in Ukrainophile circles at university, for which he was exiled to the provinces ofPerm' and then Arkhangel'sk. Here, he became interested in north Russian peasantethnography and met his future wife, Aleksandra Stavrovskaia. Born in 1848, she hadgrown up in Russia’s far north and received a secondary school education, but could notattend university on account of her gender. At first, she helped her husband in gatheringmaterials for his ethnographic studies. However, she proved herself to be the better scholar:whereas Petro rarely went beyond compilation, Aleksandra offered insightful analysis. Shepublished works on peasant women and land ownership. In 1876 the couple receivedpermission to settle in Petro’s homeland. Here, they came into contact with Ukrainophileintellectuals and Aleksandra acquired an interest in Ukrainian history. In addition to severalarticles in Kievskaia starina, she wrote a History of the Ukrainian People, one of the firstoverviews of the topic to be published. In 1907, Aleksandra was invited to teach on the“higher women’s courses” in St. Petersburg, where she became the first Russian women toreceive the title of doktor.

By examining the Iefymenkos’ lives and their ethnographic and historical writings,particularly those of Aleksandra, Kappeler explores not only the Russian and Ukrainophileintelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also the competingRussian and Ukrainophile historiographies. The Iefymenkos saw no contradiction betweentheir dedication to Russian and Ukrainian matters: as convinced populists, they hoped toreveal the nature and customs of the people, that is, the peasantry; this, in turn, led to thesearch for the peasants’ “national character,” be it Russian or Ukrainian. A second connectionwas the couple’s shared experience of the peripheries of empire. Populism also infusedAleksandra’s history of the Ukraine, which was unusual for the period in its emphasis onsocial and economic life. Unlike the Russian imperial historians, she posited a distinctUkrainian history. However, her work was less decidedly nationalist than that of, for example,the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi in that she was more reluctant to depicthistorical figures as the forerunners of a modern Ukrainian consciousness. Thus, the lifeand work of the Iefymenkos demonstrate the compatibility of Ukrainian and Russianidentities: the former did not develop simply in opposition to the latter.

Kappeler has consciously set himself a difficult task. As a biography, the work has thechallenge, acknowledged by the author, that the Iefymenkos left behind few private lettersor other personal writings: both Petro and Aleksandra remain quite distant figures. Indeed,Kappeler notes in his foreword that the work was originally envisaged as a broader study ofRusso-Ukrainian histoire croisée. To a certain extent, it still aspires to this, entailing severalshifts in focus: for example, Kappeler includes his very interesting account of the discoveryof the Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian imagination as a “digression.” In using the survey ofAleksandra’s historical writings to examine the Russo-Ukrainian entanglement before thenineteenth century, Kappeler must juggle his own depiction of these events with briefsummaries of those by Aleksandra and other Russian and Ukrainophile historians. A differentstructure might have enabled Kappeler to give more of his own insights into the earlierRusso-Ukrainian histoire croisée. Nevertheless, Kappeler’s clear and engaging prose steers

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us past these potential problems, as do his lucid theoretical considerations on writing the“Ukrainian” history of a period predating the widespread usage of the term or concept.The author makes a convincing case both for reviving interest in the Iefymenkos and forthe study of the Russian and Ukrainian past as a history of entanglement.

Christopher Gilley, Universität Hamburg

Randolph, John, and Eugene M. Avrutin, eds. Russia in Motion: Cultures of HumanMobility since 1850. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. viii + 287 pp. $55.00.ISBN 978-0-252-03703-0.

Following the lead of Leslie Page Moch, who presided, along with John Randolph andEugene Avrutin, over the 2009 “Russia’s Role in Human Mobility” conference at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, most of the scholars in this collected volumehave discovered a Eurasian space that was much more mobile than was previouslyunderstood. The editors’ call to “foreground the role played by human mobility” (p. 2)owes an acknowledged intellectual debt to Gijs Mom and moves the study of Russian andSoviet history into a vital new direction.

The book is divided into three sections and offers cross-disciplinary perspectives thattend to privilege the well-established field of migration studies. The first section, prefacedby Charles Steinwedel, begins with Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s statement that colonization is a“basic fact” of Russian history (p. 19). The essays that follow reveal imperial ambitions to“de-Polonize” prerevolutionary Kiev (Faith Hillis), Russify Manchuria through the ChineseEastern Railroad (Chia Yin Hsu), and “manage migration” into Moscow during and afterthe Soviet period (Gijs Kessler and Matthew Light). Hillis aptly describes these ambitionsas an attempt to “govern through mobility” (p. 37).

The next section, prefaced by Willard Sunderland, begins with a quote from Gogol’sDead Souls (“The Russian muzhik can adapt himself to … any environment” [p. 101]) anddoes much to explain the advantages that ethnic Russians had over other groups throughoutRussian history. Anatolyi Remnev’s research reveals the disappointment of revolutionaryidealists, exiled to Siberia, who found the peasant to be a “predator in relation to theenvironment and to indigenous peoples” (p. 127). Jeff Sahadeo discovered that the vauntedSoviet conception of “Druzhba Narodov” frequently rang hollow for emigrants to Moscowfrom Central Asia and the Caucasus during the Soviet period and beyond, while EileenKane’s study on Odessa as a Hajj hub from the 1880s to 1910 revealed that historiansthemselves have allowed their methodological approaches to silence Russia’s Muslimminorities.

Sahadeo, Light, and others discovered a surprising nostalgia for the Soviet Union,which, in fact, severely limited movement through passport controls. It appears thatCommunist ideology obfuscated a violent chauvinism, which, when it reemerged in the1990s, created a yearning for better times. Comparisons to the “Ost-logia” found in theformer East Germany could yield interesting findings.

The third section, prefaced by Anne Lounsbery, does the most to explore thejuxtapositions between mobility and immobility that so often characterize life in Russia.The first two chapters, by Alexandra Bekasova and Benjamin Schenk, explore how Russianconceptions of space and time changed with the advent of the new nineteenth-centurytechnologies of coach (Bekasova) and rail (Schenk) travel. Official anxiety can also be


perceived with both modes as passport controls are first introduced and then rescinded.This same anxiety permeates Diane Koenker’s piece on Soviet tourism and Sarah Phillips’schapter on mobility rights for the wheelchair-bound in the post-Soviet period. Koenkerjuxtaposed pleasure travel and carceral travel from the 1920s to 1960s, while Phillipsresearched wheelchair users, hidden away and immobilized by the Soviet state, whodemanded “mobile citizenship” starting in the 1990s through the bold petitioning of officialsand highly visible marathons between major cities (p. 255).

Despite this book’s impressive strengths and groundbreaking vision, large pieces ofthe mobility puzzle are still missing. Russia’s passport laws and other methods of controlwould be better understood in a cross-cultural context. Brief references to Gogol’s DeadSouls and Dostoevsky’s Demons give readers a sense of what a more systematic investigationof art, literature, and popular culture would reveal.

For scholars and researchers more interested in a more focused study how EasternEurope re-envisioned itself as both mobile and Marxist after World War II, LewisSiegelbaum’s edited volume The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc (2011) issuggested.

This book is highly recommended for students and scholars of Russian history.Randolph and Avrutin have done much to place mobility into the mainstream of Russianhistoriography.

Tracy Nichols Busch, Ferris State University

Smith, Douglas. Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. xviii + 464 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-374-15761-6.

There is no doubt that the “final days” of the aristocracy remain one of the most dramaticstories of the Russian Revolution. In less than a year, a social group that had dominatedRussia for centuries and many of whose members enjoyed lives of unparalleled luxury wasforced into a desperate struggle for survival. Douglas Smith’s new book tells this evocativestory in detail, making excellent use of diaries, letters, and memoirs (unpublished andpublished) to chart the full range of experiences from late Imperial Russia to the SecondWorld War. Although two case studies of undisputed “aristocratic” families—the Golitsynsand the Sheremetevs—form a narrative thread that runs throughout the book, Smith doescover the entire nobility. He has a good grasp of the existing literature and launches themost serious challenge yet to the persistent stereotype of the nobility as a bulwark of thetsarist regime, swept away with the tsar in February 1917 and largely irrelevant afterward.Instead, he explores the diversity of political views within the nobility prior to 1917 thatplayed a major role in undermining autocracy, the variety of their experiences afterwards,and their continuing presence in Soviet Russia, often in official positions of influence.

Nevertheless, as well as being a dramatic story, this is also an important story forunderstanding bigger issues surrounding the Russian Revolution. To what extent, forexample, did divisions within the tsarist elite not only facilitate revolution, but shape thenature of that revolution? To what extent do the experiences of nobles help us understandthe popular opinions and ambitions that directed the course of the revolution? And to whatextent did the experiences of those remaining in Soviet Russia reflect the nature of theregime’s experiment to reshape state and society and forge “Soviet” citizens? Despitebeing alive to these debates and others, Smith does not contribute as much to them as he

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could. With respect to the fall of tsarism, for example, Smith recognizes that many noblessupported political change prior to 1917, but fails to show how this fed into politicaldevelopments during the First World War and how the “remarkable” lack of noble oppositionto the February Revolution helped shape the nature of this revolution (p. 90). He mentionsthe union established by noble landowners to defend their interests in 1917 without exploringthe importance of such activities by all political and social groups. Similarly, he does notuse the nobility’s experiences in Soviet Russia to add to debates about the role of specialists,the forging of new citizens through practices of exclusion and inclusion, or the contestedquestion of “Soviet subjectivity.”

These weaknesses reflect the nature of book. It is written to grasp the attention of theelusive “general reader” as well as the specialist. Consequently, it places much emphasison its uniqueness (not always justified) and relies on the readable personal documents ofthe nobility (often treated uncritically), which focus, of course, on their own experiencesrather than the wider historical significance of these experiences. The book tends to citethe relevant literature in notes rather than engage with it in the text. It is true that thesebroad debates are of more interest to specialists, but it means that the challenging correctiveto the stereotypical view that is the book’s greatest achievement is often not pushed asmuch as it could have been. This reader, moreover, was frequently frustrated by the practiceof having numerous references gathered together in a single footnote, making it difficult towork out the precise origin of particular nuggets of information.

Overall, Smith has succeeded in writing a fascinating, readable account of the nobilityduring these tumultuous years that will do much to convince a broader audience of a morecomplex picture of noble experiences. For the specialist, however, this book could havebeen a more effective contribution to the study of revolutionary and early Soviet society.

Matthew Rendle, University of Exeter

Vitarbo, Gregory. Army of the Sky: Russian Military Aviation before the Great War,1904–1914. Studies in Modern European History. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. x +258 pp. $80.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-1490-8.

This book draws upon contemporary publications, archival resources, and a solid collectionof secondary sources in examining the reception and responses of Russian military officersand state agents to the advent of machine-powered flight. The book is organized into eightchapters of roughly equal length together with an introduction and conclusion.

Chapters 1 through 3 chronicle the arrival of aviation in Russia, with special emphasisgiven to the various meanings ascribed to flight (in both military and civilian contexts) andthe contrasting proposals put forward by general officers and political leaders for developinga robust and effective Russian air-arm. Here, as elsewhere, the author ties his account ofaeronautical developments to broader, long-standing issues in late Imperial political culture,including the emergent tensions between state and society and ongoing debates regardingthe utility of importing Western equipment versus relying on domestic industries.

Chapters 4 through 6 are devoted to military leaders’ efforts to institutionalize a cultureof flight within army ranks through the organization of flying cadres, acquisition of materiel,and the training of personnel. Vitarbo contends these processes were challenged bytraditional anticapitalist attitudes within Russian society (pp. 59–61) while demonstrating


how the airplane, in turn, challenged traditional Russian attitudes regarding social hierarchyand rank (pp. 119–23).

The book’s final two chapters describe in more detail the recruitment and trainingroutines of junior-officer pilots as well as the “ceremonies of celebration and lamentation”which marked their individual triumphs and tragedies (p. 199).

Army of the Sky is a welcome contribution to the existing literature on late ImperialRussian military culture. The first monograph devoted to exploring attitudes and expectationsrelating to aviation technologies within the armed forces, Vitarbo’s study draws attention toan overlooked aspect of the country’s past. The book would have benefitted from a discussionof naval aviation.

Airplane enthusiasts unable to consult Russian-language sources will appreciate thedetails provided on fliers such as Petr Nesterov and Mikhail Efimov. As aviation history,however, Army of the Sky is limited by its rather narrow scope. The airplane did not comeof age as a weapon until well into the Great War. Many prewar expectations, including thebelief that aerial battles would be patterned after encounters at sea (complete with the useof grappling hooks and boarding parties), were quickly altered by real-world experiencesand the rapid advance of technology. Russian contributions to this process were noteworthyand important (for example, the role of Igor Sikorskii’s famous Ilia Muromtsy in advancingthe concept of strategic air operations). In limiting coverage to the period when the airplane’smilitary functions remained up in the air, Army of the Sky achieves take-off without aspiringto soar.

Scott W. Palmer, Western Illinois University

Krementsov, Nikolai. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, BloodTransfusions, and Proletarian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.xvi + 175 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-226-45412-2.

The relationship between Soviet Marxism and Soviet science has provided ideal fodder forhistorians of science curious about the interplay between ideology and knowledge productionin the twentieth century. Nikolai Krementsov continues in this established tradition, butwith an unusual methodological conceit: he draws from the multiple personas of one famousBolshevik, Aleksandr Bogdanov. Krementsov cautions that this is “not a new biography”of the man. Instead, through a study of the multivalent activities of Bogdanov he proposes“a pointed exploration of the interrelations between science and Marxism, in all of theirrich intellectual, institutional, and cultural dimensions” (p. 12).

Bogdanov, whose real name was Aleksandr Malinovskii, is not an unknown nameamong Soviet historians. However, as Krementsov underscores, his renown is circumscribedby three different and barely intersecting epistemologies, reflecting the parallel lives of“this versatile and talented man” (p. 3). There is Bogdanov the avowed Marxist theoreticianand early co-conspirator of Lenin, who wrote extensively about the possibilities inherent in“proletarian science.” Then there is the science fiction writer Bogdanov who publishedtwo major novels, Red Star and Engineer Menni, which fused his Marxist and utopianaspirations, both technological and social, into widely read prose. Finally, there is Bogdanovthe scientist-physician, who was committed to the idea of blood transfusions as a tool for“physiological collectivism.” His commitment to this cause led him to experiment with hisown body, and ultimately caused his demise. Krementsov’s central argument is that these

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three disparate lives were actually reflections of a single sustained ideology aboutcollectivism, an exploration of which tells us much about the ambitions, contours, andliabilities of Soviet science.

Krementsov persuasively argues that Bogdanov’s interest in both Marxist thought andLamarckian evolution logically led him to consider notions of collective blood exchange.These ideas, prefigured in his two fictional novels, were further refined in the 1910s andearly 1920s as he was exposed to foreign research which had opened up new avenues ofresearch in “transfusionology.” Boganov’s belief in the “increase of the ‘viability’ ofindividual organisms through regular blood exchanges” (p. 70) and the struggle againstaging (senescence) eventually found an institutional home in the new Institute for BloodTransfusion created within the Commissariat of Health (Narkomzdrav) in 1926. Why didthe Soviet state sponsor the formation of an institute dedicated to such a seemingly esotericmedical field? Krementsov overreaches a bit to explain the timing and commitment by thestate, speculating that a broader concern about the health of leading party members in themid-1920s prompted Narkomzdrav to commit resources to Bogdanov’s ideas. Stalin’sintervention, which Krementsov argues was crucial to the formation of the institution, isbased only on Bogdanov’s claim that he met with the Soviet leader in December 1925, butthere appears to be no other evidence to corroborate this meeting. Regardless, Krementsov’sdescriptions of the effort by the Soviet state to care for the health of top party membersstrikingly illustrates how Bolshevik anxieties about enemies of the Revolution were rootednot only in fears of attack on the Soviet Union, but of attack on their very bodies.

Bogdanov’s sudden death in 1928—the result of a blood transfusion from a youngman with tuberculosis—effectively ended government-sponsored research on bloodtransfusions in the pursuit of “physiological collectivism.” Along with broader changesconcomitant with Stalin’s “Great Break,” Bogdanov’s original ideas on blood transfusionswere discredited as “medieval mysticism.” Krementsov argues that this did not mean anend to Bogdanov’s influence and that his broader worldview—particularly an instrumentalistview of science in the service of socialist mobilization—cast a long shadow over Sovietscience. In that sense, Krementsov’s imaginative reconsideration of Bogdanov’s work,which reconnects disparate strands in the early history of the Bolshevik project, recovers a“secret history” of Soviet science that should be considered essential reading for thoseinterested in the multiplicities, ambitions, and contradictions inherent in the worldview ofrevolutionary Russia.

Asif Siddiqi, Fordham University

Hoffmann, David L. Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism,1914–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. xvii + 327 pp. $45.00. ISBN978-0-8014-4629-0.

In recent decades, one of the salient trends in historiography of the Soviet period has beento insert the history of the Soviet Union in an increasingly comparative, transnational, andtranscultural space so as to mitigate, or at least recalibrate, its exceptionalism. Althoughthis interdisciplinary effort spans the full chronological range of what has been variouslycalled the “Soviet tragedy,” “the Soviet experience,” and “Soviet project,” much of thescholarship has focused on the interwar period. With respect to this chronologicalconjuncture, the chief concept that has been used to explore the USSR’s similarity to and


difference from other interwar states, and to situate it as a nexus of multidirectional transferof ideas, people, technologies, and commodities, is “modernity.” As one of the “modernstates” of the interwar global order, the USSR is assumed to have incarnated one of manypossible versions of state practices derived from a globally diffused ethos characterized bythe goal of “reshap[ing] societies in accordance with scientific and aesthetic norms” (p. 2).Among the historians who have elaborated the “modernity paradigm” is David L. Hoffmann.Cultivating the Masses is a major contribution to an ongoing effort to place the interwarhistory of the Soviet Union in comparative, transnational, and transcultural perspectiveaccording to the central assumptions of this paradigm.

The specific focus of Hoffmann’s study concerns Soviet versions of the “modern statepractices” (to quote from the title) in the realm of “social intervention”: the reshaping ofsocieties and enlistment of populations for “industrial labor and mass warfare” (p. 2). Inchronological order, his chapters examine “social welfare,” “public health,” “reproductivepolicies,” “surveillance and propaganda,” and “state violence.” As Hoffmann’s eruditefootnotes suggest, scholars in the Russian/Soviet field, as well as in other fields rangingover the globe, have examined these state practices. But prior to Hoffmann, no scholar inthe Russian/Soviet field had placed this particular combination of Soviet state practices ina comparative international context in a single volume. Another distinguishing attribute isthe book’s comparative range. When scholars first began to position “Soviet modernity” ina comparative context, they tended to locate it in a pan-European framework. This hasbeen widening to include Asia and other parts of the world, and Hoffmann deepens thistrend. His comparative cases come not just from Europe but also Asia (China, Japan,Thailand), Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico), the Middle East (Iran, theOttoman Empire, Turkey), Africa (British colonialism in Kenya), the South Pacific (NewZealand), and the United States. Hoffmann is to be commended for his intellectual visionand prodigious effort. This book is, to date, the most authoritative attempt to addressissues of similarity and difference between Soviet state practices and the various incarnationsof the modern state around the world during the “interwar conjuncture.”

But there is another intellectual agenda that drives the book. It is structured so as topermit an investigation of the following question: How can we explain the fact that whileSoviet state violence was similar in its “technologies” to that of other modern states duringthe “interwar conjuncture,” the “scale and objectives of Soviet violence were far moreextreme?” (p. 16) The answer to this question that the author seeks to rule out is, more orless, “ideology.” Instead, Hoffmann’s explanation for the scale and extreme nature of Sovietexcisionary violence—state actions to extract allegedly dangerous segments from the socialbody, such as deportations, executions, party purges—embraces, as “necessary [but notsufficient] preconditions” such factors as “social scientific knowledge, aspirations to reshapesociety, and wartime technologies of social intervention” (p. 16), and, as direct causes ofthe actualization of violent aspirations, the dictatorial form of the Soviet state. The lattermeant that neither legal precepts nor ensuing institutions could restrain the “utopianambitions” (p. 16) of party leaders. For Hoffmann, while Marxist-Leninist doctrine wasnot irrelevant to such violence—in fact, it provided its “ideological justification” (p. 239)—it certainly was not its chief cause. Though he does not directly say so, Hoffmann seems toregard Marxist-Leninist ideology as one of the “necessary preconditions”—if perhaps moresecondary than the others mentioned above—of the scale and extremity of Soviet stateexcisionary violence in the 1930s.

If this is his position, how much of a departure is it from existing scholarship? Hoffmanninsists that his intervention is dramatically revisionist, in that he is arguing against a

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“popularly held view” that “Soviet state violence” can be “attribute[d]” to communistideology.” To encapsulate the position against which he is arguing, the chief (indeed one ofthe only) examples he gives is The Black Book of Communism (1999), edited by StéphaneCourtois. The complex position that, for example, Martin Malia took on the relationshipbetween Marxist-Leninist ideology, the development of the Soviet system, and Soviet stateviolence (especially the Great Purges of 1936–39) is not conveyed by Hoffmann. Instead,Malia’s thinking gets reduced to a comment he made in the foreword to the Courtois volume,one in which Malia cheered the book’s line that ideology only (or chiefly) caused Communistviolence. Elucidating Malia’s stand on the relationship between Marxist-Leninist ideologyand Soviet state violence is a task that cannot be accomplished in a short review. But as theexample given below suggests, in at least some of his work, Malia himself did not makeMarxist-Leninist ideology a sole, or even sufficient, cause of state violence. In general,Hoffmann could have done much more to clarify how his explanation for Soviet state violencedoes, and does not, controvert existing scholarship.

A separate but related problem is that the book sometimes gives readers a mistakenimpression of how those scholars who have privileged ideology as a causal factor inexplaining Soviet social intervention, and “excisionary” state violence in particular, placedthe Soviet Union in a comparative framework. Through inclusion and exclusion (in thetext and in the notes), he would have readers think that Malia, for example, excludes theinternational context from his explanation of interwar state violence. There is no betterexample than Malia’s and Hoffmann’s respective treatments of the origins of the GreatPurges. In Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy (1994), one of the chief explanatory contexts for thetiming, the scale, and the objects of the Great Purges is not only international, buttransnational. For Malia, the “international situation” (Malia, p. 244) is one of the “threeproblems, each with its own logic,” between the end of the First Five-Year Plan in 1932 andthe beginning of the Purges in 1936 in which the “basic logic that connects the Plan to thePurge” was worked out. For example, Malia hypothesizes that if Stalin was indeed behindthe murder of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, in Leningrad partyheadquarters, he might have had in mind that Kirov’s demise could serve as a justificationfor special emergency powers in the way that the prior year’s Reichstag fire had providedHitler with a similar pretext for enhanced extralegal prerogatives. Moreover, the darkeninginternational context of the mid-to-late 1930s—not just the rise of fascism but the SpanishCivil War and Stalin’s fear of the USSR’s international entanglements in risky foreignconflicts—is one of the necessary (but not sufficient) causes of the Purges. As well, Malia’sstudent and Hoffmann’s teacher, Stephen Kotkin, includes the Spanish Civil War (and Hitler’ssupport for Franco’s counterrevolution more specifically), along with other internationalevents such as Mussolini’s aggression in Abyssinia and Japanese aggression in East Asia,among international events whose treatment in Soviet political discourse constituted partof the explanatory context of the Purges. But Hoffmann’s footnotes would have readersbelieve that Oleg Khlevniuk is the first scholar to stress the connection between Stalin’sknowledge of events in Spain (specifically his “awareness in early 1937 of rear-guarduprisings against the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War,” his “fear ofsimilar rebellions within the Soviet Union in the event of war,”) and his unleashing of“excisionary violence” against such “fifth columnists” linked to external threats, whetherfascists, Trotskyists, or other capitalist conspirators. (Incidentally, it was not the NationalistGeneral Emilio Mola Vidal who coined the term “fifth column,” as Hoffmann says in a noteon page 289. He did use the term to refer to anti-Republican forces within the city ofMadrid that would join the four columns of Franco’s troops surrounding the capital to


bring down the democratically elected government. Rather, according to Spanish CivilWar historian Hugh Thomas and other scholars, it was Marshall Aleksandr Suvorov whocoined the term in 1790, during the Russo-Turkish War, when the Russian military’s captureof Izmail from the Ottoman Empire was accomplished with the help of Slavs within thecity. This small correction speaks to the larger point that scholars have much work to do inunearthing the complicated, multidirectional travels of the discourse—let alone othercomponents—of modern state practices.) Khlevniuk’s argument is, to be sure, differentfrom Malia’s and Kotkin’s as to the relationship between the Spanish Civil War and theGreat Purges. But here and intermittently elsewhere, Hoffmann is not a reliable guide tothe history of historians’ efforts to place the interwar USSR’s social interventions in eithera comparative or transnational framework.

It might be argued that such a history should itself be the subject of a different book.And, to be sure, no one book should be expected to explain, once and for all, the necessaryconditions and direct causes of Soviet state violence during the gruesome interwar years.This book is a meritorious contribution to that ongoing conversation.

Glennys Young, University of Washington

Neumann, Matthias. The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the SovietUnion, 1917–1932. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies.New York: Routledge, 2012. xxii + 289. $145.00. ISBN978-0-415-55957-7.

Matthias Neumann’s history of the Komsomol focuses on the base activists and members,their group identity, the appeal of utopianism and political myths, and the ways in whichthe organization was shaped by events and in turn influenced politics and society. Basedon research in the Komsomol Central Archive, the book synthesizes the institutional approachof older works with the broader perspectives of social and cultural histories. Neumannchallenges Western characterization of “state-sponsored youth organizations in communistcountries as totalitarian and uniform institutions with a firm grip over all children andyouth” (p. xv). The Bolsheviks had no master program at the movement’s inception and alimited capacity to guide, let alone control it during its first decade. He just as forcefullyrejects the glasnost-era Soviet portrayals of the Komsomol as a victim of Stalinism ratherthan as protagonist in the country’s political life.

The Komsomol created a subculture that was held together by the idealization of theCivil War experience, iconoclastic visions, participation in campaigns, the stark delineationof enemies and allies, and a radical understanding of class politics. High expectations,mutual disappointments, and ambivalence complicated party-Komsomol relations. Partyleaders promoted and institutionalized the concept of “youth” as a vehicle for transformingsociety and as a constituency legitimizing the new state. They were motivated by thedemographic weight of the youth cohort, which comprised 25 percent of the RSFSR’spopulation in 1926. The Komsomol became the new culture’s creator and its creation. Theparty overregulated the Komsomol at the central and provincial levels but underregulatedit below these levels. The Komsomol’s ensuing autonomy proved problematic.Komsomol'tsy applied internalized notions of class in their vehement critique of party andKomsomol leaders for speaking the language of class struggle while pursuing policies thatfavored the NEP’s restoration of capitalism and privilege at the expense of the country’syouth.

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Neumann fills a gap in the secondary literature, which has dealt predominantly withurban youth. In rural localities, Komsomol cells often acted independently, taking overparty and state functions. Cultural studies have shown how urban youth came to be seen asa “dangerous” group whose hooliganism and social deviance underscored the inability ofthe state and Komsomol to transform it along revolutionary norms. Rural komsomol'tsywere as dangerous because they served as a quasi-peasant lobby, pressuring the party, state,and Komsomol for improved conditions and equality.

The book closes with an exploration of institutional radicalization, the rise of the“class warriors,” and the ouster of the Komsomol’s and the party’s pro-NEP leadership.The transition seems abrupt: from the high point of the political influence during the earlyphases of the Stalin Revolution, the Komsomol is transformed into a “lifeless and static ...agent” of party control and an enforcer of conformity. In the end, perhaps the glasnost-erapress had it right: Stalin and his supporters exploited the malaise among base activists andmembers. As older Komsomol leaders left or were expelled, supporters of radical classpolitics moved into the top leadership. Neumann contends that while this new leadershiphad stronger working-class links, it was inexperienced and more apt to acquiesce to top-down decision making. By 1932 the party had expanded its rural network and exertedgreater control over the rural Komsomol, too. Gone were the pitfalls of an autonomousKomsomol and its potential as a rival political force.

Neumann has written a compelling work highlighting the agency of the Komsomol’sbase in defeating the NEP. Paradoxically, this fine work suggests the need for greater detailin our understanding of the collapse of the NEP networks and the dynamics of the top andmiddle leadership. This will require scholars to go beyond the archives of the KomsomolCentral Committee. For now, Matthias Neumann has written the new standard history ofthe early Komsomol.

Isabel Tirado, William Paterson University

Friedman, Alexander. Deutschlandbilder in der weißrussischen sowjetischen Gesellschaft1919–1941: Propaganda und Erfahrungen. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011.429 pp. €66.00 (paper). ISBN 978-3-515-09796-3.

This study is a recent dissertation on the topic of the image of Germans and Germany inSoviet Belorussia between the world wars. Alexander Friedman makes extensive andadmirable use of archives in Belarus and periodical resources in Russian, Belorussian,Polish, and Yiddish. The result is an indispensable resource for historians and others whoare interested in the responses of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union’s western borderlandsto Germany’s various physical and cultural incursions into this region in the early twentiethcentury. Since the author focuses on the entire Belorussian population, not just ethnicBelorussians, the book should also be useful for specialists in Jewish, Polish, Russian, andGerman history. This broad and comprehensive approach, however, means some intriguingaspects and broader questions are passed over fleetingly.

The structure of the book is mostly chronological but does touch on several specificthemes. It begins with a discussion of the 1918 German occupation of Belorussia, thenmoves to a consideration of the various appearances of Germans and Germany in presspropaganda in the interwar period, the place of German language and culture in Belorussiansociety, and ways in which attitudes toward Germany reveal important characteristics of


Soviet Belorussian society. Although World War II is not treated systematically, Friedmandoes relate the historical experience of the Germans in Belorussia to the later experienceduring the war at various points. His German prose is straightforward and should beaccessible to non-German specialists with some knowledge of the language.

Friedman describes the long ebb and flow of central Soviet depictions of Germanythat are faithfully reflected in the Belorussian press, but his story suggests that the centralizedSoviet view of history and contemporary politics was not replicated exactly on the locallevel, nor did press depictions necessarily determine popular attitudes. Local directexperiences with Germans in World War I and the 1918 occupation, the proximity of Poland,and the relatively large Jewish population, for example, meant that the relationship betweenofficial press and popular opinions in Soviet Belorussia did not always correspond in waysthat one might expect elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Many local Jews had positive opinionsof Germans based on personal experience of World War I and exposure to German culture,and the image of the Poles, linked to enemy classes and the Polish-Soviet War, was muchmore consistently negative than that of the Germans in Belorussia. Official Soviet policiesagainst anti-Semitism, to name another example, resonated with the Jewish population inthe BSSR but also highlighted further the association of Jews and Bolsheviks in the mindsof local anti-Semites.

The author devotes much more space to the Belorussian press than to the other themes,a decision that tends to reduce the book’s potential contributions. For one, differencesbetween the Soviet Russian and Soviet Belorussian propaganda presentation of Germanyare difficult to demonstrate without a systematic comparison to the central Russian-languagepress. Moreover, while Friedman does use some memoir material and archival sources totry to get at popular attitudes, those sections are much smaller in comparison to his extensivediscussion on print media. The link between the press and the population thus remainsdifficult to determine, as always in this type of research. These choices limit the ability ofthe study to contribute to broader discussions of the Soviet experience even as its relevancefor the Belorussian experience remains.

Aaron J. Cohen, California State University, Sacramento

Ýðmen, Ali F. Speaking with a Soviet Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan.Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. xii + 236 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978-0-8229-6206-9.

Ali Ýðmen’s new book contributes to a growing body of historical monographs that enlightenus about the ways that Soviet power was introduced, institutionalized, and received in partsof the Soviet Union very far from Moscow. The book’s special contribution lies in examiningthe people in charge of implementing what we would now call the “soft power” policies ofthe Soviet revolution in Central Asia, the new Kyrgyz artistic intelligentsia whose subjectivitywas formed in the employ of the first Soviet clubs, theaters, and houses of culture. Ýðmen’sbook shows how artists and administrators crafted their own approach which “combinedwhat Kyrgyz considered ‘national’ with what was acceptable to the state” (p. 66). Some ofthese administrators feared or despised local traditions and tried to eliminate them, but atthe same time, the interaction with locals necessitated compromises, the end result of whichwas the forging of a particular and novel form of Soviet culture. “In effect, clubs encouragedKyrgyz to go back to their indigenous culture to create the new Soviet community” (p. 69).

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The result is a story not of assimilation but of the crafting of Soviet citizens through thediverse range of practices that could be incorporated into early Soviet institutions.

The book’s central chapters focus topically on houses of culture, celebrations, theater,and women. The chapter on women is especially strong and makes an important contributionto the other studies on Central Asian women of this era. Through archival and oral historyresearch Ýðmen shows how participating in Soviet cultural institutions such as holidays hadthe effect of creating a new national narrative which “included the promotion of Kyrgyzcommunity, traditions, history and heroes” in support of the broader image of a multinationalSoviet people (p. 88). More specifically, Ýðmen’s point is about how Kyrgyz culture workersinfused Soviet practices with Kyrgyzness. In his arguments about adaptation, Ýðmenemphasizes the agency and creativity of these new local elites, and the pleasure and meaningthey derived from their work. “These actors saw themselves as intellectual elites whobelonged to ail [rural] tribes and clans. This attitude did not necessarily signal blind beliefin the Soviet rhetoric of ‘brotherhood’ but, rather, the preservation of traditional allegiancesthrough service to their indigenous communities as Soviet intellectuals” (p. 111).

As delightful as the subject matter of the book is, there is a certain muddiness in thestory Ýðmen is telling, with the evidence sometimes being too vaguely presented or unclearlylinked to the argument. The title of the book implies that the Kyrgyz artistic intelligentsiaof this period learned to speak Soviet with a Kyrgyz accent, yet Ýðmen starts his conclusionby arguing that they “were engaged in fashioning a new Kyrgyz community with a Sovietaccent” (p. 140). This reversal is puzzling, but perhaps what Ýðmen means is that thisgroup of intermediaries had an accent in both idioms, passing neither as Soviet nor asKyrgyz. Still, Ýðmen’s book, and especially its oral history component, provides valuableinsight into how these culture workers understand their own biographies as essential elementsin the story of Soviet history.

Laura L. Adams, Harvard University

Fischer von Weikersthal, Felicitas. Die “inhaftierte” Presse: Das Pressewesensowjetischer Zwangsarbeitslager 1923–1937. Forschungen zur OsteruropäischenGeschichte 77. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. 528 pp. €88.00. ISBN 978-3-447-06471-2.

In recent years researchers have paid much attention to the economic functions of the Gulagand the organization and efficiency of forced labor. In 2011, Steven A. Barnes offered adifferent perspective claiming that reeducation (perekovka) was an important andunderestimated aspect of the Gulag. In his interpretation the system appears as a kind ofsocialist purgatory, separating redeemable human beings from those thought to be uselessfor Soviet society. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal makes a similar argument. In herdissertation, she analyzes the newspapers of the Solovetskii camp and Beltlag. Due tofragmentary holdings, the empirical basis is restricted to the years of 1924–27, 1929–30,and 1935–36.

Newspapers were as common in the camps as the cultural-educational departments.The OGPU introduced them in the 1920s on the Solovki islands and subsequently in theentire camp system. The question of their purpose is notoriously difficult to answer.

According to the author, the “arrested press” (which seems to be a somewhat loosetranslation of “arrestanskaia pressa”) dispersed propaganda, but also offered art, culture,


and information to the prisoners, which has to be considered a crucial means of reeducationand possible social reintegration. Furthermore, these newspapers worked as a channel ofinformation and to a certain degree as a forum of discussion between prisoners and thecamp administration. Therefore, finally, the camp’s press could also serve as a source ofeveryday practices in the camps.

In the empirical part, the author conducts an in depth analysis of the language, styleand discursive patterns of the newspapers. This focus on the final product of the camp’spress seems somehow natural. However, it also entails some dangers because other importantsources like material of the camp administrations or the editorial departments are not at allor only partly accessible. It seems that the author does not always keep the necessarydistance from the sources and sometimes falls victim to their persuasive power.

To put it bluntly, the mere fact that agitation took place does not prove that convincingor reeducating others was a significant aspect of Bolshevik techniques of power. Therewas, for example, always a lot of talking about the need for agit-prop during thecollectivization campaign. However, Bolsheviks both in the center and the localities knewwell that submission to the socialist order could be achieved not by words but only byforce. It is important to understand that the Bolsheviks responded to “others” either byagitation or extermination in an almost Pavlovian manner. Therefore, agitation may be duerather to Bolshevik culture and practices of self-affirmation than to rational ends (in MaxWeber’s terms).

Concerning the communicative function of the newspapers, it should be taken intoaccount that there were several other channels of information between administration andprisoners in the camps, some of them probably more important and efficient than thenewspapers. Apart from that, the camp bosses had good reason to ameliorate the livingconditions of prisoners from time to time independent of prisoners’ complaints. The authorall too easily equates the function of the camp newspapers with that of the ordinary Sovietpress. There are also some doubts about the value of the camp newspapers as a source foreveryday life in the Gulag. In any case, the newspapers themselves are somewhat disputableevidence for their reliability as sources on the camps’ realities or the prisoners’ mood.Their memoirs seem to tell another story.

Felix Schnell, Humboldt University of Berlin

Applebaum, Anne, ed. Gulag Voices: An Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press,2011. xviii + 195 pp. $18.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-300-17783-1.

Gheith, Jehanne M., and Katherine R. Jolluck. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of SovietIncarceration and Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xx + 256 pp. $31.00.ISBN 978-0-230-61063-7.

In 2011, two books entitled Gulag Voices appeared, one edited by Pulitzer Prize-winningauthor Anne Applebaum, and the other by professors Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck,of Duke and Stanford Universities, respectively. Each is a collection of Gulag survivoraccounts. In spite of the convergence of their titles, the volumes are distinctive, each offeringits own valuable contributions to the growing body of published primary sources on theSoviet system of forced labor.

Applebaum’s Gulag Voices: An Anthology, published by Yale University Press as partof their ongoing Annals of Communism series, is the more conventional of the two books.

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It consists of excerpts from previously published memoirs, although some appear in Englishtranslation for the first time. Arranged to “follow, roughly, the track of a prisoner’sexperience, from arrest to release,” the book includes a good mix of well-known Gulagmemoirs and those that are relatively unknown outside specialist circles (p. xiv). Theexcerpts are carefully chosen to introduce the reader to a number of important aspects oflife in the Gulag, including interrogation and torture, divisions between “politicals” and“criminals,” and informal economic and social practices. The selections from Elena Glinkaand Hava Volovich are particularly powerful, focusing on mass rape and the tragedy ofmotherhood in the camps. Each piece is framed by a clear and concise preamble. Applebaumis to be applauded for providing an accessible introduction to Gulag literature that is well-suited to the undergraduate classroom.

Applebaum’s collection represents the literary canon of Gulag survivor literature well,but it also reproduces its shortcomings, as the editor herself acknowledges. Readers willhave difficulty finding the voices of ordinary workers or peasants within its pages, groupsthat comprised the majority of prisoners and exiles. Applebaum’s commentary is sometimesoverly simplistic and occasionally tendentious. The introduction footnotes only a singlework on the Gulag, Applebaum’s own synthetic history. The editor alleges that “somescholars of the Soviet Union have been reluctant to rely on Gulag memoir literature as asource of information about the history of the camps” (p. xiii). This seems a strange assertiongiven the fact that all major studies of the Gulag, at least in my recollection, have used suchsources heavily. Applebaum also asserts that Soviet archives only tell the “dry, officialversion of events” (p. xiv), a broad generalization that belies the rich variety of materialsfrom Soviet archives that have become available in the past twenty-five years. It is a pitythat a list of suggested primary and secondary works was not included.

Jehanne Gheith, Katherine Jolluck, and the other contributors to Gulag Voices: OralHistories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile offer a far broader picture of life in the Gulag.The oral histories come from a wide range of survivors of Soviet repression, representingthe experiences of many who never put pen to paper. This includes those who come frommore humble circumstances than the “politicals” whom we usually encounter in the Gulagmemoir. In this meticulously constructed collection, Gheith and Jolluck do more thansimply broaden the range of Gulag voices—they also contribute to debates about oral history,trauma, and the nature of memory.

The book contains ten oral histories and six written sources that are organized aroundbroad themes. It begins with a particularly valuable group of interviews conducted withformer exiles to the Perm region. Here we see examples of how representatives of threemajor groups of Soviet exiles (“dekulakized” peasants, Soviet ethnic Germans, and CrimeanTartars) conceived of their lives before, during, and after deportation to Siberia. It isrefreshing to see the voices of more “ordinary” Soviet victims finally available in publishedform. The interviews that follow draw from a more conventional pool of interviewees:urbanites, mostly from the Moscow and St. Petersburg intelligentsia. Nevertheless, thestories they tell differ significantly from the standard narratives that one encounters incollections such as Applebaum’s. We see the complex ways that individuals and familieswere affected by the repressive policies of the Stalinist system and the ambivalent attemptsby Stalin’s successors to reintegrate victims of terror and repression into Soviet society. Asinterviewees tell of their experiences, they convey both a strong sense of how the Gulagwas an integral part of Soviet existence and also how repression has been interwoven intolife stories. Indeed, the book complements the recent historiographical trend of examining


the Gulag as a central part of the Soviet experience (see, for example, works by GolfoAlexopoulos, Steven Barnes, and Wilson Bell).

Gheith and Jolluck’s book dispenses with the kind of coherent structure that leadsreaders through Applebaum’s. On one hand, the rather disjointed structure of the booklends itself well to the fragmentary nature of the oral histories contained within. On theother, it does make the volume less accessible to non-specialist readers, perhaps limiting itsuse in the classroom to upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses. While the eclecticnature of the book is generally a strength, one wonders whether the inclusion of a smallgroup of written sources at the end of the volume was a wise editorial decision. Most ofthese sources were written by Polish citizens who managed to escape the Soviet Unionduring World War II. The distinctive circumstances of their production makes them warranta study in their own right, and they seem out of place in a volume of oral histories collectedin the former Soviet Union.

Despite the similarity in their titles, these two volumes offer different things to differentaudiences. Shortcomings aside, each will occupy an important place in the study of theSoviet Union and how its history is taught.

Alan Barenberg, Texas Tech University

Khristoforov, V. S., and V. G. Makarov, eds. Tainy diplomatii Tret'ego reikha: Germanskiediplomaty, rukovoditeli zarubezhnykh voennykh missii, voennye i politseiskie attashev sovetskom plenu: Dokumenty iz sledstvennykh del. 1944–1955. Rossiia. XX Vek.Dokumenty. Moscow: MFD, 2011. 876 pp. $36,00. ISBN 978-5-89511-025-6.

Except for a few minor details, there are no German diplomatic secrets in this volume; it is,however, an important publication for the history of German-Soviet relations and Sovietmethods of investigation. Three hundred and seventy four personnel working at Germandiplomatic posts, mostly in Romania and Bulgaria, were taken prisoner by Soviet forces asthey advanced into these countries in the fall of 1944. The book, a follow up on NKVDinvestigations of high-ranking German officers (Moscow 2009), contains investigationrecords for 25 officials and some officers in 189 documents, presented in alphabeticalorder in blocks for each prisoner. They were all charged with spying and/or preparing theNazi attack on the USSR. Some were sentenced to twenty-five years, others to fifteen.Most, however, survived until West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Moscowin 1955 and, in return for establishing relations with the USSR, obtained the release offifteen thousand German POWs and civilians from Nikita S. Khrushchev. At the end of thebook there are biographical sketches on the prisoners and important personages mentionedand also a table of contents.

The most important of these prisoners was Karl Clodius (1897–1952). Clodius was aneconomic expert in the German State Department and German plenipotentiary in Romaniafrom May 1944 until he was arrested by Romanian police, delivered to Soviet authorities,and sent to Moscow in September 1944. He died there in August 1951. Another prisonerworth mentioning is Adolf- Heinz Beckerle (1902–1876), who was the German ambassadorto Bulgaria. He did, in fact, press King Boris III to attack Greece and Yugoslavia, againstwhich his country had territorial claims. Before occupying this post, Beckerle was Gauleiterof the Łódê district in German-occupied Poland and responsible for the deaths of tens ofthousands of Jews. His admission of this fact, however, aroused no interest in his Soviet

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investigators; he was released in 1955 and worked as a clerk in Nuremberg. In 1966, hewas arrested for participating in the deportation of Bulgarian Jews (to death camps), butdied two years later. Another prisoner, Hermann Põrzgen (1905–75), the Frankfurter Zeitungcorrespondent in Moscow in the late 1930s, was charged with spying, sentenced to fifteenyears, and freed in 1955. Strangely enough, he returned to Moscow as the corrrespondentfor the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung for another twenty years.

The investigators wrote down all the prisoners’ statements, some of which wereobviously untrue; each prisoner had to sign the record and state that it accorded with whathe had said. Some prisoners accused their colleagues of anti-Soviet attitudes, while othersspun tall tales. Lt. Gen. Alfred Georg Gerstenberg (1893–1959), German air attache inWarsaw from 1938 to 1939, ingratiated himself with his investigator by stating that heheard from a Polish official at the time that Hermann Gõring had, during a hunting trip inPoland in 1938, “bought” Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck for 300,000 marks (p. 581).Despite the fact that Beck signed an alliance with Britain and rejected Hitler’s territorialdemands, and that the Poles fought the Germans when they attacked in 1939, the biographicalsketch states that he followed a policy of cooperation with Nazi Germany (p. 764).

More can be learned from a very interesting interview with Prof. Khristoforov in RIANovosti (June 24, 2011) and an excellent review of the book by Hans Nef in Der Spiegel(October 31, 2011), a translation of which appeared in Golos Rossii the next day.

Anna M. Cienciala, University of Kansas

Mezhiritsky, Peter. On the Precipice: Stalin, the Red Army Leadership and the Road toStalingrad, 1931–1942. Solihull: Helion & Company Limited, 2012. 399 pp. £29.95.ISBN 978-1-907677-72-4.

This book, a translation of Mezhiritsky’s 1995 book Chitaia Marshala Zhukova (ReadingMarshal Zhukov), presents itself as an extended commentary on Marshal Georgii Zhukov’smemoirs, using them as a springboard for retracing the history of the Soviet military andthe Great Patriotic War. Mezhiritsky’s subject is well-traveled ground, and a host of Westernand Russian scholars have published substantial research on it since the opening of theSoviet archives. However, this book is most useful as an English-language exemplar of acertain kind of Russian semi-popular history with high literary pretensions. All thecharacteristics are present: autobiographical asides, literary allusions, philosophical musings,rhetorical questions, quotations in big blocks, and extensive speculation devoid of concreteevidence about the intentions and motives of historical actors. Sentences trail off intoellipses full of insinuation.

For serious students of World War II, Mezhiritsky has little to offer. Despite its 399pages of very small print, this book has made little use of the wealth of archival material orthe high-quality scholarly works based on them. References to primary or secondary sourcesin support of factual claims are rare. It is not clear what main or subsidiary theses Mezhiritskyintends to argue. The author himself notes his intent to speculate beyond his evidence (pp.182-3). In a masterpiece of understatement, the translator notes that “the narrative does notflow in a straight line. Rather, it deflects, eddies and churns, while a topic may slip underthe surface, only to re-emerge later” (p. 8). There is a certain lack of skepticism towardsgood stories, as when the author notes a Soviet tank force storming into Holland in 1945(p. 212).


This sort of history exists in English as well: James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword(2001) and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (2008) have important similarities with whatMezhiritsky is trying to do. But the focus on impression, confession, recollection, andspeculation instead of hard argument based on evidence, leaves mainstream historiansunimpressed. It is difficult to imagine that readers of The Russian Review would gain muchfrom On the Precipice.

David Stone, Kansas State University

Bidlack, Richard, and Nikita Lomagin. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A NewDocumentary History from the Soviet Archives. New Haven: Yale University Press,2012. xxx + 552 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11029-6.

According to Yale University Press’s own description, “Annals of Communism,” in whichRichard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin’s book on the Leningrad Blockade appears, is intendedto publish “long-suppressed documents from former Soviet state and party archives,” with“informative introductions, incisive commentary, and comprehensive notes.” In practice,volumes published in the series vary. Some (for instance, Katerina Clark and EvgenyDobrenko’s Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents [2007], or the collectionunder the title Sedition, edited by Vladimir A. Kozlov, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and SergeiMironenko), are closer to that description than others. On the other hand, like MatthewLenoe’s The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (2010), Bidlack and Lomagin’s book isreally a historical analysis illustrated by key documents. In total, sixty-six of these (includinga photograph of I. K. Lysenko, transportation secretary of the Gorkom VKP(b), taken fromhis personal file, published as Document 21) appear in the book, mostly from the earlyperiod of the Blockade—the winter of 1941–42, during which over half a million peopleare thought to have perished from hunger, cold, and disease. The main exception is a groupof documents, nos. 26–30, relating to the history of the Orthodox Church’s relations withthe authorities, and particularly the impact of Stalin’s famous concordat in 1943.

That said, the value of The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944, as a documentarycollection per se is extremely high. The book makes available mainly material that hasappeared in scattered collections, for example in M. V. Shkarovskii’s “V ogne voiny”(published in the relatively scarce serial Russkoe proshloe, vol. 5 for 1994, a title held,according to WorldCat, in only sixty-seven libraries worldwide). Lomagin’s ownNeizvestnaia blokada (a mere forty-three holdings in WorldCat) is another major source,and there is also material from Izvestiia TsK KPSS. A number of documents appear for thefirst time in print. Source details are provided, so that material can be checked against theoriginal. The translations by Marian Schwartz, a noted interpreter of literary prose, buthere rightly going for a relatively literal and unbeautiful style, are accurate, as far as I havebeen able to check, aside from a few minor fluffs such as the retention of the prepositionalcase “Kolomiagakh” for the place actually known as Kolomiagi, or the translation“apparatus” for what contextually has to be “telephone.” While occasionally there aresome small variations from the Russian original in terms of presentation (the “outgoingnumbers” of letters are provided in some cases where the original gives them, and not inothers), these are reliable and well-annotated source materials.

Usefully, too, Bidlack and Lomagin register some of the problems of dealing with thesources that they cite. To begin with, the documents are presented thematically, rather than

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simply in chronological order (for example, secret police reports are kept separate fromrecords of internal party meetings). In addition, the running commentaries to each sectionnote some of the key issues of interpretation—for instance, in the opening pages of “ThePopular Mood” (pp. 329–67), the editors observe the lack of systematic study of the topicat the time, the fluctuation in classifications of what constituted “counter-revolutionary”tendencies, the ways in which perceptions diverged between NKVD and party sources, andthe fact that those who were most critical of Soviet power probably did not voice theirviews in contexts where these would have been recorded anyway.

Alongside this, the different sections of the book together comprise an absorbing andauthoritative history of the Blockade (or, to use the alternative description that was morecurrent in official Soviet sources, the “defense of Leningrad”). The nature of the sourcesmeans that the primary focus is on how the authorities managed the wartime situation.Importantly, Bidlack and Lomagin’s material scotches the romantic idea of an alternative“Leningrad communism” emerging in the time of conflict. Instead we see (in chapter 2,“Who Ruled Leningrad?”) the central leaders, including Stalin, keeping tight control overthe local party leadership, which latter also did its best to curb too much local exceptionalism(for instance, the 1942 film The Defense of Leningrad was vehemently criticized by Zhdanov,Andrei Kuznetsov, and Petr Popkov for beginning with an image of the Bronze Horsemanrather than with a Lenin Monument. A later version put right the deficiency [p. 355]).

A later chapter (“Policies of Total War”) deals with issues such as mobilization andindustrial production, while chapter 4, “The Struggle to Survive,” includes, for example,official police reports on alleged cases of cannibalism, both in the sense of the consumptionof meat from corpses, and in the sense of murder in the pursuit of butchery. At the sametime, the running narrative also includes material from memoirs (and from secondary sourcesthat base their discussions on these), so that the daily life of the Blockade is not neglected.(Certainly, there is almost no attention to the later stages—by which point people, as thecomplaints book of the Bol'shoi dramaticheskii teatr makes clear, had the strength not justto visit the theater but also to moan when latecomers were not admitted to the production.But that represents the current state of play with regard to Blockade history, the pendulumhaving swung away from the “keep calm and carry on” stereotypes of the Soviet era.)

All in all, this is a book that has much of value not only for student and general readersbut also for specialists. It adds up to a uniquely informative account of what Bidlack andLomagin call the “biggest challenge” (p. 411) that people in the city popularly known asPiter had ever faced.

Catriona Kelly, University of Oxford

Holmes, Larry E. War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power: The Center, Periphery,and Kirov’s Pedagogical Institute, 1941–1952. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.xxxiv + 239 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-7391-7462-3.

In his latest work Larry Holmes has merged his two research agendas—Soviet educationand provincial politics—in a study of the Kirov Pedagogical Institute. By focusing on thewar years, when the institute evacuated to the isolated provincial town Iaransk, Holmesadds to the developing scholarship about the politics and planning of evacuation and return,and he continues to show how local studies can illuminate national issues.


Although the title promises a book about the institute, Holmes’s broad and thoroughexamination of nine national and local archives, newspapers, memoirs, and personalinterviews has led to an exhaustive account of the institute’s war years. This is not a bookabout education and pedagogy. The institute serves as the medium for examining the exerciseof power during the war both within the institute and among various party, government, andindustry organs at the local, regional, and national level. Holmes’s research painstakinglyfollowing letters of complaint, decrees, and denunciations and concludes that institutionsacted primarily on self-interest and were both victims and perpetrators.

Kirov and its surrounding region escaped the destruction of war but suffered many ofthe privations that one could find in destroyed cities like Sevastopol. Although buildingsremained standing, the institute suffered from a lack of heating fuel, food, materials, andspace in Iaransk, where officials were unprepared for the burden of housing the institute, itsstudents, and faculty. Had the full contingent of students and faculty arrived—many refusedto evacuate so far from a rail line and others quickly left Iaransk—the shortages wouldhave been even more dramatic. The institute’s arrival ushered in complaints from localorgans that begrudged losing resources to the institute, yet students and faculty complainedto and about their administrators for not making daily life more bearable. Not all shortageswere fully debilitating. Holmes’s careful review of the archives illuminates a number ofcreative adaptations, such as the biology department’s use of the ever-present rats fordissections and the professor who made a name for himself by publishing a book, during atime of food shortages, about local edible plants.

In the final months of the war the institute was ordered to return to Kirov—an orderthat had been requested for months. Much of its former property was in the hands of thelumber and aviation industry commissariats. Long fights over possession ensued, andinspections of the buildings discovered that temporary tenants had removed windows, toilets,furniture, sinks, and even electrical wiring. The scarcity of goods and the inability ofSoviet industry to meet the construction needs of a ravaged country led many enterprises,the institute included, to seize as much property as possible. However, the same organizationscomplained to higher authorities when their property had been destroyed. The institute didthe same by not returning property in Iaransk and making inflated claims about the amountof lost property.

Holmes convincingly shows a political process that was nearly always based on self-interest, both institutional and, at times, personal. The Soviet collectivist ideal, althoughdeeply held by many, collapsed in the midst of scarcity and high expectations. Scholars andgraduate students interested in local power politics should add Larry Holmes’s new book totheir reading lists.

Karl D. Qualls, Dickinson College

Ro’i, Yaacov, ed. The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union. Washington: WoodrowWilson Center Press/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xviii +450 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-4214-0564-3.

Yaacov Ro’i and thirteen other scholars, some of whom were members of the dissidentmovement, provide a comprehensive analysis of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Unionin the 1970s and 1980s. The main aim of the movement was “the struggle for emigration toIsrael” (p. 1). The movement also had cultural, educational, and religious goals.

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The authors show that the policy of state anti-Semitism prevailed in the Soviet Unionfrom the late 1940s until the liberalization of the regime in the late 1980s under Gorbachev.Jews were deprived of Jewish education and cultural life, while religious life was veryrestricted. Jews could not attend synagogue without risk of being fired from their jobs.Many Jewish communities did not have rabbis and many synagogues were closed. Eventhe commemoration of Holocaust victims was regarded as Jewish nationalism by the Sovietregime.

In spite of the almost total assimilation and acculturation of Soviet Jews into Russianculture, they were treated as potential traitors; a “fifth column.” Jews were not acceptedfor prestigious jobs or admitted to top universities. Jewish children often were humiliatedat school by their classmates. This combination of state and popular anti-Semitism broughtmany Jews to the conclusion that they would never have a better future in the USSR. Jewswanted to leave the Soviet Union not only due to anti-Semitism, but also because theywished to live in a free, democratic society. About one third of Jews who emigrated fromthe Soviet Union in the 1970s up to 1991 (269,946 of 781,327) chose the United States astheir final destination (p. 107).

In spite of Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin’s announcement at a Paris pressconference in December 1966 that the road for Jewish emigration was “open,” very fewJews received permission to leave the country before 1971 (p. 168). The Soviets discouragedJewish emigration because they were afraid that other national minorities who had diasporasabroad would also demand the right to emigrate. Soviet authorities thought that massemigration would discredit the entire socialist system. Because many Jews who applied forpermission to emigrate were qualified specialists, the Soviets also were afraid of a “braindrain” from the country.

The breakthrough opening-up of Jewish emigration resulted from the attempt of agroup of Soviet Jews to hijack a plane to fly to Israel in 1971. Although the hijacking wasunsuccessful, it attracted worldwide attention to the Jewish problem in the Soviet Union.Under pressure from mass protests abroad, the Soviet authorities commuted the deathsentences of the leaders of the hijacking to fifteen years in prison. Simultaneously, theyallowed limited Jewish emigration in the hope that, if they got rid of the main Jewish“troublemakers,” then the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union would subside. However,Soviet Jews continued their struggle for the right to leave the country: they organized hungerstrikes and demonstrations, studied and taught Hebrew, celebrated Jewish national holidays,and self-published Jewish journals and newspapers (samizdat).

The Soviet authorities considered these Jewish activities illegal and attempted tosuppress them. Many Jewish activists were arrested, but the movement was not eradicated.It not only survived, but became larger and stronger due to international support, withpublic protests in the United States against restrictions on Jewish emigration, pressure fromhigh-ranking American officials (including passage of the Jackson-Vanick Amendment traderestrictions), and financial and moral support to refuseniks (Jews denied the right to emigrate).

Members of the Jewish movement often coordinated their activities with other dissidentand national movements in the Soviet Union. Some participated in the human rightsmovement. This cooperation helped them to undermine the “empire of evil” and paved theroad to the democratic changes in the late 1980s that finally opened the gate to emigrationfor all who desired it.

The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union is an important contribution to Soviet Jewishhistory, revealing new aspects of the Jewish and other dissident movements in the Soviet


Union. This book will be interesting for scholars as well for a wider audience interested inthe Jewish experience in the USSR.

Victoria Khiterer, Millersville University

Vowinckel, Annette, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, eds. Cold War Cultures:Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies. New York: Berghahn Books,2012. 396 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-85745-243-6.

This edited volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Europeanhistory by expanding beyond the traditional focus on national narratives of the Cold Waryears and considering the similarities and differences between the impact of this conflict ondifferent countries in Europe. One of several recent edited volumes to take a culturalapproach to the Cold War conflict in Europe, this one is the first to deploy the analyticalcategory of “Cold War Culture” as its primary tool of interpretation. The resulting analysisdemonstrates the benefits of this approach, and some of the challenges involved.

Written by the three editors, the Introduction explains key terms and ideas and suggestssome overall conclusions. The concept “Cold War Culture” refers to the “diverseexperiences, mentalities, and practices” associated with the impact of the Cold War struggle(p. 1). The editors describe the main questions of the book as follows: “Are there sufficientparallels between Eastern and Western European cultures to justify a specifically Europeanperspective on the Cold War? Would it make more sense to stick to national perspectiveson the one hand, and transnational perspectives independent of Cold War politics on theother? How strong was the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively,on the different European countries and cultures? What peculiarities still at work in thepresent stem from the systemic conflict? What are the different ways in which societiesremember the Cold War?” (p. 9) Drawing some preliminary conclusions, the editors suggestthat substantial parallels existed between European Cold War experiences. These similaritiesjustify the use of “Cold War Culture” as a tool of analysis. However, they nuance theirclaim by underscoring that “we should rather speak of European Cold War Cultures than ofone homogeneous culture that is merely ‘represented’ in different national variants”(p. 16).

While the questions posed by the editors get at many crucial issues, they gloss overothers, for instance the Cold War-informed interactions between European states themselvesand European influence on the two hegemons. This is especially surprising since severalrecent edited volumes, for instance by Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklossy, deal withthis issue. I would also have liked to see greater justification for using “Cold War Cultures”as a lens of analysis in comparison to other tools frequently deployed to understand postwarEuropean history, such as modernity. The editors do speak briefly of modernity at the endof the Introduction, yet in a way that brings out another problem with their perspective,namely the presumption that “Europe was the cradle of modernity, and the division ofEurope by the Iron Curtain only reflects that modernity evolved along two different paths,even if one of them proved to be an impasse” (p. 17). Certainly, Japan, China, India, Egypt,Brazil, Argentina, and a multitude of other countries might lay claim to building their ownversion of modernity. This oversight within the Introduction reflects the broader issue thatthe Third World gets practically no attention from the editors, despite the importance ofthis territory to the Cold War overall and to Europe in particular in the form of decolonization.

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Fortunately, some of the contributions address these gaps. Quinn Slobodian’s essayon the World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959, Helsinki in 1962, and Sofia in 1968 focuseson how West German participants sought to sell their model of capitalist democracy to thedelegates from developing countries. He finds that the Soviet rhetoric of equality andeconomic justice had more sway at the first two festivals, but that West Germans in 1968gained more sympathy by deploying Maoist-informed practices. Slobodian convincinglydemonstrates the significance to both blocs of targeting global south countries, and alsohighlights the key role of youth culture and youth politics in the Cold War.

The question of modernity and Cold War cultures is well handled in Sabina Mihelj’schapter. Examining the Julian region, on the border between Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia,she uncovers the way that those on both sides of the Iron Curtain deployed a discourse ofcivilization and barbarity to present their own path to modernity as the only viable one.Mihelj contextualizes such rhetoric in older discursive tropes about western versus easternEurope that stem back to the Enlightenment.

Marsha Siefert explicitly considers Cold War-influenced interactions between Europeanstates in her study of film circulation within the Soviet bloc. She points to cooperation inthe form of film exchange and a film festival circuit aimed at constructing what she terms a“Socialist audiovisual space” (p. 39). These activities, by helping create a greater sense ofcultural cohesion and unity within the bloc, illustrate the analytical usefulness of the term“East European Cold War Culture(s)” used by Siefert. Edward Larkey’s examination ofhow 1980s radio programming in West Berlin impacted East Berlin broadcasts in the sphereof popular music also deserves note for highlighting Cold War-based international exchanges.However, he fails to convince with his suggestion that the strong influence of West Germanmedia illustrates the “fun, excitement, innovation, and freedom that was missing from theexperience of daily life in the GDR” (p. 88). This widespread misconception about socialistcultural life, expressed by Reinhold Wagnleitner and many others, does not reflect thereality that multitudes of people within the Soviet bloc enjoyed officially sponsored culturalactivities, as demonstrated in my published and forthcoming work. The lack of spacehinders my ability to deal with the other contributions, which cover topics such as television,religion, sports, automobile culture, advertising, civil defense, the arts, and post-Cold Warefforts to deal with the memory and physical legacy of this conflict.

My criticisms should not detract from reader attention to this thought-provoking andhigh-quality book. The editors and contributors deserve praise for helping revise ourunderstanding of post-1945 European experience and in particular the Cold War impact onEurope. This volume likewise demonstrates the usefulness of “Cold War Culture” as ananalytical instrument. The book constitutes required reading for anyone interested in theCold War, in modern European history, and in contemporary cultural studies.

Gleb Tsipursky, Ohio State University – Newark

Tismaneanu, Vladimir, and Bogdan C. Iacob, eds. The End and the Beginning: TheRevolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History. New York: Central EuropeanUniversity Press, 2012. viii + 594 pp. $60.00. ISBN 978-615-5053-65-8.

This book opens with the modest disclaimer that its contributors do “not aim to search for‘new truths’ or novel explanations for the fall of Communism” (p. 1). Instead, they seek toprovide a “re-thinking, re-visiting, and re-assessing” of this singular event, not just as it


played out in Eastern Europe but as it germinated in Gorbachev’s foreign policy in the1980s and as it continues to influence politics and society in the region today. Notsurprisingly, it soon becomes clear that rethinking on such a scale is no less ambitious andlengthy an undertaking than the search for “new truths.”

The volume’s chapters probe an almost ostentatiously eclectic set of topics—fromelectrification policy in Ceaușescu-era Romania, to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, toconsumer behavior in communist Czechoslovakia. However, four overarching themes standout. The first is whether the fall of the old regime in 1989 qualifies as a genuine revolution.The second is a debate over the role of Soviet foreign policy in the communist party-states’collapse in Eastern Europe. The third theme is communism’s legacy for politics in theregion today. (Perhaps not surprisingly, we find consensus among the contributors of itsenduring relevance.) The fourth theme is Romania, which, despite its idiosyncrasies as theonly violent 1989 revolution, figures here as the case study of choice. Within each of thesethemes, we find broad reflective chapters (often anchored within a debate over FrancisFukuyama’s “end of history” thesis) paired with microhistories of illuminating episodes(for example, the development of Ceaușescu’s rhetorical style, the politics of transitionaljustice across countries).

In general, the mode of analysis is that of the history of ideas—their genesis, theirexplanatory power vis-à-vis material or institutional constraints, and their decay. There ismuch analysis here of the thinking behind Gorbachev’s radical reorientation of Soviet foreignpolicy, of the ideological lineages of Romania’s peculiar brand of “national Stalinism,” andof the significance of dissident intellectuals like Václav Havel and Adam Michnik. Thisemphasis on the power of ideas is perhaps most pithily encapsulated by the title of a chapterprobing the origins of Yugoslavia’s tragic civil wars: “Where Was the Serbian Havel?”

To those more skeptical about the causal force of ideas in politics—compared with,say, economic interests or institutions—this volume will seem limited, or at least partial.That, to my mind, is not really a persuasive criticism because the editors are quite explicitabout their goals. My concern is rather that, in attempting as broad and interdisciplinary aretrospective as this, the volume succumbs to a loss of focus and misses opportunities forthe individual chapters to engage directly with each other. Where such engagement occurs—as, for example, in the chapters on transitional justice and in the debate between MarkKramer and Vladislav Zubok on Gorbachev’s foreign policy goals—it succeeds beautifully.A second critique, which will no doubt sound paradoxical given the first, is that thecontributors’ heavy concentration on topics like Gorbachev, Ceaușescu, and lustration politicscrowds out others seemingly natural for a volume aiming to reassess 1989. The discussionof, say, the politics of economic reform, European integration, political party development,and majority-minority tensions is surprisingly underdeveloped. Fortunately, theseshortcomings do not detract from this book’s valuable contribution to the project of rethinking1989’s significance; instead, they show why more such rethinking is needed.

Conor O’Dwyer, University of Florida

Book Reviews 351

SOCIAL SCIENCES, CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA, AND OTHER

Stevenson, Struan. Stalin’s Legacy: The Soviet War on Nature. Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited,2012. xvi + 254 pp. £20.00. ISBN 978-1-78027-090-6.

This well-intentioned but misleadingly titled book does not present an analysis of Sovietenvironmental policy or an account of Stalin’s attitude toward nature, but rather a travelogueof recent trips taken by the author, a Scottish delegate to the European Parliament, to theformer Soviet republics of Central Asia. Stevenson recounts his visits to a number ofecological hot spots, dedicating the most space to the “Polygon,” the site in Kazakhstanwhere hundreds of nuclear tests were conducted from the 1950s to the 1980s, but alsodiscusses the environmental catastrophes related to the diversion of the rivers that feed theAral Sea. Stevenson’s main contention is that Central Asia’s current environmental woesare the result of a conscious Stalinist plan to disrupt nature, although he does not prove hiscase so much as frequently assert it.

This is not a book designed to satisfy scholars, historians especially. Although there isa brief bibliography, none of the works consulted are historical in nature. There are nofootnotes or citations in the text, preventing the reader from verifying the author’s claims.This decision is more problematic given the author’s penchant for hyperbole; twice theauthor blames Stalin for the death of sixty million people, a number far out of line withpublished estimates, even if all of the casualties of World War II are assigned to him alone.Readers interested in an academic work detailing the environmental problems of the SovietUnion would be better served to consult Murray Feshbach and Arthur Friendly’s well-sourced Ecocide in the USSR.

Most likely, the true purpose of this book is to assist Stevenson in his laudable effortsto raise awareness of the public health problems in Central Asia, but while it may berhetorically effective to link environmental destruction to Stalinism, there is a danger indoing so. (Stevenson reports that his first book about Central Asian environmental troubles,Crying Forever, has raised more than $100,000 to build hospitals for victims of nucleartests in Kazakhstan.) Holding Stalin personally responsible for the consequences ofindustrialization and the Cold War testing may be comforting, but doing so assumes an all-encompassing Soviet animus toward the natural world that Stevenson supports only withone tendentiously selected quote from Maxim Gorky, and more importantly,compartmentalizes the environmental crisis as a vestige of a social movement recedinginto the past. The environmentally destructive practices that Stevenson assigns to Stalin,among them nuclear weapons testing, river diversion, and unchecked industrial expansion,are all too prevalent today, although most have been outsourced from the West to developingcountries—a process that the Soviet Union did not take part in.

At the same time, Stevenson is oddly ambivalent about a more direct legacy of theSoviet era: the personalized, authoritarian, and corrupt rule of figures like Islam Karimovand Nursultan Nazarbayev, who receive praise for their achievements and even for theirplans to divert rivers in ways that the Soviets rejected as too radical. There may be deeper,altruistic motives behind Stevenson’s often puzzling characterizations of Soviet and post-Soviet environmental attitudes, but the finished result is a lost opportunity to present anuanced study of the lasting impact of communism on Central Asia in the twenty-firstcentury.

Stephen Brain, Mississippi State University


Hardman, Helen. Gorbachev’s Export of Perestroika to Eastern Europe: DemocratisationReconsidered? Perspectives on Democratic Practice. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2012. xii + 287 pp. £60.00. ISBN 978-0-7190-7978-8.

The leaders of contemporary Russia cannot help but sense that their presumed transition toliberal democracy is thought by the United States to be inadequate. Their privatizationmeasures have gone off according to specifications and will no doubt continue. But mostAmerican observers of consequence think their transition to democracy is in need of a newchapter. No wonder that, when Russian crowds demand leniency for Pussy Riot, VladimirPutin thinks he sees the hand of Hillary Clinton. Has Putinism really turned back thedemocratic impulses of the Gorbachev years? Helen Hardman does not think so. In fact,she does not think that Gorbachev really had them in the first place. His struggle againstthe opponents of perestroika, especially in 1987–89, on which she centers her attention,was not, in her view, a fight for democracy in any recognizable western sense, but only anattempt to shore up the power of the one-party regime and carry out economic reformbased on the Chinese model. Accordingly, the managed pseudo-democracy that clothesPutin’s Our Russia party in an impenetrable shell is no accident. It is more or less thefruition of Gorbachev’s campaigns to put a “democratic” face on his dictatorship.

Historians of the end of Communism and students of today’s Russia cannot say thatthey have heard all this before. They will want to consider Hardman’s study and weigh thearray of evidence, much of it from archives, press sources in several languages, includingHungarian, and interviews with actors in the drama. Careful readers will want to peruse thecopious quotations, even if they do not interpret them exactly as Hardman does. Theymight even want to compare what Hardman says in this volume to the remarks of StephenCohen on the possibilities of Gorbachevian democratization. Not that these two would belikely to agree. However, according to both authors, Gorbachev does indeed appear to betrying to square the circle, to create a democratic system under one party.

Then what was Gorbachev really trying to do in 1987 in the Soviet Union and inEastern Europe when he took on the Stalinists, whom he called the “right”? Hardman doesnot think that Gorbachev’s opponents were really on the right. She sees Egor Ligachev, thesecond secretary around whom opposition to perestroika coalesced, perhaps against hisown wishes, as merely a foil for Gorbachev, who wanted to be a centrist between the “right”and wild men like Boris Yeltsin. So far so good. Gorbachev no doubt hoped to be thewinning centrist, as in previous Soviet succession struggles. But why the drive to churncadres so persistently from the moment he took office? Hardman does not know how toanswer this, so she falls back on the assumption, rather weakly stated, that it was all for thepurpose of economic reform. Were all of Gorbachev’s ruinous struggles for the fundamentalpurpose of restoring market economy to the bloc? Hardman cites cartoons in the Yugoslavpress making the case that it was all a matter of hard currency debt to the West that led toperestroika. To my mind, Hardman takes this much too seriously, as she does the story ofLeonid Abalkin, to the effect that Gorbachev was actually in cahoots with his captors duringthe August coup of 1991. She seems not to reckon with any of the imperatives of thesuccession process, the role of the second secretary as established under Mikhail Suslov, orthe experience of the past. Even so, this book must be read.

Anthony D’Agostino, San Francisco State University

Book Reviews 353

Kostadinova, Tatiana. Political Corruption in Eastern Europe: Politics after Communism.Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2012. xiv + 303 pp. $62.50. ISBN 978-1-58826-811-2.

Back in 1989–90 hardly anyone would have mentioned “corruption” if asked about themost formidable problems the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe would have tocope with. Today it would be impossible to imagine a serious discussion of postcommunistpolitics from which this problem is omitted. What are the causes of corruption? What areits manifestations? What are its effects? These questions attract and will continue toattract considerable scholarly attention.

Tatiana Kostadinova’s new book is a valuable contribution to the vibrant subfield ofcorruption studies. Relying on two specific measurements of corruption, TransparencyInternational’s Corruption Perception Index and the World Bank’s Control of CorruptionIndex, the author offers analyses of various factors that affect the spread of corrupt practicesas well as the impact of such practices on postcommunist polities. The book consists of anintroduction, conclusion, and eight substantive chapters. The chapters are tightly organizedand well structured; each begins with an informative literature review followed by adiscussion of various hypotheses which the author intends to explore, whereupon thehypotheses are tested by means of an array of quantitative techniques (the regression analysisseems to be the author’s preferred analytical tool). The chapters conclude with lucidlywritten discussions of the essential findings.

Of central importance are the findings presented in chapter 3, where the authordemonstrates that politics is “cleaner” in countries that share the following characteristics:lighter regulatory burden, relatively high GDP per capita, and an association agreementwith the European Union. In contrast, factors such as openness to trade and the type ofelectoral system are shown to have a minor impact on levels of corruption. Chapter 4addresses issues related to party finance regulations, and what the author establishes thereis that such regulations actually do matter: in countries where parties are directly subsidizedby the state (as opposed to relying exclusively on donors) and where parties are required todisclose their financials accounts corruption is less widespread. A case study of the rise ofwhat the author describes as “networks of corruption” in Bulgaria and a survey of regionaldevelopments in the Balkans are followed by the concluding two chapters, in which theauthor deals with the consequences of corruption. Perhaps her most important finding isthat even though the attitude of most East Europeans towards the political classes thatgovern them is negative, this attitude does not translate into antidemocratic sentiments.Using the World Values Survey data set, Kostadinova demonstrates that even though thecitizens of postcommunist countries perceive politicians as corrupt and political institutionsas dysfunctional, support for democracy is still very strong. She also shows that it is difficultto predict whether the widespread perception that politicians abuse their power in order toenrich themselves will result in lower electoral participation (alienation) or higher electoralparticipation (efforts to “throw the rascals out”): “the relative size of the clusters of activeand demobilized voters may vary across countries and over time, depending on the level ofdemocratization and the scale of corruption” (p. 230). While some readers may regard thisconclusion as heuristically stale, in my view it is important because it implies that theimpact of corruption on democratic political processes cannot be straight-jacketed in auniversally valid formula.

Inevitably, some readers will notice problems with the book. For example, in thebeginning Kostadinova announces that she will deal only with “grand,” not “petty”


corruption, and this statement is problematic in at least three ways: the distinction is notexplained in a satisfactory manner; the data sets the author uses are not compiled with sucha distinction in mind; and in subsequent chapters she routinely deals with what can only bedescribed as “petty” corruption, including the misbehavior of civil servants and partyfunctionaries. Another problem with the book is the questionable conceptualization of“culture.” She rank-orders East European nations on a secular-traditional continuum, butthis choice of a proxy for culture is, in my view, vastly inferior to available alternatives,such as religion, historical legacies (for example, Habsburg versus Ottoman), or socialstructure (for example, patrimonial versus modernized societies). This book also exhibitsthe limitations of strictly quantitative approaches to the study of corruption: readers interestednot in the question “how much corruption is there in Eastern Europe?” but in issues like“what types of corrupt practices are prevalent, how do they evolve over time, and how dovarious distinct forms of corrupt behavior affect political processes?” will perhaps remaindisappointed. Such critical comments notwithstanding, the fact remains that Kostadionvahas written an important book which presents important data in a systematic way andimproves our understanding of corruption as an enduring element of postcommunist politics.

Venelin I. Ganev, Miami University (Ohio)

Thorson, Carla L. Politics, Judicial Review, and the Russian Constitutional Court. NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. xviii + 199 pp. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-230-29872-9.

This book addresses important questions posed by the rise and fall of judicial reviewtribunals, the interplay between law and politics in post-authoritarian regimes, and thecreation and maintenance of the rules of the game in the high-level body politic. By analyzingthe unexpected trajectories of the USSR Constitutional Oversight Committee (1989–91)and of the Russian Constitutional Court (1991–2010) through the lenses of political scienceinterest-centered approaches, this book attempts to define conditions in which constitutionalcourts are likely to flourish or fail. Importantly, the argument distinguishes betweenconditions necessary for the creation of independent and powerful judicial review tribunalsand those necessary for the maintenance of such tribunals. To set up an independentconstitutional court, Carla Thorson argues, the presence of three conditions is necessary: aproper institutional design (p. 12), political uncertainty faced by the constitution-makers(p. 15), and a large number of constitution-makers (p. 18). The success of the constitutionalcourt, however, depends on a greater number of factors. Some of them are outside thecontrol of the court: interests of politicians who must prefer a strong and autonomous courtand be satisfied with the outcomes of court judgments (pp. 19 and 26), litigants’ perceptionthat the court is neutral (p. 153), and the difficult process of amending the constitution,which makes judicial review an attractive way to seek favorable interpretation ofconstitutional rules (p. 23). Other factors are under control of the court: interests of judgeswho must issue fair and balanced decisions in order to keep the court attractive to politicians(p. 26) and the ability of the court to enforce its decisions (p. 153). Thorson argues thatboth the Soviet Constitutional Oversight Committee, which disappeared together with theUSSR, and the first Russian Constitutional Court, which President Yeltsin suspended shortlyafter the bloody confrontation with the Parliament in the fall of 1993, scored low on thesefactors. In contrast, the second Russian Constitutional Court, which had been reactivated

Book Reviews 355

by Yeltsin after court-packing in 1995, scored higher than its predecessors, albeit withouthaving reached actual power and independence.

The key reason for this difference (and the inability of the Constitutional Court tobecome a powerful and independent tribunal) is the instrumental use of judicial review asa tool for propaganda (p. 36), bargaining (pp. 53, 141, 144, and 154), or domination (pp.69, 72 and 73), and the instrumental view of legal institutions in general by Russia’s leaders,as Thorson correctly points out throughout the book. This conclusion is not surprising toRussia watchers. Indeed, the literatures on legal transplants and on other post-Communistconstitutional courts, which Thorson ignores, show that instrumentality underlies manyconstitutional, legal, and judicial reforms. Thorson’s contribution is that she assemblesand analyzes evidence of this instrumental approach of key politicians toward the institutionthat is supposed to police them. She does this skillfully for the two-year period (1995–96)during which the Russian Constitutional Court restarted its work under the 1993 Constitution.

However, the development of the court after 1996 could have been analyzed in a moresystematic way. The book briefly mentions that this tribunal is perceived as biased towardthe federal executive (p. 145), yet it guarantees “fair rules of the game” (pp. 121 and 157)and is frequently used by subnational political elites (pp. 141–46). If this is indeed true,then it poses an interesting puzzle for comparative politics. The book’s discussion of thedevelopment of the Court between 1997 and 2010 is very short (pp. 145–52) and lacks ananalysis of judicial decision-making, the key factor that make a difference in judicial power,according to the theoretical argument of the book. In addition, if the interests of politiciansare crucial for judicial empowerment, then their interests in making the court strong orweak should have been defined and examined more directly and systematically. For example,concrete and reliable evidence could strengthen the author’s claim that Russian politicianscontinued to find a constitutional court both “viable and valuable as a means to continue apolitical discussion” (p. 147).

In addition, the text suffers from numerous conceptual and factual errors. Discussionof the forms of judicial review—abstract vs. concrete (p. 16) and a priori vs. a posteriori(p. 20)—is misleading and is not connected with the rest of the book. The USSRConstitutional Oversight Committee never had the status of “highest judicial body in thecountry” (p. 33). Justice Vladimir Strekozov’s last name is repeatedly spelled as Strekazov(pp. 41, 162–63). Justice Boris Ebzeev is Karachai and not from the Volga Tatar region(p. 40). President Yeltsin nominated Tatar journalist Raif Biktagirov, not “R. Bektagraf,”for a judgeship on the Court (p. 48). Contrary to the assertion on page 48, the 1994 law onthe Russian Constitutional Court does not provide for presidential nominations of candidatesfor the bench “based on recommendations from a judicial qualifications commission.”Similarly, Russia’s council of judges does not oversee “judges’ discipline throughout thecountry,” contrary to the statement on page 152. Instead, Russia’s council of judges is abody of judicial self-government responsible for drafting judicial budgets, while judicialqualification commissions oversee judicial discipline.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, the book helps to explain, in an accessible way,high-level judicial politics in Yeltsin’s tumultuous Russia (1992–96), makes clear that courtsbecome powerful only when politicians want them to become powerful, and develops anumber of interesting hypotheses. These could be tested not just on the basis of Russia’sexperiments with judicial review, but also on the basis of the development of accountabilitymechanisms in other post-authoritarian regimes.

Alexei Trochev, Nazarbayev University


Sutela, Pekka. The Political Economy of Putin’s Russia. Routledge Frontiers of PoliticalEconomy. New York: Routledge, 2012. xx + 256 pp. $145.00. ISBN 978-0-415-69737-8.

The second decade of Russia’s market economy, admits Pekka Sutela, was not as excitingas the first. The “Putin years” of the 2000s were a time of normalization and stabilization,one when politics were less important than economics. This more normal economy, arguesSutela, lends itself better to conventional economic analysis than before. A main purposeof his book is to offer a comprehensive survey of that analysis.

Sutela covers his topic in seven chapters. The first two are on the roots and nature ofPutin’s system, economic and political. A final chapter deals with Russia’s response to theglobal financial crisis after 2008. In between are chapters on four particular dimensions ofthe economy: the growth record, the energy sector, the financial system, and welfare issues.The introductory chapter is subtitled “Burden of the Past.” For all the normalization, Russiaremains a special case. The factor that Sutela emphasizes above all is the country’s history.“For this book the key fact about Russia is that it used to be the Soviet Union” (p. 2). Bythat he means especially the Soviet legacy of institutions and policies and, importantly,modes of thinking. Sutela is a leading historian of Soviet economic thought, and he bringsthat expertise to bear in a discussion of how that legacy has influenced current thinking,including the thinking of Vladimir Putin. Sutela has a notable discussion of Putin’s 1997dissertation for a graduate degree in economics.

Each of the middle chapters combines extensive discussion of economists’ theoriesand policy proposals with an assessment of the outcomes. A chapter on “Economic Growth,”for instance, both discusses growth theory and presents evidence how the Russian economyhas performed. A chapter on “Energy” is mainly about the oil and gas sectors and theirrelationship to the European market. But it also has a final section on the “oil curse”—what it is and whether Russia suffers from it. Sutela, who spent a good part of his career ashead of a research arm of the Finnish central bank, devotes one chapter to the financialsystem (again, describing the evolution of institutions but also of policy). The fourth of themain chapters, which bears the heading “Welfare,” is a disjointed one, with much preliminarydiscussion before moving, finally, to some direct welfare issues: demography, health, andincome distribution.

As extensive as the book is, it is not fully comprehensive. Notably absent is anyseparate discussion of Russia’s foreign economic activity. Regional issues—or indeedanything relating to the spatial dimensions of Russia’s economy—are another neglectedarea.

This is a dense volume. With well over four hundred references cited, it is anencyclopedic review of research on what happened in Russia from 2000 through 2008. Assuch, it is a useful book. But it is not a user-friendly one. Too often, having presented alarge amount of information on a topic, it then fails to interpret and evaluate. The readerreaches the end of a chapter or section and begs for a bottom line: What is it that is importanthere? What out of all this do you, the expert, regard as valid and robust and what not?

A big part of the problem is a lack of organization. It is as if the text is stripped ofeverything that provides hierarchy. There are very few subheads. There are no footnotesand no endnotes. The index is so terse and has so many omissions as to be almost withoutvalue. The effect is that there is little sense of priority. All this means that the book willwork best for those with much inside knowledge already, or those willing to use the book as

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a starting point for their own further research and reading, to consult other works andreferences.

Clifford G. Gaddy, The Brookings Institution

Mendras, Marie. Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2012. xvi + 349 pp. $37.50. ISBN 978-0-231-70390-1.

Marie Mendras has written a solid study of the Putin political regime, emphasizing thestructural tension between a highly effective authoritarian political machine and agovernmental system that cannot effectively manage the modernization of post-CommunistRussia. Vladimir Putin’s accomplishments, and they are many, have also defined the limitsof the political system over which he presides. On the one hand, Putin proved able to assertthe interests of the state over Russia’s financial barons sufficiently to establish severalreserve funds out of energy revenues that allowed Russia to absorb the collapse of oilprices in 2008–9 (in stark contrast to Yeltsin in 1998 and Gorbachev after 1986). On theother, Putin’s Russia is more dependent on rents from energy receipts than ever, with thefuels sector accounting for two-thirds of Russia’s exports, a third of the country’s GDP, upto half of all public sector budget revenue, while employing just two percent of the country’sworkforce. Corruption remains rampant and Russia’s privileged elites themselves do notbelieve that Russia can truly be modernized. The economy remains characterized by “growthwithout development,” with GDP growth today half of what it was before the crash in 2008(3–4 percent vs. 7–8 percent). In effect, Russia’s elites, who have parked the bulk of theirliquid assets abroad in safe Western accounts, do not require that Russia be modernized inthe Western sense (rule of law, property rights free of political intervention, genuine elections,transparent policy-making, and so on) in order to maintain their personal futures. So longas they stay out of high politics and manage insider networks paying due deference (anddues) to Putin’s various policy subalterns, Russia’s economic elites can maintain theireconomic and social position.

Within this context, Mendras analyses a series of apparent paradoxes, for example: astrong regime but a weak state; elite loyalty without trust; a civil society without a politicalsociety; mass support for Putin but not his government; and, as noted, economic growth inthe absence of economic development. Mendras concludes by analyzing the evidentlyfixed December 2011 parliamentary elections and their implications for the future of Putin’sregime. She believes that the mass protests triggered by the evidence disseminated bysocial media of crass regime manipulation of the vote constitute a bell-weather of futureproblems for the regime. But is Putin’s system really as unstable as Mendras asserts?(p. 231) No doubt, his regime has become dependent on relatively high prices of oil andnatural gas to maintain living standards and co-opt political clients. Should the price offossil fuels fall deeply and remain low for a long time, Putin’s regime would come undersubstantial stress. Yet by comparison, the Brezhnev regime with which Putin’s is oftencompared was profoundly stable (if increasingly ineffectual) until Gorbachev moved toundermine the institutional foundations of the Soviet system (that is, the centrally plannedeconomy, which required a Communist party with a political monopoly; the Communistparty, which required a centrally planned economy in order to maintain its political monopoly;and the credible use of force to maintain the system). So long as no effective alternativeemerges either from among Russia’s elites or Russian society—and Mendras has given us


a vivid analysis of how improbable either is—Putin may well be able to maintain the integrityof the system that he has built even in the face of demonstrably declining performance.Eventually, though, the issue of political succession will test the viability of Putin’sachievement; for Russia remains the only post-Communist country in Europe (includingBelarus) where executive power has yet to yield to the opposition through free and fairelections.

Allen C. Lynch, University of Virginia

Salmenniemi, Suvi, ed. Rethinking Class in Russia. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. xiii +270 pp. $114.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-2137-5.

This book is a valuable contribution to the literature on social inequality and transformationin Russia and beyond. The volume presents a rich array of perspectives on class identitiesand practices, with a focus on qualitative approaches (primarily interview data) and withattention to working class, middle class, and (to a lesser extent) elite experiences. Thetwelve research articles foreground subjective perceptions and/or discursive representationsof class; less attention is given to empirical measures (though many authors situate theirinterviewees professionally or otherwise). Rather, class is illuminated in terms of howpeople narrate their own positionings and in terms of how moralized discussions of class(both informal and institutionalized) have tangible effects in people’s lives. For example,Olga Gurova’s essay describes how middle-class subjects talk about the significance ofclothing, which they tend to identify as both central to their own sense of class positioningand as unimportant, insofar as they distance themselves from materialist snobbishness.Marja Rytkönen and Ilkka Pietilä highlight how health itself is viewed as a sign of classprivilege, while Anna Rotkirch, Olga Tkach, and Elena Zdravomyslova examine the mixtureof class distance and pseudo-kin closeness that is negotiated by domestic workers and theiremployers. Sirke Mäkinen considers how class identifications are invoked in the rhetoricsof two of Russia’s major political parties. Several essays consider the intersection of classand gender identities. We see how the “glamour” of wealthy Russian wives is depicted inpopular media (Saara Ratilainen) and how gender ideologies inform representations ofpoverty and neblagopoluchnye sem'i (Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov). Weobserve how the travails of working-class men (Charles Walker) and middle-aged men(John Round) are shaped by ideas about male bread-winning as well as gendered shifts inlabor markets, and we gain glimpses into the gender and kinship concerns that shape singlemothers’ decisions about legal claims and property ownership (Vikki Turbine).

As a group the articles draw attention to both the legacies of Soviet class and genderideologies and the ways in which current realities are aptly described as “neoliberal,”paralleling developments elsewhere in the world. Trubina links young people’s ideas aboutclass mobility with “neoliberal individual-centred discourse” (p. 204). In her essay oncontemporary self-help literature, Salmenniemi comments that “responsibility has becomea dominant moral virtue and a key class-making discourse in Russia (and beyond), proposingan individual-centred cure to a range of problems originating from social-structuralrelationships of power” (p. 81). This neoliberal convergence might not seem surprising orunique; but given that just a few years ago many qualitative social scientists were warningagainst the assumption that Russia’s marketization would yield predictable and familiarforms of capitalist culture, these observations are notable and merit ongoing analytical

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consideration. In his afterword, Steph Lawler observes based on these studies that WesternEuropean countries, the United States, and Russia clearly share “the normalization of classprivilege ... and the symbolic denigration and devaluation of those who are dominated inclass terms” (p. 264). But to what extent do these normalization processes function insimilar ways? How does the normalization of inequality operate differently in Russia todaythan in the Soviet era? Given that we see both historical continuities in Russia and clearparallels with capitalist experiences elsewhere in the world, how are we to piece throughthe layered, persistent, and tensive effects of Soviet ideologies such as kul'turnost' andtheir more recent, neoliberal transformations? Many of the articles render glimpses ofinsight on these issues, but the volume does not offer strong “take-away” answers to theseadmittedly sticky questions (despite Salmenniemi’s thorough Introduction and her usefuloverview, with Harri Melin, of literatures on Soviet and Russian class). While in this sensethe volume underplays its own contributions, this is a rich collection that should be relevantfor scholars of Russia and of class transformation more broadly.

Jennifer Patico, Georgia State University

King, Alexander D. Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. xviii + 329 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8032-3509-0.

Anthropologists have long acknowledged that “culture” is a term invented by scholars.What receives much less attention is the fact that “culture” has long since migrated intopopular usage, and these popular uses have their own genealogies. Alexander King’s bookseeks to remedy this. It is, he argues, not an ethnography of Koryak culture but rather “anethnography of speaking about indigenous culture in Kamchatka, Russia” (p. 2), a delicatebut important distinction which King carries successfully throughout the book. Hisethnography effectively illustrates the gap between hegemonic institutionalized structuresthat presume such a thing as “Koryak culture” corresponds to an identifiable group ofpeople and can be described, taught, and preserved and the lived experience of people inKamchatka who do things that index “Koryakness” without necessarily identifying as such.The result is a book that is both theoretically compelling and an engaging read.

Chapter 1 examines the local genealogy of both “culture” and the ethnonym “Koryak”in Kamchatka produced by missionaries, ethnographers, and the Soviet state. Chapters 2and 3 focus on Koryak dance, both in small village ensembles and urban performancegroups. Dance provides King with a lens to examine how different local conceptions ofauthenticity, culture, and “getting it right” are brought into play in trying to determine whatis “Koryak” about “Koryak dance.” Chapter 4 examines “The Culture of Schools andMuseums.” Schools and museums, he argues, are designed around a symbolic definition ofculture, in which “cultural differences are symbols that can be learned” (p. 169). Kingshows very clearly how success in learning the symbolic forms of culture taught in schooltakes people further and further away from the ways of life in which these cultural formsare meaningful, but for most contemporary Kamchatkans there is no other viable option.Chapter 5 focuses on attempts to teach Koryak language in school. Both of these chaptersvery nicely illustrate the reasons why indigenous arts and languages are at risk in thecontemporary world, not just in Russia.


King’s discussion of attempts to teach Koryak in schools is particularly useful in thisregard. Everyone involved in the process is well intentioned and invested in the revival ofKoryak language use. However, the act of writing a textbook presumes, one might sayeven requires, a standardized language, and given dialect variation among Kamchatkangroups, this means that textbooks represents a version of Koryak that no one actually speaks.Both of these chapters are good illustrations of the kinds of “Catch-22” situations that sooften define indigenous life.

King begins with Boasian culture theory, combined with a Peircean semiotic approach,that looks for the way “culture,” “tradition,” and “authenticity” are indexed in interactions.King’s text fits well into a larger body of work on nationalism and national identity inRussia produced as a result of Stalin’s vision of a nationality policy defined by “national inform, socialist in content.” He contributes to this literature by undercutting the sharpdistinction usually drawn between “museum culture” and lived or embodied “knowing”(p. 262), showing instead the interplay between these two conceptions of culture in everydayinteractions, both among native intellectuals and reindeer-herding villagers. It is a potentreminder of the way in which “culture” is now a native term. Unlike in many contemporaryethnographies, however, the theoretical framework takes a back seat in favor of evocativedescriptions that make the book very readable for undergraduates. I found that the textenabled my students to have a productive discussion about the ideas of culture, tradition,and authenticity in everyday life. Their only critique was that King’s closing sentence, inwhich he argues that “the future of Koryak tradition is secure” (p. 262), is far more optimisticthan the rest of his descriptions warrant.

Justine Buck Quijada, Wesleyan University