The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia,1941-1944 by Alexander HillReview by: Roger R. ReeseSlavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 195-196Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148563 .

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Book Reviews 195

Glantz's work adds important texture and new documentary materials to the wartime antecedents to the Cold War. Her clearly written book effectively balances evidence and interpretation and presents a compelling case for paying attention to foreign policy for- mulation as a contested process rather than a simple top-down dictation. In short, her work shows what happens when a careful historian pays close attention to (as the saying goes) "what one clerk said to another." FDR and the Soviet Union merits wide readership among specialists on American-Soviet relations, the origins of the Cold War, and Ameri- can and Soviet military affairs.

DAVID C. ENGERMAN Brandeis University

The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North- West Russia, 1941- 1944. By Alexander Hill. Cass Series on the Soviet (Russian) Study of War. London: Frank Cass, 2005. xxvi, 195 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Photographs. Figures. $65.00, hard bound.

In this book Alexander Hill challenges the myth of the large-scale and popularly sup- ported partisan movement promoted and glamorized in Soviet historiography of the war. He focuses in particular on the area behind the front in northwest USSR in the vicinity of Leningrad. Hill shows that the numbers of participants were initially quite small and only grew to a sizeable extent when the tide had turned against the Germans and people in the occupied zones needed to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime before Soviet authority was reimposed. He also shows that the German occupation was not always harsh and did not tend to create a backlash against occupation until the tide turned against them and their measures in retreat became more oppressive.

Although the subtitle indicates that the book concerns the partisan movement, it is really more about civilian life and the organization of the German occupation in the areas behind the front lines. The partisan movement is treated in a top-down manner. One learns of the orders and decrees from Moscow and the bureaucratic infighting over who would control the partisan movement: the party, the NKVD, the NKGB, or the Red Army. At first the party intended to run partisan warfare under its auspices, but Lavrentii Beriia had other ideas and sought to control it under the NKVD. Eventually Beriia gained the up- per hand and every partisan detachment was supposed to have an NKVD presence. The army, which hoped to coordinate partisan activity with its operations at the front, was un- able to realize this hope to the degree it desired primarily due to communication and bu- reaucratic problems. In 1941, partisan operations as a whole were negligible, and they suf- fered considerable growing and organizational pains in 1942.

Of interest to the social historian was the underrepresentation of the peasantry in the partisan movement in the vastly rural areas. Overrepresented were party members, urban dwellers, and Red Army soldiers, who carried the burden of the partisan war until mid- 1943. Hill suggests that lingering resentment over collectivization and doubts about prospects for the survival of the Soviet regime kept the vast majority of peasants on the sidelines. Additionally, German occupation policies, particularly in areas under the con- trol of the military, may have been coercive and exploitative in 1941 and 1942, but usually not excessively so, and were restricted to gathering a percentage of the harvest (and not always effectively at that) and recruiting workers for German industry. The further away the peasants were from the main routes of communication, the less they felt the presence of the Nazi regime and therefore the less reason or motivation they had to risk their lives as partisans.

Anti-partisan operations were frequent, but usually small in scale. In the area under study the security forces were thinly spread out and therefore unable to wield a continu- ous heavy hand over the population; their presence thus created a commensurate low level of resistance. Reprisals against civilians were not uncommon but were generally below the level desired by the civilian administration of the occupied areas. Overall, according to

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196 Slavic Review

Hill's research, the partisan movement behind the Leningrad front seems to have been fairly weak, undermanned, and lightly armed. When pressed hard by German forces, or when they ran out of supplies, partisan units tended to retreat to the safety of Soviet terri-

tory, usually against orders. In sum, the partisan movement in northwest Russia did not

significantly contribute to breaking the siege of Leningrad, weakening the German hold of the rear areas, representing Soviet power, or affecting the German war effort in mean-

ingful ways. Hill has thoroughly researched the Russian, German, and American archives and

published documentary sources. The detailed documentation and analysis of his work adds much to the debate on the effectiveness of the partisan movement and civil life behind the lines, which has hitherto been argued without benefit of Russian archival material.

ROGER R. REESE Texas A &M University

Russia in the 21st Century: The Prodigal Superpower. By Steven Rosefielde. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xxiv, 244 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index.

Figures. Tables. $70.00, hard bound. $24.99, paper.

Steven Rosefielde, a distinguished economist, has written in part a summary and justifica- tion of his long-held and persuasive view-a view opposed to that of the Central Intelli-

gence Agency and most Sovietologists at the time-that the Soviet Union had mortgaged its economy to the military and the military-industrial complex and in part, and much more compellingly, a political-economic analysis of contemporary Russian political devel-

opment. In this light, a decade and a half of postcommunist politics and economics has not only shattered the institutional (if not moral) template of the command economy but also seriously discredited liberal politics and economics. In spite of the near catastrophic decline of Russian industrial, including military-industrial, capabilities, Russia retains

significant residual military capabilities and potential, as shown by its arms exports (for ex-

ample, 90 percent of China's arms imports come from Russia). Combined with the statist and great power presumptions behind the political regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as shown by the predominance within Putin's administration of military, intelli-

gence, and para-military personnel, there is a real danger, in Rosefielde's view, that Russia will seek to recapture its lost status as a "prodigal superpower," that is, to acquire the full set of military capabilities, with global reach, that could justify the Russian national secu-

rity elite's claim to international greatness. Rosefielde is properly skeptical whether such a capability actually lies within the reach

of the Russian state in the foreseeable future as well as clear about the debilitating effects on Russia's integration into the global system of making the attempt. At the same time, there is little question that some such tendency represents the "default" preference of Rus- sia's national security elites who are anxious to reassert Russian standing in the world, al-

though they have been constrained to date by Putin's sober awareness of the powerful re- source constraints-administrative as well as economic-on Russian resurgence.

Rosefielde argues powerfully that an alternative to the path that has led Russia to this

impasse existed at the outset of the post-Soviet period, in the form of state-guided, evolu-

tionary macroeconomic and institutional transformation toward a "democratic, free en-

terprise path" (62). Yet given the ravages of institutional decomposition in the late Gor- bachev period, including the spontaneous privatization by Soviet elites of the bulk of the

country's liquifiable wealth, one wonders whether any reform program could have been

successfully executed. A competent state, not to be confused with a powerful state, acting on behalf of public interests (if only the interest of the state itself), remains a precondi- tion for coherent macroeconomic reform. And while revenues from oil and gas exports al- low Russian elites the hope of reconstituting a powerful Russia, Russia's gross domestic

product (GDP) remains less than 10 percent of that of the United States and less than

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