BOOK REVIEWS

LITERATURE AND FINE ARTS

Vishlenkova, Elena. Vizual'noe narodovedenie imperii, ili Uvidet' russkogo dano ne
kazhdomu. 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 second
half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Vishlenkova seeks to answer these
questions by investigating a wealth of graphic [relating to pictorial representation] images
(graficheskie obrazy) of the peoples of the Russian Empire. These appeared in a wide
variety of media: gravures, caricatures, depictions (on porcelain plates, cups, and other
utensils), medals, ethnographic portraits, lubki, cartouches on maps, toys, and the like. She
focuses on what she calls the pre-philosophical and pre-photographic stage of the debates
over identity because, she argues, at that time visual images were dominant in shaping
cultural perceptions of the empires peoples, especially so given the low level of literacy
among the mass of the population. Vishlenkova undertakes to decipher these images in
terms of their production techniques, their creators aims, the message(s) projected, and
their circulation between cultural settings (say, from literary journals read by the educated,
sophisticated urban milieu to the lubki and caricatures usually more popular among the
uneducated or barely literate masses of the provincial peasantry). The end result is a densely
written but fascinating peregrination in the visual imaginings of Russians and (to a lesser
extent) 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 cultural
setting. For example, she analyzes the costume portraits (and the albums compiled thereof)
accompanying ethnographic reports by foreign scientists in the employ of the Russian
Academy in the eighteenth century; or the engravings appearing in literary journals, such
as Syn Otechestva, in the beginning of the nineteenth century. She also investigates their
subsequent replication, adaptation, and reuse by both domestic and foreign engravers and
publishers. On occasion she even delves into their transmission to the average provincial
inhabitant of the empire via flyers, ephemera, and even toys. In what is surely the most
interesting part of this book, Vishlenkova discusses the manipulation of the visual images
and, therefore, the revision of their messages (both for technical reasons and so as to make
them 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 the
intellectuals (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 portrayed
the Russian Empire as a community of separate peoples identified as such by their outward
appearance and clothing. The actual process of depiction both validated existing images
of these groups and redefined the taxonomic nomenclature of the empires peoples at a

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time when Russian scientific terminology was in its infancy. Later on, in the beginning of
the nineteenth century, other authors and artists associated the costumed peoples with
particular morals and ways of life. Still others were influenced by physiognomy theories in
their 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 further
development occurred during the struggle against Napoleon, when classical images of civic
duty were synthesized with Russian and Slavic folkloric characters to produce hybrid portraits
of the Russian village as a heroic community defending itself from the marauding and
thieving 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 narod
changed according to need. It could denote a social stratum, refer to local identity associated
with regions of the empire, designate the subject peoples of the crown, or signify a cultural
nation or even an ethnic group. The projection of the Russian states imperial character
was a bit more stable. The empire was depicted as an agglomeration of distinct elements
under the monarchs protection or (and here there was a lot more variety) in allegorical
terms, especially in the cases of sculpture or architecture.
It is particularly striking, though not surprising, that the majority of the pictorial
messages were in fact government-approved and even sponsored. From the costume
albums of the late eighteenth century or the portraits of individual inhabitants of the Russian
Empire in the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the caricatures of the enemy during
the Napoleonic invasion or the postwar return to an image of Russianness exemplified in
the calm and naturalistic portraits of sturdy, hard-working peasants (men and women) created
by Venetsianov and his studentsin all of these cases it is very clear that the imperial
government tried to have a say in what was published and where, and what its message
ought to be. Simply put, the titles vizual'noe narodovedenie was in fact manipulated,
directly or indirectly, to fit the imperial governments needs of the day. A case in point was
the 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, caricatures
fell out of use and instead an image of Russia as the sacred empire of the Slavs was projected
in a variety of media (for example, medals and porcelain products). Vishlenkovas book,
therefore, focuses on the visual images produced by the elite under the governments watchful
eye. 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 peasants
were receptive to these messages or to which they absorbed them necessarily in the way
intended 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 facilitated
primarily by the empires educated classes. And she makes a cogent and convincing argument
that 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 9781-909254-10-7.
For people interested in how Great Britain reacted to Russian culture, this book is a real
treasure chest because it has so many valuable pieces (twenty-one all in all) and its scope is
so 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 British
Reception of Russian Film, 19601990: The Role of Sight and Sound, by Julian Graffy).
The volume offers us glimpses into responses to Russian literature (among them a thoughtful
article by Rachel Polonsky on how, in a fit of jealousy, Katherine Mansfields husband and
editor J. M. Murry chose to excise most of her references to Chekhov from the posthumous
publications of her letters), folklore, painting (including icons, on which there is an excellent
article by Richard Marks), music (An Extraordinary Engagement: A Russian Opera
Company 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 the
most prominent British Slavists. The introduction takes us through awareness of Russia in
England prior to the nineteenth century and explains the books title: the words belong to
George Turbervile, a sixteenth-century poet who served as secretary to Sir Thomas Randolph
when the latter was ambassador to Muscovy. The full line reads a people passing rude to
vices vile inclind (p. 3). While Mr. Turbervile was obviously not particularly impressed
by the Russians or their culture, how things changed through the centuries! By the early
1900s, one may argue, no other culture influenced the sensibilities of the British intelligentsia
as powerfully as Russiaswhether through the Ballets Russes and the English translations
of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky, or, later, the Soviet Constructivists and the silent
Soviet 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 Dostoevskys Crime
and Punishment on English murder mystery writers), A People Passing Rude concerns
itself primarily with more marginal but no less interesting manifestations of The Russian
Influence (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.
Eliots Criterion (Olga Ushakova). It also focuses on the English agents who spread this
influence through the British Isles, among them William Henry Leeds, who reviewed works
of Pushkin in the early nineteenth century (Anthony Cross); Rosa Newmarch, a popularizer
of Russian music in England at the turn of the twentieth century (Philip Ross Bullock); Jane
Harrison, a rare female scholar at Cambridge who largely taught herself Russian and became
also an accomplished translator (Alexandra Smith); and Stephen Graham, a student and
admirer of Russian Orthodoxy who eagerly shared his love for Holy Russia with his
countrymen (Michael Hughes).
The contributors to the volume range from very seasoned scholarslike Anthony
Cross and Philip Ross Bullockto very recent Ph.D.s and even pre-Ph.D.s. Since the
volume is based on the papers presented at a 2011 Cambridge Colloquium in Russian
Studies, most of the participants are from British universities, but Russia is represented by
three scholars, and there are also two American contributors: Marilyn Schwinn Smith, whose
article on the English translators of Aleksei Remizov features new archival materials, and

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Scott Ruby, whose piece on the Russian display at Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in
1851 introduces us to Pavel Sazikov, a Russian silversmith whose company was one of the
first 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 to
review.
Galya Diment, University of Washington
Baudin, Rodolphe. Nikola Karamzine Strasbourg: Un crivain-voyageur russe dans
lAlsace rvolutionnaire (1789). tudes Orientales, Slaves et No-hellniques.
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 of
1789-90 to Western Europe, Nikolai Karamzin describes the day and two nights he spent in
Strasbourg. At first sight it might appear that Rodolphe Baudin, a researcher and lecturer at
the University of Strasbourg, devotes an exaggerated amount of attention to this brief episode,
which constitutes such a tiny fraction of Karamzins work. In fact, Baudins book is a
master 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'ma
themselves: their origin and the complicated history of their publication. Baudin insists on
the division between the narrator and Karamzin the traveler, and the dual function of the
Pis'ma as an exercise in the genre of the travelers account and a partly factual record of the
tumultuous events to which the Russian was a witness. Baudins second chapter offers a
description 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 its
importance as a way-station for Russian travelers on their Grand Tour.
In chapters 3 and 4, Baudin examines Karamzins account of his stay in the city as a
factual document. He takes issue with Lotmans assertion in Sotvorenie Karamzina (1987)
that all was quiet in Strasbourg on August 6, 1789, confirming, on the basis of historical
records and testimony, Karamzins account of riots on the streets. Baudin further refutes
Lotmans assertion that after the Strasbourg stay Karamzin disappears somewhere for a
minimum of two weeks, which Lotman posits could have been used by Karamzin for a
flying visit to Paris to see his friend Aleksander Mikhailovich Kutuzov (174890), the
mystic and Mason, and an associate of Radishchev and Novikov. At the same time, Baudin
suggests that Karamzin almost certainly did not visit the attractions he describesthe
cathedral, the monument to Maurice de Saxe, and the botanical gardenplagiarizing other
travelers accounts instead, and he speculates as to why Karamzin does not mention the
name of the hotel he stayed athypothesizing that, since the letter was published only after
Kutuzov had become a persona non grata, Karamzin wanted to hide such sensitive
information 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 Karamzins text
as a literary and cultural artifact. In Karamzins description of the revolutionary chaos on
the streets of Strasbourg, Baudin sees carnivalization as Karamzins solution to the generic

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problem of integrating revolution into the sentimental genre of the travel account. In the
next two chapters, which are devoted to the Strasbourg text, Baudin first examines
descriptions of various Russian visitors to the city (most notably the Countess Golitsyn),
and then situates Karamzins Strasbourg in the context of the emerging aesthetics of
sentimentalism and preromanticism, in particular pointing to the cathedral as the writers
first experience of the Gothic style, and to his rejection of Pigalles Baroque monument to
Maurice de Saxe in favor of neoclassicism. In a final summation, Baudin argues for
Karamzins rejection of revolution in favor of progress through enlightenment.
The only frustration I had was the system of footnotes, which are not keyed to the
bibliography. The latter, bizarrely, is not exhaustive, so that one has to hunt among the
footnotes for information on sources. Nevertheless, Baudins book is scrupulously
documented and argued, elegantly written, and richly illustrated. It is an important addition
to 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 his
Morphology of the Folktale (1928) set the parameters for studying the wonder tale in the
twentieth century. Instructors of classes on Russian folklore and the international folktale
will find Sibelan Forresters translation of The Russian Folktale (Russkaia skazka, 1984) a
welcome addition to Propps works in English. The Russian Folktale is not a scholarly
monograph presenting the masters final word on the folktale. It is instead the book version
of his course at Leningrad State University, which was unfinished at the time of his death in
1970 and was augmented by lecture notes from his students. This explains the conversational
and repetitive nature of its language as well as the many insertions into the text of marginalia
and examples on which Propp likely spoke impromptu in class, but did not live to integrate
into his book. In his preface to the Russian edition, K. V. Chistov suggests that the living
voice of the teacher can be heard in this work, and one must try not so much to read
attentively as to listen attentively (p. 22).
Though confined to the folktale, the course that Propp offered was standard fare for
Soviet Russia, and on occasion his surveys of the history of collection (chap. 1) and the
history of interpretative schools (chap. 2) will remind readers of Iurii Sokolovs Russian
Folklore as well as of sections of Mark Azadovskiis History of Russian Folkloristics (Istoriia
russkoi fol'kloristiki). Propps fundamental concerns, however, are precisely those on which
he expended the greater portion of his scholarly activity: the classification and genesis of
the folktale. In The Russian Folktale he carefully separates the folktale from such genres
as myth, legend, memorate (bylichka), and tradition (predanie), while at the same time
noting instances in which clear demarcation is difficult. He finds the Aarne-Thompson
index 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 headings
or in dissecting a single plot and giving separate headings to its component parts (pp. 37-41
and elsewhere).

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Propp likewise attempts to mark boundaries between sub-genres of the folktale, of

which 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.
36). 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 Propp
gives an overview of plots comprising the Russian repertoire, retelling a number of them
with new insight. In the section on wonder tales, the structural breakthroughs of Morphology
are presented in a clear and user-friendly manner.
Forresters translation reads smoothly. As she says in her introduction, she on occasion
removed some of the redundancies characteristic of oral delivery. The book is nicely
annotated and equipped with a bibliography, an author index, and an index of subjects and
tales; there are, however, a few typos. One can only hope that this important volume will
find its way into the American classroom and that English-speaking students will have an
opportunity 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. Studies
in 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 concepts
inseparable from any interpretation of Dostoevskiis work. As Robert Reid, one of the
editors 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 [Dostoevskiis]
work. Similarly, the three major thematic areas overlap and interact in critical interpretations
that are presented throughout fourteen chapters of the book. Each essay approaches those
aspects of Dostoevskiis oeuvre from a specific, sharp, and often innovative angle,
concentrating (with one exception) on a singular work of fiction. The Brothers Karamazov
has drawn special attention of the scholars; the novel is the subject of five articles in the
book.
Cleo Protokhristova discusses this novel on the most theoretical level in terms of the
relationship between time and narrative, concluding that the tension between the two results
from its authors obsession with temporality and his ambition in this last novel to ultimately
rationalize the human condition in chronotopic terms (p. 302). The remaining four papers
on 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 Dostoevskiis
treatment of theodicy and divine justice. Miller, by analyzing Ivans retelling of the
apocryphal The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell, Zosimas disquisition on the
Book of Job, and Grushenkas folktale about the old woman and the onion, points out that
in each case God emerges on the one hand as open to persuasion, and on the other somewhat
less attractive and seeming to act according to whim (p. 276 ff.), which contradicts
Dostoevskiis basic message of Gods infinite love and goodness. Miller does not attempt
to 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. Grushenkas fable also figures in Peaces 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 qualities
which might ultimately have the power to save (p. 291). Joe Andrew and Katherine Jane
Briggs examine the role of women in The Brothers Karamazov and arrive at opposite
conclusions: according to Andrew, the author marginalizes women in his last novel, and
thus 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 the
experience of women in terms of their spiritual development and their striving against
moral, personal and institutional evil (p. 258).
It is up to the reader to judge the persuasive force of their arguments. I personally
favor Briggss position on this issue. Hristo Manolakev dissects the plot of Crime and
Punishment into symbolic spaces of the body and of the soul, the first exemplified by
Porfirii, and the second by Sonia, while the saint Lizaveta, metaphorically speaking through
the latter, allows Raskolnikov to recognize that in actuality he killed himself and helps
him to move toward salvation. In her treatment of photography and painting in The Idiot,
Olga Soboleva emphasizes the literally iconoclastic aspect of Dostoevskiis attitudes and
his deep skepticism toward the idea of absolute representation, since otherwise the dialogue
with the world will have to cease (p. 110). The same author, in co-authorship with Robin
Milner-Gulland, delineates the polysemanticism of Bobok and the array of its
interpretations, from parody to anti-symposium or mystery story. Diane Oenning
Thomson moves into almost untrodden territory in her insightful reading of the Koranic
vision of transcendence in The Idiot and The Demons. As in some of her other works, one
of the leading Dostoevskii scholars points toward a significant thematic undercurrent of
Islamic motif hidden within the narratives of these novels. Sarah Hudspith interprets
Dostoevskiis Underground Man along the lines of the need to be mocked so that he could
reach the higher plane of humanity; and the Ridiculous Man is looked upon by Robin
Aizlewood, in philosophical terms, as concerned with the phenomenal rather than the
noumenal, but at the same time seeking to make space beyond for the metaphysical, for
immortality, 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 priori
lacks a solution. Katalin Kro comes up with a complex argument regarding the rapport, in
semantic terms, of the epigraph and structure in The White Nights; and Audun J. Mrch
views 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 Dostoevskiis works is a
welcome addition to the unceasing research in the field. It is also a good model of an
interconnected scholarly discourse. The high quality of individual contributions results in
an informed and organic polylogue, a professional round-table, which should be the aim
of any such collective scholarly endeavor.
Marina Kostalevsky, Bard College
McPeak, Rick, and Donna Tussing Orwin, eds. Tolstoy on War: Narrative Art and
Historical 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 Napoleons fateful invasion of Russia, has
inspired seasoned Tolstoyans Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin to organize and edit

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a collective retrospective response to the great novel in which that invasion is so vividly
depicted. What makes this symposium especially interesting is the diversity and international
range of the eleven participants: six literary scholars, mostly Tolstoy specialists; three
historians; and two political scientists. The literary scholars are McPeak and Orwin
themselves, with Orwin contributing two fine essays, War and Peace from the Military
Point of View and The Awful Poetry of War: Tolstoys Borodino; McPeaks is Tolstoy
and Clausewitz: The Duel as a Microcosm of War; Gary Saul Morsons contribution applies
to 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 Disobediences
of War and Peace; Jeff Love under the title The Great Man in War and Peace gives a
dazzling (but to me unenlightening) display of esoteric erudition; finally, Dan Ungurianu
ably analyzes The Use of Historical Sources in the novel.
The historians are Alan Forrest, who examines the novels treatment of The French at
War; Dominic Lieven, author of a splendid recent history of these same events, Russia
against 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, which
likewise faults Tolstoy for ignoring the entire non-aristocratic population of the city. The
political 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 International
Relations Theorist avant la lettre. There are six Americans, two Britons, and one each
from Germany, Belgium, and Canada. Alas, there are no Russians.
It is impossible in this limited space to do justice to these diverse essays, but the
volume does embody justice in another sense. If the author chooses, as Tolstoy did, to
venture beyond the safe, anything-goes realm of fiction, he leaves himself open to be judged
by the professionals whose territory he has invaded. War and Peace not only represents
real historical figures and real historical events but also contains lengthy digressive essays
on such questions as historical causality. The professionals judgment of Tolstoy qua
historian is on the whole severe. His grasp of causation is weak, almost juvenile. Thus
when he ventures outside the realm of fiction, where he was an unparalleled master, into
discursive prose, Tolstoy becomes something like a country crank, ready to pontificate on
any topic that strikes his fancy. However, when he calls upon his stupendous talent for
fiction to represent how war actually feels to the men fighting it, the results are masterful. It
seems 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 to
acknowledge any power in great men, who in fact are only puppets pretending to govern
happenings that would have happened anyway. The real causes of large historical
movements, Tolstoy at times maintains, are the combined wills of all the participants, and
in this calculus the will of Napoleon counts no more than that of the lowliest private in his
army. Another more elusive cause, seemingly incompatible with the first, to which Tolstoy
attributes the outcome of major events, he labels Providence, presumably a supernatural
deity ultimately in control of history, pursuing inscrutable ends of its own. Such notions
of course find little sympathy among historians.
What none of the essays in this book makes any attempt to explainit was not the
intent of a volume focused on 1812 and waris the reason for the enormous, seemingly
everlasting popularity of this book, despite its sinsits inordinate length, its partly
misleading accounts of battles and war, and its self-indulgent philosophizing. Readers
tolerate these excesses, if they are bothered by them at all, because of their absorption in
the 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 in
which 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). ISBN
978-0-8101-2832-3.
Rebecca Stantons 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 firstperson narrative that problematizes the border between truth and fiction. As the books
title indicates, Isaac Babel, the most prominent of these writers, is the focal point: two of
the four chapters (chaps. 2 and 3) are devoted to stories that belong to his ostensibly
autobiographical cycle The Story of My Dovecote. This central part of the book is preceded
by a chapter (City through the Looking Glass: Literary Odessa) that provides a history of
Odessa as a literary image and explains how this image is reshaped in Babels definition of
his literary project. Having contextualized Babel, Stanton goes on in the second half of
chapter 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 a
tendency to roguishly manipulate the boundaries of autobiographical discourse (p. 41).
From the introduction (Stories That Come True) onward, Stanton pursues the
argument that works of fictionespecially first-person narrativescan so fully command
the readers credulity that they come to be understood as being true. The works of the
Odessan 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 motion
is analyzed with intensity and persuasive power in chapter 2, Isaac Babel: Stories That Lie
Like Truth. Two storiesChildhood: At Grandmothers and The Story of My
Dovecoteare examined here, with particular attention to the storytellers within them
and their pretensions to credibility. This close reading is the strongest part of the book; the
treatment of Great-Uncle Shoyl, builder of the dovecote and fabricator of stories, is especially
well done.
The discussion continues in chapter 3, Babels Bildungsroman and Odessan
Modernism, with a study of three other storiesFirst Love, In the Basement, and
Awakeningthat also raise questions about the aesthetic qualities, epistemological status,
and ethical boundaries of fiction (p. 74). Stanton analyzes the texts with sensitivity and
imagination (her interpretive judgments may not all be persuasive, but they are always
thought-provoking). Her argument, that events seen by the protagonist through the window
in First Love could be understood as tinged with fantasy, is productive, as is Stantons
analogy to the realm beyond the windows in the paintings of Chagall. In the final part of
the chapter, Stanton briefly looks beyond the five stories that she includes in Babels
bildungsroman and touches on their relation to other stories that Babel wrote in the pseudoautobiographical mode, as well as to the Odessa Tales. One wishes that she had expanded
this discussion to include even more of Babels oeuvre, particularly those stories that extend
his narrators story beyond Odessa and into the Soviet era.

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The tension in many autobiographical narratives written in the Soviet period, between
exploring the authentic inner self and evoking elements of an identity forged to suit prevailing
circumstances, is one thing at issue in Stantons concluding chapter, Reinventing the Self:
Valentin Kataev and Yury Olesha. Here she turns to two contemporaries who, unlike
Babel, survived Stalinism and wrote works of autobiography near the ends of their lives. In
examining Kataevs My Diamond Crown and Oleshas No Day without a Line, Stanton
engages 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, also
discussed here), Babel comes to be seen as both contemporary and precursor. Stanton
explores the ways in which the autobiographical writings of all these figures bordered
upon and implicated one another, and in inventing themselves, she argues, they were
also inventing a narrative of each other, of Odessa, and of Soviet literature that would
compete for authority with the scientific version advanced by historians (p. 41).
Stantons writing is clear and lively. It can be vivid at times, as when she describes the
narrators exultant and panicked recitation of Shakespeare in In the Basement as a case
of declamatory berserkism (p. 86). She brings to her topic a broad frame of reference
and a thoughtful approach to strategies for reading autobiographical prose. Isaac Babel
and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism makes a valuable contribution to the
understanding of truth and truth in storytelling, of Babels 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 Stanford
in 2004 for the edited volume based on that event to appear from Stanford University
Press. A number of articles in the volume have come out as part of other books, in Russian
and English, in the intervening period. The conference itself has since been unforgettably
described by Elif Batuman (whose article on Babel as clerk and clerkship as metaphor in
his work is featured in the current volume) in her essay Babel in California, first published
in n+1 (2005) and, later, in Batumans The Possessed, a memoir of her time in graduate
school at Stanford (2010). True to Babels famous quip in My First Fee that real life is
only too eager to resemble a well-devised story, The Enigma of Isaac Babel, coming out
as it does after Babel in California, might tempt a nosey academic to read the scholarly
volume for the unmasking of the identities of the Stanford conference participants disguised
in Batumans 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 2010
before completing her biography of Babel, was a journalist in the Soviet Union in the
1960s when the tale of her adventures and misadventures (p. 3) of researching Babels
biography is set. Blakes piece is a memoir about an attempted biography rather than a

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biography itself; it precedes Freidins reading of Babels play Maria as an autobiographic

text, which, at forty pages in length with several additional pages of illustrations, is the
volumes centerpiece. An ambitious intertextual reading, Freidins contribution traces some
of the most enigmatic aspects of Babels biography, such as his purported work for the
Cheka in the immediate postrevolutionary period, across Babels life and texts. Freidins
essay looks for concealed biographical clues in fiction and then ties fiction back to an
attempted biography: a productive and far-reaching approach in its own right and one that
is certain to result in a significant contribution to the field once Freidin completes his
monograph-length biography of Isaac Babel.
Part Two places Babel in various contexts of Russian history. Oleg Budnitskys essay
considers the treatment of Jews by Red Army soldiers during the Russo-Polish War of 1920
that Babel wrote about in his masterpiece, Red Cavalry, and that he would have witnessed
himself as a wartime journalist. Carol J. Avins article is also a look at the issue of Jewishness
in Babels work, which retraces some of the same ground (particularly Babels writings
about postrevolutionary Petrograd) that Freidin addresses in his essay; her particular
emphasis is on the story The Journey, which, according to Avins, connects the Jewish
experience of the Revolution with that of the Romanov royal familys experience of the
upheaval. Michael S. Gorham considers the Soviet states early attempts at the cultivation
of public language and its permutation in two works of fiction about the Civil War, Babels
Red Cavalry and Dmitrii Furmanovs Chapaev. Finally, Marietta Chudakovas contribution
traces the allusions in Babels unique stylistic idiom to immediate prerevolutionary Russian
literature and, subsequently, the thinning and diluting of Babels own stylistic
idiosyncrasies in the work of Babels 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 Babels work
in the context of works by other writers: Flauberts aestheticization of ugliness, debut
narratives by Nabokov, Chekhov, and Sholem Aleichem, and childhood narratives of Henry
Roth, respectively. An essay by Carl Weber, an internationally renowned theater director
and a professor of Drama at Stanford, recounts his work with Stanford students on the
production of Babels late play Maria (the subject of Freidins essay) that ran during the
Babel conference in 2004. In addition to Batumans contribution that addresses the
relationship between clerk and writer, mimesis and imitatio (p. 162) in the fiction of
Babel (as well as Proust and Cervantes), Efraim Sicher rounds out the volume with an
essay on Jewish intertextuality in Babels work, such as comparison of Babels prose to the
work of Odessa-born modernist Hebrew poet Bialik.
In addition to a volume edited by Harold Bloom in 1985 (Isaac Babel) and the recent
Norton Critical Edition of Babels work (edited by Gregory Freidin, 2010), The Enigma of
Isaac Babel is sure to become an invaluable addition to the bookshelves of scholars of
Isaac Babel and, given Babels centrality in Russian letters, of Russian literature and culture
more broadly.
Sasha Senderovich, Rutgers University

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Shatskikh, Aleksandra. Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. xviii + 346 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-30014089-7.
This book invites high expectations. Aleksandra Shatskikh is an authority on Malevich and
has numerous Russian-language publications to her credit. Further, she uses recently
available materials from the Khardzhiev-Chaga archivecombined with close scrutiny of
exhibition reviews from the artists lifetimeto dispel many vexing uncertainties that have
obscured the chronology of Malevichs paintings. To establish his own priority in the
hectic process of innovation that propelled avant-garde painting, Malevich deliberately
backdated a number of his works. Thus, Shatskikh describes Malevichs disingenuous
attempt to associate his iconic Suprematist work Black Square with his own 1913 set designs
for the opera Victory Over the Sun. In addition, Shatskikh demonstrates that the Black
Square was not the artists first Suprematist painting but was preceded by other, more
complex compositions. Indeed, the title of the volume under review savors of irony since
the author ousts Malevichs Black Square from its presumed position as the progenitor of
Suprematism. In Shatskikhs account, a sketch made in early summer 1915, Suprematism:
Large Black Trapezoid and Red Square, has a stronger claim to be the first Suprematist
composition.
Although the book is as much a chronicle as a cohesive narrative, one important theme
runs throughout: Malevichs desire to extend the Suprematist idea into a comprehensive
array of art forms, including music and the decorative arts. Particularly interesting are the
lengthy excurses on two individuals involved with Malevich in these efforts: Natalia
Davydova, founder of the Verbovka center for handicraft production, and Nikolai Roslavets,
Malevichs childhood friend, who became a modernist composer with a successful career
between 1912 and 1932. Malevich actively propagandized among his composer friends
for a Suprematist music that would abandon the structural conventions of classicaland
avant-gardemusic in favor of pure sound. Alas, neither Roslavets nor Malevichs friend
Mikhail Matiushin fulfilled these hopes. Roslavets, in particular, disappointed Malevich
by persistently producing art songs, nice little poems that mirrored the movements of an
individual psyche rather than evoking the measureless space of the cosmos.
Shatskikhs discussion of Davydova reveals the extent to which Suprematisms brief
history was entwined with the decorative arts. One month prior to the dramatic unveiling
of Suprematism at the 0.10 Exhibition in December 1915, Suprematist drawings appeared
along with a selection of products from the Verbovka workshop: Shatskikh cites this
exhibition as confirmation that Malevichs leap into pure abstraction preceded that of
other 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 lead
them into abstraction, while Malevich, pioneer of non-objectivity, was able to cross the
figurative/non-figurative boundary without such prompting.
To avoid bibliographic confusion, it should be stated that the volume under review is
not an English-language version of Chernyi kvadrat (2001), a book edited by Aleksandra
Shatskikh. It is an English-language reworking of Shatskikhs Kazimir Malevich i
Obshchestvo Supremus (2009). A reader may wish to have the Russian publication on
hand when tackling the current edition since it has considerably fewer illustrations than the
original. This is a significant source of irritation whenever the reader finds striking
importance 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, Schwartzs word-for-word translation is
consistently clumsy; and Shatskikhs scholarly style, with numerous appositions and
occasional ex cathedra pronouncements, does not translate smoothly into English. The
translator clearly wasted no time evaluating the readability of her end product. Phrases
such as houses with their trapezoidal roofs piled in rhythmic groups on a backdrop of
cubized 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 shapes
resembling the flattened tops of small hills that appear in icon painting would have been
more comprehensible, though scarcely more graceful.
Black Square will be essential reading for those already well acquainted with Malevichs
career. Unfortunately, it cannot be recommended for undergraduate students or for the
literate general public. Unless a reader is already familiar with the subject, the books
welter of detail is likely to be confusing rather than enlightening. In sum, Black Square is
a valuable contribution to Malevich scholarship; one can only wish that pains had been
taken to render it more user-friendly.
Janet Kennedy, Indiana University
Schulte, Jrg, Olga Tabachnikova, and Peter Wagstaff, eds. The Russian Jewish Diaspora
and European Culture, 19171937. 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 the
seriousness of the project: Glenda Abramson, Franois Guesnet, Harriet Murav, Leonid
Katsis, 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, and
historiography/politics. The uniting theme concerns Jews from Russia in the post-1917
emigration in Western Europe. Most of essays focus on Paris and Berlin, but a few authors
treat relations with the Yishuv in Palestine. Overall, it is possible to speak of a renaissance
of Russian-Jewish creativity in the interwar years by leading artists in multiple genres and
writers in many languages. The authors focus on such figures as Chagall, El Lissitzky, Ber
Ryback, Dovid Bergelson, David Vogel, Hayim Nachman Bialik, Elisheva, Leah Goldberg,
Shimon Dubnov, Lev Shestov, and Vladimir Jabotinsky, and also treat such institutions as
the ORT, the Ostjdisches 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 section
on Hebrew literature and especially Glenda Abramsons article Vogel and the City, in
which she describes the way David Vogels urban depictions emerge from his experiences
of poverty and homelessness. She quotes Vogel, who describes the bohemian down-andout atmosphere where much of this creativity was taking place: We have again been in
Paris for about a month. We have had many moves and innumerable tribulations in the past
two years. My return to Berlin was uselessno flour and no Torah. We escaped from
there while we still could and travelled around Poland for two months. I was hoping to find
some concrete advantage in all this, but even there I didnt succeed and left empty-handed.

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Now Paris. ... In the difficulty of these times it seems that there is no place in the world for
people like us (p. 43).
A wonderful article by Zoya Kopelman concerns borrowings from Russian in Hebrew
literature titled Marginalia of the Hebrew Renaissance: The Enrichment of Literary Hebrew
through Calques of Russian Phrases in the Works of Elisheva and Leah Goldberg.
Examining the way famous phrases from Russian poetry (Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, and
the like) found their way into Hebrew poetry through translation, she shows how the Russian
language composed a substratum of the poetic language, and therefore has become part of
modern Hebrew without revealing its origins.
I also found Jrg Schultes study of Nahum Slouschz exciting because so little has
been written about this scholar who wrote one of the pioneering books on modern Hebrew
literature. Friends with Ben-Yehuda, Tchernichowsky, and Bialik, Slouschz was part of the
Odessa crowd that insisted on a Hebraic revolution in the diaspora. His task was to lambast
the criticism that Hebrew was a dead language and draw attention to growing number of
talented writers and their production.
Finally, one might pay attention to the continuing work of Leonid Katsis on the unknown
oeuvre of the early Vladimir Jabotinsky through the decoding of pseudonyms and
contextualization. One result of this research is the image of a writer more engaged with
the political events of his time and more professional in his activity as a journalist.
Apparently, Jabotinsky often wrote on minor events in Russias southwest, and on culture
and 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 was
defined not by the editors but by the contributors.
The volume as a whole is an embarrassment of riches. For researchers of Eastern
European Jewish history and culture this book can serve as a resource thanks to the
bibliographies at the end of each article. Because of the volumes high price, it is
unlikely any single individual would buy it, but I suggest that readers ask their libraries to
purchase it.
Brian Horowitz, Tulane University
Russian Film Posters (19001930). 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, this
book is an exact reprint of Nina Babarina, The Silent Film Poster: Russia 19001930
(Moscow, 2001). The title of the 2012 collection is misleading because the actual
chronological parameters of the reproductions are different: the earliest poster dates from
1908 and the latest from 1935, when avant-garde style had been displaced by Socialist
Realism. Of the 161 posters included in the book, approximately 70 percent date from the
1920s, with an expectedly heavy dose of the Stenberg brothers work; the remaining posters
pertain to the silent era through 1917, and just a few realist works from the early 1930s
close the collection. Dr. Maria-Christina Boerner has provided a short but informative
introduction for the general reader which outlines similarities to lubok in the earliest film
posters, then moves on to the influence of European book art, illustrated magazines, and

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317

Art Nouveau on posters for early silent films, such as Bezdna, and devotes most of the
essay to the ways in which the Soviet avant-garde took up the film poster as an applied
medium for the expression of new ideas. Of central importance was the Stenberg brothers
integration of cinematic and constructivist effects (montage, dynamism, fades, lighting
effects, graphic-photo combinations, geometric shapes) into their film posters. Russian
Film Posters (19001930) is a nice coffee table book for film lovers, but Slavists should
not expect any revelations. Those interested in 1920s works are better served by Susan
Packs 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: Socialist
Realism 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 a
lens to examine the nuanced relationships between the Union of Soviet Composers, opera
theaters, 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 the
roles of individuals within these institutions, who often operated according to their own
predilections and personal politics, Herrala illuminates the ways in which they responded
to the demand for clear definitions of socialist realism and formalism in Soviet music. Her
analysis thus reveals how centralized control of Soviet music never came to fruition.
Herralas sources reveal her extensive research in Russian archives and engagement
with current historical scholarship. She builds upon the research of similar histories written
by Leonid Maximenkov and Kiril Tomoff by examining several state agencies; yet her
approach exposes interconnectedness between those multiple agencies instead of a topdown push, illuminating a network of musical politics. Herrala shows this complexity by
analyzing how leaders of major agencies mediated between each other, high-ranking party
officials, composers, and musicologists. Such administrators, who were also composers
and musicologists, constantly moved in and out these positions for various reasons, adding
to the instability and inconsistency that marks the cultural politics of this time. Herralas
analysis effectively, though sometimes inefficiently, teases out these inconsistencies to reveal
a complex network of interaction between entities and individuals to create the ideal Soviet
opera; a goal that, as she argues, was never successfully achieved.
Herrala especially excels in providing a fascinating and grounded discussion of the
musicologist Boris Asafyev and his role in the 1948 resolution that deeply affected several
composers including Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, and Nikolay Myaskovsky.
In her analysis of hand-written drafts and other documents, Herrala challenges long-held
criticisms of Asafyevs engagement in the discrediting of these composers by demonstrating
the extent to which Asafyev was involved in the authorship of the infamous speech against
musical formalism. In so doing, she offers a sensitive and detailed account of his participation
in 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. Although
Asafyev and the 1948 resolution were indirectly part of her discussion about opera and
cultural politics, her self-proclaimed focus for the book, this chapter is an example of her

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attempt to create a nuanced reading of this particular event and the difficulty of the artistic
individuals negotiation with the state in its multiple manifestations.
Herralas book is a worthwhile contribution to English-language scholarship. Although
written in a difficult style, marred with errors in organization and language, and lacking
reference to much musicological literature in the West, the content and substantial research
still makes this book an interesting and valid read for scholars engaged with Soviet cultural
politics.
Joan Titus, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Leving, Yuri, ed. Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokovs Puzzles, Codes, Signs and
Symbols. New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2012. xx + 410 pp. $34.95.
ISBN 987-1-44114-263-4.
Vladimir Nabokovs Signs and Symbols is one of the most moving and evocative stories
the author ever wrote. Just a few pages long, the story concentrates on the anxiety and
frustration felt by an elderly migr couple whose son has tried to commit suicide in a
mental institution. At night, as the couple considers what to do about the son, the phone
rings. It is a wrong number. The phone rings again: the same wrong number. The woman
explains the dialers mistake, and, as the couple sits down to tea, the phone rings once
again. Here the story ends. Much ink has been spilled over the question of what the third
phone call means, and critics have combed through the plethora of details provided in the
story searching for clues to decoding its ultimate message.
In this new volume, Yuri Leving reprints the original story, and adds to it an extremely
large and diverse body of critical material. Over thirty scholars are represented here, some
with 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 correspondence
between Nabokov and Katherine White, his editor at The New Yorker, where the story first
appeared in 1948. Following this is an essay by J. Morris discussing the revisions Nabokov
made 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 the
story (they are mentioned in the story three times, and there are three essays devoted to
them in this collection). Several articles deal with the significance of certain symbols and
numbers in the story, particularly the numbers zero, two, and three.
There are, of course, many essays devoted to the central question of how to interpret
the story and its ending. Several of these dwell on the meaning of the third call, and they
arrive at conflicting interpretations. Some, like John Hagopian and Gennady Barabtarlo,
assert that the phone call signals the fruition of the parents deepest fearthat the son has
succeeded in killing himself. Others, such as William Carroll and David Richter, argue that
to attribute such a meaning to the call indicates that the reader has succumbed to the youths
own illness of referential madness and is thus implicated in the act of killing the boy in
ones imagination. A third group, including Leona Toker, maintains that Nabokov intended
to leave the story (and the boys fate) open-ended. There are also some striking minority
opinions. Alexander Dolinin evaluates the signs planted in the text and determines that the
boy has killed himself, but has arranged the call from the beyond to send a message of
assurance 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 essays
concentrate on different parts of the story and are concerned not so much with the phone
call as with the story of the parents and the family itself, seeing in the sons malady a
morbidly condensed expression of the Jewish experience in Europe at the time of the
Holocaust (Toker, 211; see also the essays by Leving and Drescher). The majority of
these essays are of high quality, and the implicit dialogue conducted throughout the collection
makes for fascinating reading. Nabokovs 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 Medieval
Novgorod 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 of
medieval Novgorod and its lands. As are the first two tomes, the one under review is a
priceless addition to the study not only of medieval Russia but also of European archeology
of 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 in
their field, which are concerned with a broad set of issues related to Novgorod and its
hinterlands. While some of the subjects addressed in this collection already have been
treated in Russian-language literature, this volume is the sole one in which these topics
have been examined in English. A CD-Rom with data and figures is included with the
volume.
Taken as a whole, the vast majority of the subjects addressed in the volume relate in
one way or another to the complex economy of Novgorod and its lands, spanning some six
hundred years (ninth to fifteenth centuries). The topics include the study of the natural and
manmade environment of Novgorod and its rural sites through palynological, paleobotanical,
climatological, entomological, osteological, topographical, geological, and pedological
investigations; settlement patterns; the manufacture of pottery; extraction, production, and
working 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 beads
from certain rural sites. Other topics addressed include the fur trade in the far north of
Novgorod and what the birch-bark texts reveal about crafts in the city. Overall, the essays
shed a great deal of light on many subjects of Novgorodian agriculture, animal husbandry,
hunting, gathering, fishing, craft production, and tradetopics that are generally overlooked
in traditional written sources. For this reason, this collection of essays is invaluable for the
study of the economy of Novgorod and its lands.
One of the most interesting conclusions of the volume concerns the rural Novgorodian
settlements. Contrary to common perception in historiography, the authors of the introduction
observe and stress that rural Novgorodian settlements in the far north were economically
and 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 high
level of material culture (including high-status and imported objects), similar to that found

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in urban centers (p. 9). The authors do not address in much detail what occurred with these
rural sites in the second half of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, although it is
stated that they declined during this period (p. 56). This reader is thus left wondering why
and how these settlements withered away during the Mongol era of Russian history. This
important issue needs to be better addressed.
On a technical level, the one detraction to the volume, as to the series as a whole, is the
puzzling 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 much
from having the titles translated, while Russian readers will have to translate the works
back into Russian with the hope of finding the proper, exact translations, so as to locate
them. Furthermore, due to the translation, it is not at all clear what articles and books were
actually written in English or Russian. Specifically, a reader may look to find the work
Novgorods Trade in the 14th15th Centuries by A. L. Khoroshkevich, but will be disappointed
to learn that the actual title is Torgovlia Velikogo Novgoroda v XIVXV vekakh (sic!not
14th15th), written in Russian. What is more, Khoroshkevich is found in the bibliography
not only under her proper name, but also as Choroshkevich, making things all the more
confusing. With this observation made, it must be stressed that the volumes contents in
their totality are unquestionably of the highest merit and deserving of great praise. This
collection of essays, found in a single volume and printed in English, is a vital tool for
archaeologists, historians, and other specialists interested in premodern Russia and medieval
Europe 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: Materialy
mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii budapeshtskogo Tsentra Rusistiki ot 1718
maia 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 rusistike
30. Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2011. 285 pp. ISBN 978-963-7730-65-8.
The books under review were edited by Gyula Szvk, a historian of Budapest University in
Hungary, specialist in Russian premodern history, and author of a monograph on Ivan IV
and Peter I (IV. Ivn s I. Pter utlete [2001]). These two books appear in the same
series, Books on Russistics, and both volumes bring together articles by scholars from
East and West in Russian and English (in one case Polish). The two volumes from this
series give the non-Hungarian-reading scholar an insight into Hungarian scholarship on
Eastern 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 Russias
historical development. Given the rather broad thematic of statehood and the rather broad
period that reaches from early Kievan Rus' via the Petrine Period to the present, the varying
scholarly 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 a
valuable insight into their work and research field.
gnes Krizas article on the curious topic of flying icons of the Mother of God
(pp. 100120) 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 seriously
by levitating and flying through the streets. Szergej Filippov works on the idea of
caesaropapism in patriarch Nikons Refutation (pp. 16478). Beta Varga looks at the
foreign policy of Bogdan Khmel'nitski in the early time of state building of the Ukraine
(pp. 17999). Gyrgyi Bebesi discusses Alexander Is plans for a first Russian constitution
(pp. 28391). The Chinese historian Huan Lifu looks for the reasons behind nonmobility
in the Soviet Union and compares them to the economic, political, and social situation in
Putins Russia.
The volume on the development of statehood leaves the reader with much information
and 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 need
of modernization. However, there is no common denomitator for preceding periods about
the 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. Petersburg
historian 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 Skrynnikovs pupils or close scholarly
friends. The current volume is edited by Gyula Szvk and the Volgograd historian Igor' O.
Tiumentsev. The scholarly standard of this volume may be judged by Skrynnikovs own
standards, which Szvks biographical sketch identifies as a thorough reading of the sources
and 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, Skrynnikovs pupils publish material on his scholarly career. The last part
is dedicated to the publication of new sources. Stanislav V. Mirskii publishes a letter of the
Polish officer Jan Wislouch about events of the Time of Troubles before 1605 in the Polish
original and a Russian translation (pp. 25465). Igor' Tiumentsev and Natal'ja Rybalko
publish the archive of Jan Sapieha from 1608 to 1611. The eight published sources complete
Sapiehas well-known diary of the Time of Troubles (pp. 26683).
The middle section consists of scholarly articles by historians from both the East and
West, all based on analysis of various primary sources. Janet Martin shows a case of
inheritance of service estates in a family from Novgorod and Livonia (pp. 6875). Ann
Kleimola works on the influence of the princes widow and mother Efrosinia Starickaia on
politics in the time of Ivan the Terrible. She comes to the conclusion that, unlike her
depiction in scholarship, Efrosinia was free of the usual demands from a woman by virtue
of the oath that her son Vladimir Starickii swore, in which he refused to listen to his mothers
advice (pp. 7688). Charles Halperin gives an account of invectives in sixteenth-century
epistles and Ivan IVs canine invectives in particular, with a special focus on Ivans private
attitude to dogs (pp. 89108).
Vasilii I. Ul'ianovskii gives a superb analysis of the biblical sources and meaning of
references to poverty and wealth in the Izlozhenie of the Kievan metropolitan Spiridon
(pp. 11840). Igor' Tiumentsev analyzes the Epistle of a nobleman to a nobleman and
concludes that it is not only a source of the uprising of I. I. Bolotnikov but a source on the
movement of the Territorial Armies in the Time of Troubles (pp. 15963). Andrej P. Pavlov
writes about the service and promotion history of the petty noble family Streshnev, which
came into wealth and service in Moscow after Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich married Evdokiia
Luk'janovna Streshneva in 1626 (pp. 20319). Maureen Perrie gives an interpretation of
the biblical provenience of the eagles in the Muscovite coat of arms in the middle of the
seventeenth century. Russian and Ukrainian books depictions of the two-headed eagle
were used and perceived in different ways by Orthodox and Old Believers (pp. 23139).

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Pavel V. Sedov writes of the perception of the term law (zakon) in the second half of the
seventeenth century. He reviews the protocols of lawsuits and concludes that people
appreciated the outcome of a lawsuit as just when the judge decided in their favor, but
people did not believe that written law would work for their purposes (pp. 24053).
The volume dedicated to the Russistics of Ruslan Skrynnikov gives many new insights
on Muscovite Rus' through the analysis of sources from the fifteenth to the seventeenth
centuries. It is proof of the great international impact that St. Petersburg historian had on
the research in the field of medieval Russia.
Cornelia Soldat, Universitt zu Kln
Norris, Stephen M., and Willard Sunderland, eds. Russias People of Empire: Life Stories
from 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 individual
presented herein to open up a view on the long-running effects of what it meant to live in a
densely multicultural neighborhood (p. 8). With the scale of the Russian Empire and its
tremendous ethnolinguistic diversity, this is no small task. With thirty-one biographies
spanning from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, this collection comes quite close to
its objective. Though the biographies preponderantly cover men of empire (there are only
six women), the regional and chronological coverage is rather impressive on the whole,
beginning with the famous Cossack Ermak and concluding with contemporary politician
Vladislav Surkov.
Though the editors aspire toward a common theme in the introduction, the broad tapestry
of the individual experiences defies simplification. The volume provides approachable
(and short) narratives to march in progression with an undergraduate survey of Russias
transformation from imperial system to Soviet empire. Well-known figures such as Catherine
the Great and Stalin sit alongside men and women with notable careers but whose lives
were otherwise unnoticed from the historical record. The contrast will open a worthwhile
discussion about whose biography has value to history. In addition, the style of the
biographies changes from author to author, from straightforward narratives to exploratory
essays on the problem of biographical writing and some personal reactions to uncovering
the 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 a
general historiography course.
Within the volume, there is a biography for everyone. I was particularly struck by
Marianne Kemps life of Jahon Obidova (190067), a Tajik- and Uzbek-speaking woman,
born in the region northeast of Tashkent, who was married at the age of 13, escaped from
her husband and his family, and joined the Communists during the revolution in Central
Asia. Benefitting under the new system that provided educational opportunities, she had
an amazing party career at a high levelbecoming a member of the Uzbek Central Executive
Committee, a term as mayor of Tashkent, a long span as a deputy director of Uzbekstans
trade delegation, before ending up as the director of Tashkents tobacco factory. It is
unquestionably a remarkable life.

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Obidova also reflects one of the challenges of the volume. For any individuals life to
be recovered, that person must leave enough of a historical imprint for later discovery, and
it is unlikely the average and unexceptional will do so. All of the thirty-one individuals
made some unusual and noteworthy contribution to the history of the empire. This likely
has produced the gender imbalance, as men generated more of the historical record than
women in Russias past. Barbara Alpern Engels biography of Ekaterina SabashnikovaBaranovskaia (1859?) is as close to an ordinary person as we see, but Baranovskaia exists
in the archive as a plaintiff suing her husband to reclaim her sizeable family fortune (a case
which would involve the personal intervention of Pobedonostsev), which hardly constitutes
a typical history. On closer inspection, even the ordinary lives are extraordinary, which
could inspire an engaging discussion on the challenge of reclaiming lives from historical
obscurity.
This book will engage students with its lively narratives of figures from the past, serve
teachers with varied examples reflecting the diversity of the empire, and challenge researchers
to think about the difficulties of restoring the individual to broad narratives. The editors
and the contributors are to be complimented for their accomplishment.
Matthew P. Romaniello, University of Hawai'i at Mnoa
Martin, Russell E. A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early
Modern Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2012. xiv + 380 pp. $48.00. ISBN
978-0-87580-448-4.
Russell Martin has written an excellent book on a topic, royal marriage in early modern
Russia, that has not received much attention of late from historians. Martin briefly discusses
bride-shows in various world cultures at various times. Separate chapters then discuss the
origins 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 connection
between the conduct of bride-shows and court politics, the vexed question of the many
wives of Ivan IV, the fascinating and intricate stories of Romanov bride-shows up until to
the 1680s, and, finally, a discussion of the disappearance of the bride-show, together with
the changes in court politics that caused that disappearance. An epilogue traces brideshows 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 in
Martins narrative.
Martins book is a remarkable contribution to the flourishing literature on early modern
Russia. It is based on a huge quantity of archival work. Indeed, the author had already
published a lengthy survey of archival evidence on his subject. His command of the
secondary literature is equally impressive. Best of all, he transforms his large volume of
heterogeneous 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 Zabelins somewhat
romantic picture of bride-shows as demonstrations of unbridled royal power by into a
sociopolitical examination. He looks at the institution in the context of a close investigation
of clan rivalries at court at the time of each bride. This task demands an extensive knowledge

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of the genealogies of court clans as well as a careful reading of the often slender evidence
we have of court politics, particularly in the sixteenth century.
What this book does, then, is bring a mass of hitherto largely neglected but highly
relevant evidence to bear on the twin questions of the nature of royal power and the
relationship between the Muscovite ruler and his most powerful subjects that have
preoccupied historians for centuries. His rejection of the interpretation of the bride-show
as evidence of royal despotism can hardly be more emphatic: The bride-show custom, as
performed in Muscovy for nearly two centuries, was simply incompatible with an autocratic
or despotic monarchy (p. 18). He reaches this conclusion by showing both how the brideshow 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 to
advance the political interests of their own clans and allies. This would appear to be a clear
example of the faade of autocracy, as the author himself observes (pp. 24445): what
appears on the surface to be a self-explanatory demonstration of unlimited royal power in
fact turns out to have the fingerprints of boyar clans all over it, both in the design of the
process, 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 have
read more of the highly complex wedding rituals that Martin obviously knows well, and
how these rituals functioned within the court culture. But these are minor points, and
weddings are not bride-shows. Martins book is a major contribution to our knowledge of
early 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 Jewish
Studies. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. ii + 285 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978-1936235-59-9.
John Doyle Kliers untimely passing at the age of 62 in 2007 was a blow to all those who
worked within the field of Russian Jewish history. Johns erudition, generosity, and good
cheer inspired countless young scholars; his scholarship leaves a legacy that will continue
to influence for many years to come. Jews in the East European Borderlands: Essays in
Honor of John D. Klier brings together some of those scholars whose work was impacted
by Johns career. The volume emerged out of a 2009 conference held in Johns memory at
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where John completed his doctorate and
captained the fencing team.
The volume comprises twelve scholarly essays, as well as an introduction and a
bibliography of John Kliers work. The introduction, by the volumes editors, Harriet
Murav and Eugene Avrutin, begins with a sensitive portrait of Johns life, taking the reader
through the challenges that John faced as a Catholic studying Russian Jews in the 1970s
and 1980s. The editors also make a convincing argument for the importance of Johns
major works in opening what has now become a vibrant field of study. The editors should
also be commended for compiling the bibliography of Johns works, a resource that will be
of benefit to future scholars.

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The essays represent some of the range of scholarship that has emerged in Russian
Jewish history. Several of the articles included in the volume are drawn from important
books that have recently been published: Gabriella Safrans article on S. An-sky is derived
from her biography of the writer, Sam Johnsons piece on the pogrom in the Anglo-American
imagination comes out of her book on British attitudes toward Eastern European Jews,
Oleg Budnitskiis article on anti-Semitism in late imperial Russia emerges from his book
on Jews and the Russian Civil War, David Shneers piece on Soviet Jewish photography
comes out of his book on the same topic, and Marat Grinbergs piece on Boris Slutsky also
emerges from his critical study of the poet. These pieces will hopefully direct readers
toward the more complete books from which they are derived.
Other articles included in the volume are parts of larger projects in development:
ChaeRan Freezes study of a shelter for converted Jewish children reveals much about the
ways in which voluntary associations adopted the language of the state to remake Jews into
productive citizens. Gennady Estraikh shows how Yiddish became integrated into what he
calls, perhaps overly generously, Russias Jewish civil society. Olga Litvak presents a
convincing argument that Sholem Aleichem (Sholem-aleichem in her rendering) developed
his writing against the background of Russian realism. Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta
Newman look at Russian and Yiddish writing manuals and argue that their differences
reflect the varying lifestyles of their intended readers. Robert Weinberg examines visual
depictions of Jews in the Black Hundreds press, showing how they drew upon conventional
anti-Semitic tropes made popular throughout pan-European anti-Semitic publications. Shaul
Stampfers revisionist speculations that there was no mass Ashkenazic migration to Eastern
Europe from German lands is intriguing. Joshua Karlip demonstrates that the historian
Simon Dubnow adopted a variation of the lachrymose narrative of Jewish history in order
to 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 previously
published in more complete forms, and others present only a suggestive taste of scholarship
to come. But the book holds it worth as a tribute to John Klier and as a testament to the
variety 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 978-0-81433492-8.
The subject of this meticulously researched, convincingly argued, and lucidly written book
has until recently failed to attract scholarly attention, mainly for two reasons: first, Jewish
historians 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 of
the other half of the Jewish people. Eliyana Adlers pioneering study tells the forgotten
story of private schools for Jewish girls in the Russian Empire from their beginnings in
1831 to the 1880s, when Jewish education in Russia underwent a radical transformation.
Most of Adlers sources come from the various central and provincial archival collections
in the former Soviet Union which have become available to foreign scholars only after

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1991. This diverse body of materials is woven into a sophisticated narrative which opens
a 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 affordable
option for many middle- and lower-middle-class families. The majority of over one hundred
private schools in the Pale of Jewish Settlement offered instruction in Russian, Yiddish,
German, and French, as well as in arithmetic, basics of Judaism, and womens crafts.
Some of their graduates continued their education in Russian secondary schools, others
went straight into apprenticeship or domestic service, and eventually nearly all of them got
married and had children. The marginal position of girls in the Jewish education system
had its advantages: while Jewish boys remained in unchanging hadarim [traditional religious
elementary 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 of
modernization and acculturation, passing their knowledge and worldview on to their children.
A good illustration of this thesis can be Osip Mandelstams mother, who was educated in a
Russian school in Vilna and instilled her love of Russian literature and admiration for the
Russian intelligentsia into her sons tender mind and soul, in contrast to the terrifying image
of Judaic chaos associated with the father.
In the first part of her book, Adler carefully reconstructs the curriculum, sources of
support and financing, and the operation of the schools. The second part of the book places
these schools into broader cultural and social contexts of Russias and its Jews transition
from the rigid autocratic rule of Nicholas I to the reforms of Alexander II. Adlers work
belongs to the recent trend in East European Jewish historiography which seeks to expand
the methodological arsenal and extend the thematic horizons of Jewish social history. By
firmly embedding the story of girls education in the social, economic, religious, and cultural
frameworks of Russian Jewish life, Adler convincingly demonstrates its centrality in the
formation of a new modern Russian-Jewish identity. Yet this book should be of interest not
only 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 Russification
in the western imperial borderlands. Was it merely an accident that the first Jewish school
for girls was opened in Vilna in the year of the first Polish uprising? Adler mentions in a
footnote that the Polish language was taught only in a few schools and was taken out of
curriculum after the second Polish uprising of 186364. Does it indicate that Jewish
educators acted as agents of Russification, which in this particular case had an additional
and significant gender dimension? The fascinating romance between Jewish women and
Russian culture in the nineteenth century, and their role in promoting Russian culture, is
only one of many subjects of future research, for which Adlers book will be an indispensable
point of departure.
Mikhail Krutikov, University of Michigan
Khristoforov, I. A. Sud'ba reformy: Russkoe krest'ianstvo v pravitel'stvennoi politike do
i posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (18301890-e gg.). Moscow: Sobranie, 2011.
368 pp. ISBN 978-5-9606-0105-4.
The sesquicentenary of Alexander IIs enactment of the abolition of serfdom in 1861 was
not marked by a large quantity of publications. The high quality of the book under review,

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327

however, goes some way to compensate for this. Igor Khristoforov offers an incisive analysis
of the reform from the perspective of the Russian government and educated society. He set
out initially to analyze the fate of the reform in the decades after its enactment, but realized
that in order to do this he needed also to look back to its origins. Thus, in line with other
historians assessments, he considers the elimination of serfdom in Russia as a process
spread over several decades. This long-term perspective allows him, for example, to draw
instructive parallels between Kiselevs reforms of the state peasants of the 1830s and the
Stolypin reforms after 1906.
Khristoforovs book nicely complements his earlier monograph on aristocratic
opposition to the Great Reforms by focusing on disagreements not between advocates and
opponents of reform, but among the reformists. He identifies a division between bureaucratic
rationalizers and romantic Slavophiles, which shaped both the measures of 1861 and
discussions of the reform process over subsequent decades. This approach offers useful
analyses of key figures such as Nicholas Miliutin and Iurii Samarin. Men such as these
disagreed over whether the freed peasants should become rational, market-orientated,
landowning farmers or patriarchal members of communes and bearers of historical traditions
who would create a special, Russian, path to the future. They further disagreed over whether
the 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 political
doctrines in influencing the differing views. Reform-minded Russians adhered, variously,
to classical liberalism, a more dirigiste liberal bureaucratism, and romantic denials of
rationalism. The influence of such contradictory doctrines did not bode well for consistent
direction of the reform process.
Another important contribution of this book is the close attention to infrastructure
or rather the lack of itin rural Russia. Khristoforov notes that below district (uezd) level,
Russia lacked the legal and administrative infrastructure necessary to implement a reform
on the scale of the abolition of serfdom, in particular working out the land settlement and
tax assessment. He goes on to note that in the decades after 1861, the government did not
satisfactorily address this problem. The lack of infrastructure, together with laissez-faire
liberalism and romantic attitudes to the peasant commune, all contributed to the importance
figures in the Russian government and society assigned to the commune, and shaped debates
over its future.
The bookas befits one written by a Russian scholar from the Institute of History in
Moscow who spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princetonis solidly
grounded in the relevant international historiography. The author locates his arguments in
the contexts of the prerevolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian and Western historical
literatures. He acknowledges his debts to his mentor, Larisa Zakharova (and Petr
Zaionchkovskii). He also engages with recent western works, such as Tracy Dennisons
iconoclastic The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (2011), which addresses the
issues of infrastructure and romanticized attitudes to institutions in rural Russia at the local
level. Khristoforov could, perhaps, have developed the points he does make (on pages193
and 325) about the argument of Francis Wcislos Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local
Society, and National Politics, 18551914 (1990), which to some extent covers similar
ground to his book. Nevertheless, this is an fine book that offers significant contributions
to our understanding of the reform process in late-tsarist Russia.
David Moon, University of York, UK

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Kappeler, Andreas. Russland und die Ukraine: Verflochtene Biographien und

Geschichten. Vienna: Bhlau Verlag, 2012. ii + 395 pp. 39.90. ISBN 978-3-20578775-4.
Andreas Kappelers biography of the little-known academics Aleksandra and Petro
Iefymenko presents the couple as an example of Russo-Ukrainian histoire croise. Petro
was born in Taurida Province in the south of what today is the Ukraine in 1835. He was
involved in Ukrainophile circles at university, for which he was exiled to the provinces of
Perm' and then Arkhangel'sk. Here, he became interested in north Russian peasant
ethnography and met his future wife, Aleksandra Stavrovskaia. Born in 1848, she had
grown up in Russias far north and received a secondary school education, but could not
attend university on account of her gender. At first, she helped her husband in gathering
materials for his ethnographic studies. However, she proved herself to be the better scholar:
whereas Petro rarely went beyond compilation, Aleksandra offered insightful analysis. She
published works on peasant women and land ownership. In 1876 the couple received
permission to settle in Petros homeland. Here, they came into contact with Ukrainophile
intellectuals and Aleksandra acquired an interest in Ukrainian history. In addition to several
articles in Kievskaia starina, she wrote a History of the Ukrainian People, one of the first
overviews of the topic to be published. In 1907, Aleksandra was invited to teach on the
higher womens courses in St. Petersburg, where she became the first Russian women to
receive 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 Ukrainophile
intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also the competing
Russian and Ukrainophile historiographies. The Iefymenkos saw no contradiction between
their dedication to Russian and Ukrainian matters: as convinced populists, they hoped to
reveal the nature and customs of the people, that is, the peasantry; this, in turn, led to the
search for the peasants national character, be it Russian or Ukrainian. A second connection
was the couples shared experience of the peripheries of empire. Populism also infused
Aleksandras history of the Ukraine, which was unusual for the period in its emphasis on
social and economic life. Unlike the Russian imperial historians, she posited a distinct
Ukrainian 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 depict
historical figures as the forerunners of a modern Ukrainian consciousness. Thus, the life
and work of the Iefymenkos demonstrate the compatibility of Ukrainian and Russian
identities: 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 the
challenge, acknowledged by the author, that the Iefymenkos left behind few private letters
or 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 of
Russo-Ukrainian histoire croise. To a certain extent, it still aspires to this, entailing several
shifts in focus: for example, Kappeler includes his very interesting account of the discovery
of the Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian imagination as a digression. In using the survey of
Aleksandras historical writings to examine the Russo-Ukrainian entanglement before the
nineteenth century, Kappeler must juggle his own depiction of these events with brief
summaries of those by Aleksandra and other Russian and Ukrainophile historians. A different
structure might have enabled Kappeler to give more of his own insights into the earlier
Russo-Ukrainian histoire croise. Nevertheless, Kappelers 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 for
the study of the Russian and Ukrainian past as a history of entanglement.
Christopher Gilley, Universitt Hamburg
Randolph, John, and Eugene M. Avrutin, eds. Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human
Mobility 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 and
Eugene Avrutin, over the 2009 Russias Role in Human Mobility conference at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, most of the scholars in this collected volume
have discovered a Eurasian space that was much more mobile than was previously
understood. 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 and
Soviet history into a vital new direction.
The book is divided into three sections and offers cross-disciplinary perspectives that
tend to privilege the well-established field of migration studies. The first section, prefaced
by Charles Steinwedel, begins with Vasilii Kliuchevskiis 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 Chinese
Eastern Railroad (Chia Yin Hsu), and manage migration into Moscow during and after
the Soviet period (Gijs Kessler and Matthew Light). Hillis aptly describes these ambitions
as an attempt to govern through mobility (p. 37).
The next section, prefaced by Willard Sunderland, begins with a quote from Gogols
Dead Souls (The Russian muzhik can adapt himself to any environment [p. 101]) and
does much to explain the advantages that ethnic Russians had over other groups throughout
Russian history. Anatolyi Remnevs research reveals the disappointment of revolutionary
idealists, exiled to Siberia, who found the peasant to be a predator in relation to the
environment and to indigenous peoples (p. 127). Jeff Sahadeo discovered that the vaunted
Soviet conception of Druzhba Narodov frequently rang hollow for emigrants to Moscow
from Central Asia and the Caucasus during the Soviet period and beyond, while Eileen
Kanes study on Odessa as a Hajj hub from the 1880s to 1910 revealed that historians
themselves have allowed their methodological approaches to silence Russias Muslim
minorities.
Sahadeo, Light, and others discovered a surprising nostalgia for the Soviet Union,
which, in fact, severely limited movement through passport controls. It appears that
Communist ideology obfuscated a violent chauvinism, which, when it reemerged in the
1990s, created a yearning for better times. Comparisons to the Ost-logia found in the
former East Germany could yield interesting findings.
The third section, prefaced by Anne Lounsbery, does the most to explore the
juxtapositions between mobility and immobility that so often characterize life in Russia.
The first two chapters, by Alexandra Bekasova and Benjamin Schenk, explore how Russian
conceptions of space and time changed with the advent of the new nineteenth-century
technologies of coach (Bekasova) and rail (Schenk) travel. Official anxiety can also be

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perceived with both modes as passport controls are first introduced and then rescinded.
This same anxiety permeates Diane Koenkers piece on Soviet tourism and Sarah Phillipss
chapter on mobility rights for the wheelchair-bound in the post-Soviet period. Koenker
juxtaposed pleasure travel and carceral travel from the 1920s to 1960s, while Phillips
researched wheelchair users, hidden away and immobilized by the Soviet state, who
demanded mobile citizenship starting in the 1990s through the bold petitioning of officials
and highly visible marathons between major cities (p. 255).
Despite this books impressive strengths and groundbreaking vision, large pieces of
the mobility puzzle are still missing. Russias passport laws and other methods of control
would be better understood in a cross-cultural context. Brief references to Gogols Dead
Souls and Dostoevskys Demons give readers a sense of what a more systematic investigation
of art, literature, and popular culture would reveal.
For scholars and researchers more interested in a more focused study how Eastern
Europe re-envisioned itself as both mobile and Marxist after World War II, Lewis
Siegelbaums edited volume The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc (2011) is
suggested.
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 Russian
historiography.
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 dramatic
stories of the Russian Revolution. In less than a year, a social group that had dominated
Russia for centuries and many of whose members enjoyed lives of unparalleled luxury was
forced into a desperate struggle for survival. Douglas Smiths new book tells this evocative
story in detail, making excellent use of diaries, letters, and memoirs (unpublished and
published) to chart the full range of experiences from late Imperial Russia to the Second
World War. Although two case studies of undisputed aristocratic familiesthe Golitsyns
and the Sheremetevsform a narrative thread that runs throughout the book, Smith does
cover the entire nobility. He has a good grasp of the existing literature and launches the
most serious challenge yet to the persistent stereotype of the nobility as a bulwark of the
tsarist 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 that
played 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 for
understanding bigger issues surrounding the Russian Revolution. To what extent, for
example, did divisions within the tsarist elite not only facilitate revolution, but shape the
nature of that revolution? To what extent do the experiences of nobles help us understand
the popular opinions and ambitions that directed the course of the revolution? And to what
extent did the experiences of those remaining in Soviet Russia reflect the nature of the
regimes experiment to reshape state and society and forge Soviet citizens? Despite
being 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 nobles
supported political change prior to 1917, but fails to show how this fed into political
developments during the First World War and how the remarkable lack of noble opposition
to the February Revolution helped shape the nature of this revolution (p. 90). He mentions
the union established by noble landowners to defend their interests in 1917 without exploring
the importance of such activities by all political and social groups. Similarly, he does not
use the nobilitys 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 contested
question of Soviet subjectivity.
These weaknesses reflect the nature of book. It is written to grasp the attention of the
elusive general reader as well as the specialist. Consequently, it places much emphasis
on its uniqueness (not always justified) and relies on the readable personal documents of
the nobility (often treated uncritically), which focus, of course, on their own experiences
rather than the wider historical significance of these experiences. The book tends to cite
the relevant literature in notes rather than engage with it in the text. It is true that these
broad debates are of more interest to specialists, but it means that the challenging corrective
to the stereotypical view that is the books greatest achievement is often not pushed as
much as it could have been. This reader, moreover, was frequently frustrated by the practice
of having numerous references gathered together in a single footnote, making it difficult to
work out the precise origin of particular nuggets of information.
Overall, Smith has succeeded in writing a fascinating, readable account of the nobility
during these tumultuous years that will do much to convince a broader audience of a more
complex picture of noble experiences. For the specialist, however, this book could have
been 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,
19041914. 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 collection
of secondary sources in examining the reception and responses of Russian military officers
and state agents to the advent of machine-powered flight. The book is organized into eight
chapters of roughly equal length together with an introduction and conclusion.
Chapters 1 through 3 chronicle the arrival of aviation in Russia, with special emphasis
given to the various meanings ascribed to flight (in both military and civilian contexts) and
the contrasting proposals put forward by general officers and political leaders for developing
a robust and effective Russian air-arm. Here, as elsewhere, the author ties his account of
aeronautical developments to broader, long-standing issues in late Imperial political culture,
including the emergent tensions between state and society and ongoing debates regarding
the utility of importing Western equipment versus relying on domestic industries.
Chapters 4 through 6 are devoted to military leaders efforts to institutionalize a culture
of flight within army ranks through the organization of flying cadres, acquisition of materiel,
and the training of personnel. Vitarbo contends these processes were challenged by
traditional anticapitalist attitudes within Russian society (pp. 5961) while demonstrating

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how the airplane, in turn, challenged traditional Russian attitudes regarding social hierarchy
and rank (pp. 11923).
The books final two chapters describe in more detail the recruitment and training
routines 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 Imperial
Russian military culture. The first monograph devoted to exploring attitudes and expectations
relating to aviation technologies within the armed forces, Vitarbos study draws attention to
an overlooked aspect of the countrys past. The book would have benefitted from a discussion
of naval aviation.
Airplane enthusiasts unable to consult Russian-language sources will appreciate the
details 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 come
of age as a weapon until well into the Great War. Many prewar expectations, including the
belief that aerial battles would be patterned after encounters at sea (complete with the use
of grappling hooks and boarding parties), were quickly altered by real-world experiences
and the rapid advance of technology. Russian contributions to this process were noteworthy
and important (for example, the role of Igor Sikorskiis famous Ilia Muromtsy in advancing
the concept of strategic air operations). In limiting coverage to the period when the airplanes
military functions remained up in the air, Army of the Sky achieves take-off without aspiring
to soar.
Scott W. Palmer, Western Illinois University
Krementsov, Nikolai. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood
Transfusions, 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 for
historians of science curious about the interplay between ideology and knowledge production
in the twentieth century. Nikolai Krementsov continues in this established tradition, but
with an unusual methodological conceit: he draws from the multiple personas of one famous
Bolshevik, 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 their
rich intellectual, institutional, and cultural dimensions (p. 12).
Bogdanov, whose real name was Aleksandr Malinovskii, is not an unknown name
among Soviet historians. However, as Krementsov underscores, his renown is circumscribed
by three different and barely intersecting epistemologies, reflecting the parallel lives of
this versatile and talented man (p. 3). There is Bogdanov the avowed Marxist theoretician
and early co-conspirator of Lenin, who wrote extensively about the possibilities inherent in
proletarian science. Then there is the science fiction writer Bogdanov who published
two major novels, Red Star and Engineer Menni, which fused his Marxist and utopian
aspirations, both technological and social, into widely read prose. Finally, there is Bogdanov
the 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 his
own body, and ultimately caused his demise. Krementsovs central argument is that these

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three disparate lives were actually reflections of a single sustained ideology about
collectivism, an exploration of which tells us much about the ambitions, contours, and
liabilities of Soviet science.
Krementsov persuasively argues that Bogdanovs interest in both Marxist thought and
Lamarckian 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 and
early 1920s as he was exposed to foreign research which had opened up new avenues of
research in transfusionology. Boganovs belief in the increase of the viability of
individual organisms through regular blood exchanges (p. 70) and the struggle against
aging (senescence) eventually found an institutional home in the new Institute for Blood
Transfusion created within the Commissariat of Health (Narkomzdrav) in 1926. Why did
the Soviet state sponsor the formation of an institute dedicated to such a seemingly esoteric
medical field? Krementsov overreaches a bit to explain the timing and commitment by the
state, speculating that a broader concern about the health of leading party members in the
mid-1920s prompted Narkomzdrav to commit resources to Bogdanovs ideas. Stalins
intervention, which Krementsov argues was crucial to the formation of the institution, is
based only on Bogdanovs claim that he met with the Soviet leader in December 1925, but
there appears to be no other evidence to corroborate this meeting. Regardless, Krementsovs
descriptions of the effort by the Soviet state to care for the health of top party members
strikingly illustrates how Bolshevik anxieties about enemies of the Revolution were rooted
not only in fears of attack on the Soviet Union, but of attack on their very bodies.
Bogdanovs sudden death in 1928the result of a blood transfusion from a young
man with tuberculosiseffectively ended government-sponsored research on blood
transfusions in the pursuit of physiological collectivism. Along with broader changes
concomitant with Stalins Great Break, Bogdanovs original ideas on blood transfusions
were discredited as medieval mysticism. Krementsov argues that this did not mean an
end to Bogdanovs influence and that his broader worldviewparticularly an instrumentalist
view of science in the service of socialist mobilizationcast a long shadow over Soviet
science. In that sense, Krementsovs imaginative reconsideration of Bogdanovs 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 those
interested in the multiplicities, ambitions, and contradictions inherent in the worldview of
revolutionary Russia.
Asif Siddiqi, Fordham University
Hoffmann, David L. Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism,
19141939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. xvii + 327 pp. $45.00. ISBN
978-0-8014-4629-0.
In recent decades, one of the salient trends in historiography of the Soviet period has been
to insert the history of the Soviet Union in an increasingly comparative, transnational, and
transcultural space so as to mitigate, or at least recalibrate, its exceptionalism. Although
this interdisciplinary effort spans the full chronological range of what has been variously
called the Soviet tragedy, the Soviet experience, and Soviet project, much of the
scholarship has focused on the interwar period. With respect to this chronological
conjuncture, the chief concept that has been used to explore the USSRs similarity to and

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difference from other interwar states, and to situate it as a nexus of multidirectional transfer
of ideas, people, technologies, and commodities, is modernity. As one of the modern
states of the interwar global order, the USSR is assumed to have incarnated one of many
possible versions of state practices derived from a globally diffused ethos characterized by
the 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 interwar
history of the Soviet Union in comparative, transnational, and transcultural perspective
according to the central assumptions of this paradigm.
The specific focus of Hoffmanns study concerns Soviet versions of the modern state
practices (to quote from the title) in the realm of social intervention: the reshaping of
societies and enlistment of populations for industrial labor and mass warfare (p. 2). In
chronological order, his chapters examine social welfare, public health, reproductive
policies, surveillance and propaganda, and state violence. As Hoffmanns erudite
footnotes suggest, scholars in the Russian/Soviet field, as well as in other fields ranging
over the globe, have examined these state practices. But prior to Hoffmann, no scholar in
the Russian/Soviet field had placed this particular combination of Soviet state practices in
a comparative international context in a single volume. Another distinguishing attribute is
the books comparative range. When scholars first began to position Soviet modernity in
a comparative context, they tended to locate it in a pan-European framework. This has
been widening to include Asia and other parts of the world, and Hoffmann deepens this
trend. His comparative cases come not just from Europe but also Asia (China, Japan,
Thailand), Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico), the Middle East (Iran, the
Ottoman Empire, Turkey), Africa (British colonialism in Kenya), the South Pacific (New
Zealand), and the United States. Hoffmann is to be commended for his intellectual vision
and prodigious effort. This book is, to date, the most authoritative attempt to address
issues of similarity and difference between Soviet state practices and the various incarnations
of 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 to
permit an investigation of the following question: How can we explain the fact that while
Soviet state violence was similar in its technologies to that of other modern states during
the interwar conjuncture, the scale and objectives of Soviet violence were far more
extreme? (p. 16) The answer to this question that the author seeks to rule out is, more or
less, ideology. Instead, Hoffmanns explanation for the scale and extreme nature of Soviet
excisionary violencestate actions to extract allegedly dangerous segments from the social
body, such as deportations, executions, party purgesembraces, as necessary [but not
sufficient] preconditions such factors as social scientific knowledge, aspirations to reshape
society, and wartime technologies of social intervention (p. 16), and, as direct causes of
the actualization of violent aspirations, the dictatorial form of the Soviet state. The latter
meant that neither legal precepts nor ensuing institutions could restrain the utopian
ambitions (p. 16) of party leaders. For Hoffmann, while Marxist-Leninist doctrine was
not irrelevant to such violencein fact, it provided its ideological justification (p. 239)
it certainly was not its chief cause. Though he does not directly say so, Hoffmann seems to
regard Marxist-Leninist ideology as one of the necessary preconditionsif perhaps more
secondary than the others mentioned aboveof the scale and extremity of Soviet state
excisionary violence in the 1930s.
If this is his position, how much of a departure is it from existing scholarship? Hoffmann
insists 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 communist
ideology. To encapsulate the position against which he is arguing, the chief (indeed one of
the only) examples he gives is The Black Book of Communism (1999), edited by Stphane
Courtois. The complex position that, for example, Martin Malia took on the relationship
between Marxist-Leninist ideology, the development of the Soviet system, and Soviet state
violence (especially the Great Purges of 193639) is not conveyed by Hoffmann. Instead,
Malias thinking gets reduced to a comment he made in the foreword to the Courtois volume,
one in which Malia cheered the books line that ideology only (or chiefly) caused Communist
violence. Elucidating Malias stand on the relationship between Marxist-Leninist ideology
and Soviet state violence is a task that cannot be accomplished in a short review. But as the
example given below suggests, in at least some of his work, Malia himself did not make
Marxist-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 violence
does, and does not, controvert existing scholarship.
A separate but related problem is that the book sometimes gives readers a mistaken
impression of how those scholars who have privileged ideology as a causal factor in
explaining Soviet social intervention, and excisionary state violence in particular, placed
the Soviet Union in a comparative framework. Through inclusion and exclusion (in the
text and in the notes), he would have readers think that Malia, for example, excludes the
international context from his explanation of interwar state violence. There is no better
example than Malias and Hoffmanns respective treatments of the origins of the Great
Purges. In Malias The Soviet Tragedy (1994), one of the chief explanatory contexts for the
timing, the scale, and the objects of the Great Purges is not only international, but
transnational. For Malia, the international situation (Malia, p. 244) is one of the three
problems, each with its own logic, between the end of the First Five-Year Plan in 1932 and
the beginning of the Purges in 1936 in which the basic logic that connects the Plan to the
Purge was worked out. For example, Malia hypothesizes that if Stalin was indeed behind
the murder of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, in Leningrad party
headquarters, he might have had in mind that Kirovs demise could serve as a justification
for special emergency powers in the way that the prior years Reichstag fire had provided
Hitler with a similar pretext for enhanced extralegal prerogatives. Moreover, the darkening
international context of the mid-to-late 1930snot just the rise of fascism but the Spanish
Civil War and Stalins fear of the USSRs international entanglements in risky foreign
conflictsis one of the necessary (but not sufficient) causes of the Purges. As well, Malias
student and Hoffmanns teacher, Stephen Kotkin, includes the Spanish Civil War (and Hitlers
support for Francos counterrevolution more specifically), along with other international
events such as Mussolinis aggression in Abyssinia and Japanese aggression in East Asia,
among international events whose treatment in Soviet political discourse constituted part
of the explanatory context of the Purges. But Hoffmanns footnotes would have readers
believe that Oleg Khlevniuk is the first scholar to stress the connection between Stalins
knowledge of events in Spain (specifically his awareness in early 1937 of rear-guard
uprisings against the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, his fear of
similar rebellions within the Soviet Union in the event of war,) and his unleashing of
excisionary violence against such fifth columnists linked to external threats, whether
fascists, Trotskyists, or other capitalist conspirators. (Incidentally, it was not the Nationalist
General Emilio Mola Vidal who coined the term fifth column, as Hoffmann says in a note
on page 289. He did use the term to refer to anti-Republican forces within the city of
Madrid that would join the four columns of Francos troops surrounding the capital to

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bring down the democratically elected government. Rather, according to Spanish Civil
War historian Hugh Thomas and other scholars, it was Marshall Aleksandr Suvorov who
coined the term in 1790, during the Russo-Turkish War, when the Russian militarys capture
of Izmail from the Ottoman Empire was accomplished with the help of Slavs within the
city. This small correction speaks to the larger point that scholars have much work to do in
unearthing the complicated, multidirectional travels of the discourselet alone other
componentsof modern state practices.) Khlevniuks argument is, to be sure, different
from Malias and Kotkins as to the relationship between the Spanish Civil War and the
Great Purges. But here and intermittently elsewhere, Hoffmann is not a reliable guide to
the history of historians efforts to place the interwar USSRs social interventions in either
a 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 necessary
conditions 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 Soviet
Union, 19171932. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies.
New York: Routledge, 2012. xxii + 289. $145.00. ISBN978-0-415-55957-7.
Matthias Neumanns 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 which
the organization was shaped by events and in turn influenced politics and society. Based
on research in the Komsomol Central Archive, the book synthesizes the institutional approach
of older works with the broader perspectives of social and cultural histories. Neumann
challenges Western characterization of state-sponsored youth organizations in communist
countries as totalitarian and uniform institutions with a firm grip over all children and
youth (p. xv). The Bolsheviks had no master program at the movements inception and a
limited capacity to guide, let alone control it during its first decade. He just as forcefully
rejects the glasnost-era Soviet portrayals of the Komsomol as a victim of Stalinism rather
than as protagonist in the countrys political life.
The Komsomol created a subculture that was held together by the idealization of the
Civil War experience, iconoclastic visions, participation in campaigns, the stark delineation
of enemies and allies, and a radical understanding of class politics. High expectations,
mutual disappointments, and ambivalence complicated party-Komsomol relations. Party
leaders promoted and institutionalized the concept of youth as a vehicle for transforming
society and as a constituency legitimizing the new state. They were motivated by the
demographic weight of the youth cohort, which comprised 25 percent of the RSFSRs
population in 1926. The Komsomol became the new cultures creator and its creation. The
party overregulated the Komsomol at the central and provincial levels but underregulated
it below these levels. The Komsomols ensuing autonomy proved problematic.
Komsomol'tsy applied internalized notions of class in their vehement critique of party and
Komsomol leaders for speaking the language of class struggle while pursuing policies that
favored the NEPs restoration of capitalism and privilege at the expense of the countrys
youth.

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Neumann fills a gap in the secondary literature, which has dealt predominantly with
urban youth. In rural localities, Komsomol cells often acted independently, taking over
party and state functions. Cultural studies have shown how urban youth came to be seen as
a dangerous group whose hooliganism and social deviance underscored the inability of
the state and Komsomol to transform it along revolutionary norms. Rural komsomol'tsy
were 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 Komsomols and the partys pro-NEP leadership.
The transition seems abrupt: from the high point of the political influence during the early
phases 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-era
press had it right: Stalin and his supporters exploited the malaise among base activists and
members. As older Komsomol leaders left or were expelled, supporters of radical class
politics moved into the top leadership. Neumann contends that while this new leadership
had stronger working-class links, it was inexperienced and more apt to acquiesce to topdown decision making. By 1932 the party had expanded its rural network and exerted
greater control over the rural Komsomol, too. Gone were the pitfalls of an autonomous
Komsomol and its potential as a rival political force.
Neumann has written a compelling work highlighting the agency of the Komsomols
base in defeating the NEP. Paradoxically, this fine work suggests the need for greater detail
in our understanding of the collapse of the NEP networks and the dynamics of the top and
middle leadership. This will require scholars to go beyond the archives of the Komsomol
Central Committee. For now, Matthias Neumann has written the new standard history of
the early Komsomol.
Isabel Tirado, William Paterson University
Friedman, Alexander. Deutschlandbilder in der weirussischen sowjetischen Gesellschaft
19191941: 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 in
Soviet Belorussia between the world wars. Alexander Friedman makes extensive and
admirable use of archives in Belarus and periodical resources in Russian, Belorussian,
Polish, and Yiddish. The result is an indispensable resource for historians and others who
are interested in the responses of the inhabitants of the Soviet Unions western borderlands
to Germanys various physical and cultural incursions into this region in the early twentieth
century. Since the author focuses on the entire Belorussian population, not just ethnic
Belorussians, the book should also be useful for specialists in Jewish, Polish, Russian, and
German history. This broad and comprehensive approach, however, means some intriguing
aspects and broader questions are passed over fleetingly.
The structure of the book is mostly chronological but does touch on several specific
themes. It begins with a discussion of the 1918 German occupation of Belorussia, then
moves to a consideration of the various appearances of Germans and Germany in press
propaganda in the interwar period, the place of German language and culture in Belorussian
society, and ways in which attitudes toward Germany reveal important characteristics of

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Soviet Belorussian society. Although World War II is not treated systematically, Friedman
does relate the historical experience of the Germans in Belorussia to the later experience
during the war at various points. His German prose is straightforward and should be
accessible to non-German specialists with some knowledge of the language.
Friedman describes the long ebb and flow of central Soviet depictions of Germany
that are faithfully reflected in the Belorussian press, but his story suggests that the centralized
Soviet view of history and contemporary politics was not replicated exactly on the local
level, nor did press depictions necessarily determine popular attitudes. Local direct
experiences 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 between
official press and popular opinions in Soviet Belorussia did not always correspond in ways
that one might expect elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Many local Jews had positive opinions
of 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 much
more consistently negative than that of the Germans in Belorussia. Official Soviet policies
against anti-Semitism, to name another example, resonated with the Jewish population in
the BSSR but also highlighted further the association of Jews and Bolsheviks in the minds
of 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 books potential contributions. For one, differences
between the Soviet Russian and Soviet Belorussian propaganda presentation of Germany
are difficult to demonstrate without a systematic comparison to the central Russian-language
press. Moreover, while Friedman does use some memoir material and archival sources to
try to get at popular attitudes, those sections are much smaller in comparison to his extensive
discussion on print media. The link between the press and the population thus remains
difficult to determine, as always in this type of research. These choices limit the ability of
the study to contribute to broader discussions of the Soviet experience even as its relevance
for the Belorussian experience remains.
Aaron J. Cohen, California State University, Sacramento
men, Ali F. Speaking with a Soviet Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. xii + 236 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978-08229-6206-9.
Ali mens new book contributes to a growing body of historical monographs that enlighten
us about the ways that Soviet power was introduced, institutionalized, and received in parts
of the Soviet Union very far from Moscow. The books special contribution lies in examining
the people in charge of implementing what we would now call the soft power policies of
the Soviet revolution in Central Asia, the new Kyrgyz artistic intelligentsia whose subjectivity
was formed in the employ of the first Soviet clubs, theaters, and houses of culture. mens
book shows how artists and administrators crafted their own approach which combined
what Kyrgyz considered national with what was acceptable to the state (p. 66). Some of
these administrators feared or despised local traditions and tried to eliminate them, but at
the same time, the interaction with locals necessitated compromises, the end result of which
was the forging of a particular and novel form of Soviet culture. In effect, clubs encouraged
Kyrgyz 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 the
diverse range of practices that could be incorporated into early Soviet institutions.
The books central chapters focus topically on houses of culture, celebrations, theater,
and women. The chapter on women is especially strong and makes an important contribution
to the other studies on Central Asian women of this era. Through archival and oral history
research men shows how participating in Soviet cultural institutions such as holidays had
the effect of creating a new national narrative which included the promotion of Kyrgyz
community, traditions, history and heroes in support of the broader image of a multinational
Soviet people (p. 88). More specifically, mens point is about how Kyrgyz culture workers
infused Soviet practices with Kyrgyzness. In his arguments about adaptation, men
emphasizes the agency and creativity of these new local elites, and the pleasure and meaning
they derived from their work. These actors saw themselves as intellectual elites who
belonged to ail [rural] tribes and clans. This attitude did not necessarily signal blind belief
in the Soviet rhetoric of brotherhood but, rather, the preservation of traditional allegiances
through 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 the
story men is telling, with the evidence sometimes being too vaguely presented or unclearly
linked to the argument. The title of the book implies that the Kyrgyz artistic intelligentsia
of this period learned to speak Soviet with a Kyrgyz accent, yet men starts his conclusion
by arguing that they were engaged in fashioning a new Kyrgyz community with a Soviet
accent (p. 140). This reversal is puzzling, but perhaps what men means is that this
group of intermediaries had an accent in both idioms, passing neither as Soviet nor as
Kyrgyz. Still, mens book, and especially its oral history component, provides valuable
insight into how these culture workers understand their own biographies as essential elements
in the story of Soviet history.
Laura L. Adams, Harvard University
Fischer von Weikersthal, Felicitas. Die inhaftierte Presse: Das Pressewesen
sowjetischer Zwangsarbeitslager 19231937. Forschungen zur Osteruropischen
Geschichte 77. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. 528 pp. 88.00. ISBN 978-3-44706471-2.
In recent years researchers have paid much attention to the economic functions of the Gulag
and the organization and efficiency of forced labor. In 2011, Steven A. Barnes offered a
different perspective claiming that reeducation (perekovka) was an important and
underestimated aspect of the Gulag. In his interpretation the system appears as a kind of
socialist purgatory, separating redeemable human beings from those thought to be useless
for Soviet society. Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal makes a similar argument. In her
dissertation, she analyzes the newspapers of the Solovetskii camp and Beltlag. Due to
fragmentary holdings, the empirical basis is restricted to the years of 192427, 192930,
and 193536.
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 the
entire 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 loose
translation of arrestanskaia pressa) dispersed propaganda, but also offered art, culture,

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and information to the prisoners, which has to be considered a crucial means of reeducation
and possible social reintegration. Furthermore, these newspapers worked as a channel of
information and to a certain degree as a forum of discussion between prisoners and the
camp administration. Therefore, finally, the camps press could also serve as a source of
everyday practices in the camps.
In the empirical part, the author conducts an in depth analysis of the language, style
and discursive patterns of the newspapers. This focus on the final product of the camps
press seems somehow natural. However, it also entails some dangers because other important
sources like material of the camp administrations or the editorial departments are not at all
or only partly accessible. It seems that the author does not always keep the necessary
distance 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 convincing
or reeducating others was a significant aspect of Bolshevik techniques of power. There
was, for example, always a lot of talking about the need for agit-prop during the
collectivization campaign. However, Bolsheviks both in the center and the localities knew
well that submission to the socialist order could be achieved not by words but only by
force. It is important to understand that the Bolsheviks responded to others either by
agitation or extermination in an almost Pavlovian manner. Therefore, agitation may be due
rather to Bolshevik culture and practices of self-affirmation than to rational ends (in Max
Webers terms).
Concerning the communicative function of the newspapers, it should be taken into
account that there were several other channels of information between administration and
prisoners in the camps, some of them probably more important and efficient than the
newspapers. Apart from that, the camp bosses had good reason to ameliorate the living
conditions of prisoners from time to time independent of prisoners complaints. The author
all too easily equates the function of the camp newspapers with that of the ordinary Soviet
press. There are also some doubts about the value of the camp newspapers as a source for
everyday life in the Gulag. In any case, the newspapers themselves are somewhat disputable
evidence 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 Soviet
Incarceration 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-winning
author Anne Applebaum, and the other by professors Jehanne Gheith and Katherine Jolluck,
of Duke and Stanford Universities, respectively. Each is a collection of Gulag survivor
accounts. In spite of the convergence of their titles, the volumes are distinctive, each offering
its own valuable contributions to the growing body of published primary sources on the
Soviet system of forced labor.
Applebaums Gulag Voices: An Anthology, published by Yale University Press as part
of 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 English
translation for the first time. Arranged to follow, roughly, the track of a prisoners
experience, from arrest to release, the book includes a good mix of well-known Gulag
memoirs and those that are relatively unknown outside specialist circles (p. xiv). The
excerpts are carefully chosen to introduce the reader to a number of important aspects of
life in the Gulag, including interrogation and torture, divisions between politicals and
criminals, and informal economic and social practices. The selections from Elena Glinka
and Hava Volovich are particularly powerful, focusing on mass rape and the tragedy of
motherhood in the camps. Each piece is framed by a clear and concise preamble. Applebaum
is to be applauded for providing an accessible introduction to Gulag literature that is wellsuited to the undergraduate classroom.
Applebaums collection represents the literary canon of Gulag survivor literature well,
but it also reproduces its shortcomings, as the editor herself acknowledges. Readers will
have difficulty finding the voices of ordinary workers or peasants within its pages, groups
that comprised the majority of prisoners and exiles. Applebaums commentary is sometimes
overly simplistic and occasionally tendentious. The introduction footnotes only a single
work on the Gulag, Applebaums own synthetic history. The editor alleges that some
scholars of the Soviet Union have been reluctant to rely on Gulag memoir literature as a
source of information about the history of the camps (p. xiii). This seems a strange assertion
given the fact that all major studies of the Gulag, at least in my recollection, have used such
sources heavily. Applebaum also asserts that Soviet archives only tell the dry, official
version of events (p. xiv), a broad generalization that belies the rich variety of materials
from Soviet archives that have become available in the past twenty-five years. It is a pity
that a list of suggested primary and secondary works was not included.
Jehanne Gheith, Katherine Jolluck, and the other contributors to Gulag Voices: Oral
Histories 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, representing
the experiences of many who never put pen to paper. This includes those who come from
more humble circumstances than the politicals whom we usually encounter in the Gulag
memoir. In this meticulously constructed collection, Gheith and Jolluck do more than
simply broaden the range of Gulag voicesthey 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 around
broad themes. It begins with a particularly valuable group of interviews conducted with
former exiles to the Perm region. Here we see examples of how representatives of three
major groups of Soviet exiles (dekulakized peasants, Soviet ethnic Germans, and Crimean
Tartars) conceived of their lives before, during, and after deportation to Siberia. It is
refreshing to see the voices of more ordinary Soviet victims finally available in published
form. The interviews that follow draw from a more conventional pool of interviewees:
urbanites, mostly from the Moscow and St. Petersburg intelligentsia. Nevertheless, the
stories they tell differ significantly from the standard narratives that one encounters in
collections such as Applebaums. We see the complex ways that individuals and families
were affected by the repressive policies of the Stalinist system and the ambivalent attempts
by Stalins successors to reintegrate victims of terror and repression into Soviet society. As
interviewees tell of their experiences, they convey both a strong sense of how the Gulag
was an integral part of Soviet existence and also how repression has been interwoven into
life stories. Indeed, the book complements the recent historiographical trend of examining

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the Gulag as a central part of the Soviet experience (see, for example, works by Golfo
Alexopoulos, Steven Barnes, and Wilson Bell).
Gheith and Jollucks book dispenses with the kind of coherent structure that leads
readers through Applebaums. On one hand, the rather disjointed structure of the book
lends itself well to the fragmentary nature of the oral histories contained within. On the
other, it does make the volume less accessible to non-specialist readers, perhaps limiting its
use in the classroom to upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses. While the eclectic
nature of the book is generally a strength, one wonders whether the inclusion of a small
group of written sources at the end of the volume was a wise editorial decision. Most of
these sources were written by Polish citizens who managed to escape the Soviet Union
during World War II. The distinctive circumstances of their production makes them warrant
a study in their own right, and they seem out of place in a volume of oral histories collected
in the former Soviet Union.
Despite the similarity in their titles, these two volumes offer different things to different
audiences. Shortcomings aside, each will occupy an important place in the study of the
Soviet 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: Germanskie
diplomaty, rukovoditeli zarubezhnykh voennykh missii, voennye i politseiskie attashe
v sovetskom plenu: Dokumenty iz sledstvennykh del. 19441955. 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 Soviet
methods of investigation. Three hundred and seventy four personnel working at German
diplomatic posts, mostly in Romania and Bulgaria, were taken prisoner by Soviet forces as
they advanced into these countries in the fall of 1944. The book, a follow up on NKVD
investigations of high-ranking German officers (Moscow 2009), contains investigation
records for 25 officials and some officers in 189 documents, presented in alphabetical
order in blocks for each prisoner. They were all charged with spying and/or preparing the
Nazi attack on the USSR. Some were sentenced to twenty-five years, others to fifteen.
Most, however, survived until West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Moscow
in 1955 and, in return for establishing relations with the USSR, obtained the release of
fifteen thousand German POWs and civilians from Nikita S. Khrushchev. At the end of the
book there are biographical sketches on the prisoners and important personages mentioned
and also a table of contents.
The most important of these prisoners was Karl Clodius (18971952). Clodius was an
economic expert in the German State Department and German plenipotentiary in Romania
from 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 prisoner
worth mentioning is Adolf- Heinz Beckerle (19021876), who was the German ambassador
to Bulgaria. He did, in fact, press King Boris III to attack Greece and Yugoslavia, against
which his country had territorial claims. Before occupying this post, Beckerle was Gauleiter
of the d district in German-occupied Poland and responsible for the deaths of tens of
thousands 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, he

was arrested for participating in the deportation of Bulgarian Jews (to death camps), but
died two years later. Another prisoner, Hermann Przgen (190575), the Frankfurter Zeitung
correspondent in Moscow in the late 1930s, was charged with spying, sentenced to fifteen
years, and freed in 1955. Strangely enough, he returned to Moscow as the corrrespondent
for the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung for another twenty years.
The investigators wrote down all the prisoners statements, some of which were
obviously untrue; each prisoner had to sign the record and state that it accorded with what
he had said. Some prisoners accused their colleagues of anti-Soviet attitudes, while others
spun tall tales. Lt. Gen. Alfred Georg Gerstenberg (18931959), German air attache in
Warsaw from 1938 to 1939, ingratiated himself with his investigator by stating that he
heard from a Polish official at the time that Hermann Gring had, during a hunting trip in
Poland in 1938, bought Polish Foreign Minister Jzef Beck for 300,000 marks (p. 581).
Despite the fact that Beck signed an alliance with Britain and rejected Hitlers territorial
demands, and that the Poles fought the Germans when they attacked in 1939, the biographical
sketch 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 RIA
Novosti (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 to
Stalingrad, 19311942. Solihull: Helion & Company Limited, 2012. 399 pp. 29.95.
ISBN 978-1-907677-72-4.
This book, a translation of Mezhiritskys 1995 book Chitaia Marshala Zhukova (Reading
Marshal Zhukov), presents itself as an extended commentary on Marshal Georgii Zhukovs
memoirs, using them as a springboard for retracing the history of the Soviet military and
the Great Patriotic War. Mezhiritskys subject is well-traveled ground, and a host of Western
and Russian scholars have published substantial research on it since the opening of the
Soviet archives. However, this book is most useful as an English-language exemplar of a
certain kind of Russian semi-popular history with high literary pretensions. All the
characteristics are present: autobiographical asides, literary allusions, philosophical musings,
rhetorical questions, quotations in big blocks, and extensive speculation devoid of concrete
evidence about the intentions and motives of historical actors. Sentences trail off into
ellipses full of insinuation.
For serious students of World War II, Mezhiritsky has little to offer. Despite its 399
pages of very small print, this book has made little use of the wealth of archival material or
the high-quality scholarly works based on them. References to primary or secondary sources
in support of factual claims are rare. It is not clear what main or subsidiary theses Mezhiritsky
intends 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 not
flow in a straight line. Rather, it deflects, eddies and churns, while a topic may slip under
the surface, only to re-emerge later (p. 8). There is a certain lack of skepticism towards
good stories, as when the author notes a Soviet tank force storming into Holland in 1945
(p. 212).

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This sort of history exists in English as well: James Carrolls Constantines Sword
(2001) and Nicholson Bakers Human Smoke (2008) have important similarities with what
Mezhiritsky is trying to do. But the focus on impression, confession, recollection, and
speculation instead of hard argument based on evidence, leaves mainstream historians
unimpressed. It is difficult to imagine that readers of The Russian Review would gain much
from On the Precipice.
David Stone, Kansas State University
Bidlack, Richard, and Nikita Lomagin. The Leningrad Blockade, 19411944: A New
Documentary 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 Presss own description, Annals of Communism, in which
Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagins book on the Leningrad Blockade appears, is intended
to 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 Evgeny
Dobrenkos Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents [2007], or the collection
under the title Sedition, edited by Vladimir A. Kozlov, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Sergei
Mironenko), are closer to that description than others. On the other hand, like Matthew
Lenoes The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (2010), Bidlack and Lomagins book is
really a historical analysis illustrated by key documents. In total, sixty-six of these (including
a photograph of I. K. Lysenko, transportation secretary of the Gorkom VKP(b), taken from
his personal file, published as Document 21) appear in the book, mostly from the early
period of the Blockadethe winter of 194142, during which over half a million people
are thought to have perished from hunger, cold, and disease. The main exception is a group
of documents, nos. 2630, relating to the history of the Orthodox Churchs relations with
the authorities, and particularly the impact of Stalins famous concordat in 1943.
That said, the value of The Leningrad Blockade, 19411944, as a documentary
collection per se is extremely high. The book makes available mainly material that has
appeared in scattered collections, for example in M. V. Shkarovskiis 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). Lomagins own
Neizvestnaia 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 the
first time in print. Source details are provided, so that material can be checked against the
original. The translations by Marian Schwartz, a noted interpreter of literary prose, but
here rightly going for a relatively literal and unbeautiful style, are accurate, as far as I have
been able to check, aside from a few minor fluffs such as the retention of the prepositional
case Kolomiagakh for the place actually known as Kolomiagi, or the translation
apparatus for what contextually has to be telephone. While occasionally there are
some small variations from the Russian original in terms of presentation (the outgoing
numbers of letters are provided in some cases where the original gives them, and not in
others), these are reliable and well-annotated source materials.
Usefully, too, Bidlack and Lomagin register some of the problems of dealing with the
sources that they cite. To begin with, the documents are presented thematically, rather than

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345

simply in chronological order (for example, secret police reports are kept separate from
records of internal party meetings). In addition, the running commentaries to each section
note some of the key issues of interpretationfor instance, in the opening pages of The
Popular Mood (pp. 32967), the editors observe the lack of systematic study of the topic
at the time, the fluctuation in classifications of what constituted counter-revolutionary
tendencies, the ways in which perceptions diverged between NKVD and party sources, and
the fact that those who were most critical of Soviet power probably did not voice their
views in contexts where these would have been recorded anyway.
Alongside this, the different sections of the book together comprise an absorbing and
authoritative history of the Blockade (or, to use the alternative description that was more
current in official Soviet sources, the defense of Leningrad). The nature of the sources
means that the primary focus is on how the authorities managed the wartime situation.
Importantly, Bidlack and Lomagins 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 over
the 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 Horseman
rather 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 and
industrial 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 consumption
of meat from corpses, and in the sense of murder in the pursuit of butchery. At the same
time, the running narrative also includes material from memoirs (and from secondary sources
that 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 stagesby which point people, as the
complaints book of the Bol'shoi dramaticheskii teatr makes clear, had the strength not just
to 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 pendulum
having 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 readers
but also for specialists. It adds up to a uniquely informative account of what Bidlack and
Lomagin call the biggest challenge (p. 411) that people in the city popularly known as
Piter had ever faced.
Catriona Kelly, University of Oxford
Holmes, Larry E. War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power: The Center, Periphery,
and Kirovs Pedagogical Institute, 19411952. 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 agendasSoviet education
and provincial politicsin a study of the Kirov Pedagogical Institute. By focusing on the
war years, when the institute evacuated to the isolated provincial town Iaransk, Holmes
adds 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.

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Although the title promises a book about the institute, Holmess broad and thorough
examination of nine national and local archives, newspapers, memoirs, and personal
interviews has led to an exhaustive account of the institutes war years. This is not a book
about education and pedagogy. The institute serves as the medium for examining the exercise
of power during the war both within the institute and among various party, government, and
industry organs at the local, regional, and national level. Holmess research painstakingly
following letters of complaint, decrees, and denunciations and concludes that institutions
acted primarily on self-interest and were both victims and perpetrators.
Kirov and its surrounding region escaped the destruction of war but suffered many of
the privations that one could find in destroyed cities like Sevastopol. Although buildings
remained standing, the institute suffered from a lack of heating fuel, food, materials, and
space in Iaransk, where officials were unprepared for the burden of housing the institute, its
students, and faculty. Had the full contingent of students and faculty arrivedmany refused
to evacuate so far from a rail line and others quickly left Iaranskthe shortages would
have been even more dramatic. The institutes arrival ushered in complaints from local
organs that begrudged losing resources to the institute, yet students and faculty complained
to and about their administrators for not making daily life more bearable. Not all shortages
were fully debilitating. Holmess careful review of the archives illuminates a number of
creative adaptations, such as the biology departments use of the ever-present rats for
dissections and the professor who made a name for himself by publishing a book, during a
time of food shortages, about local edible plants.
In the final months of the war the institute was ordered to return to Kirovan order
that had been requested for months. Much of its former property was in the hands of the
lumber and aviation industry commissariats. Long fights over possession ensued, and
inspections of the buildings discovered that temporary tenants had removed windows, toilets,
furniture, sinks, and even electrical wiring. The scarcity of goods and the inability of
Soviet 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 organizations
complained to higher authorities when their property had been destroyed. The institute did
the same by not returning property in Iaransk and making inflated claims about the amount
of lost property.
Holmes convincingly shows a political process that was nearly always based on selfinterest, both institutional and, at times, personal. The Soviet collectivist ideal, although
deeply held by many, collapsed in the midst of scarcity and high expectations. Scholars and
graduate students interested in local power politics should add Larry Holmess new book to
their reading lists.
Karl D. Qualls, Dickinson College
Roi, Yaacov, ed. The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union. Washington: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. xviii +
450 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-4214-0564-3.
Yaacov Roi and thirteen other scholars, some of whom were members of the dissident
movement, provide a comprehensive analysis of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union
in the 1970s and 1980s. The main aim of the movement was the struggle for emigration to
Israel (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 Union
from 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 very
restricted. 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. Even
the commemoration of Holocaust victims was regarded as Jewish nationalism by the Soviet
regime.
In spite of the almost total assimilation and acculturation of Soviet Jews into Russian
culture, they were treated as potential traitors; a fifth column. Jews were not accepted
for prestigious jobs or admitted to top universities. Jewish children often were humiliated
at school by their classmates. This combination of state and popular anti-Semitism brought
many Jews to the conclusion that they would never have a better future in the USSR. Jews
wanted to leave the Soviet Union not only due to anti-Semitism, but also because they
wished to live in a free, democratic society. About one third of Jews who emigrated from
the Soviet Union in the 1970s up to 1991 (269,946 of 781,327) chose the United States as
their final destination (p. 107).
In spite of Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygins announcement at a Paris press
conference in December 1966 that the road for Jewish emigration was open, very few
Jews received permission to leave the country before 1971 (p. 168). The Soviets discouraged
Jewish emigration because they were afraid that other national minorities who had diasporas
abroad would also demand the right to emigrate. Soviet authorities thought that mass
emigration would discredit the entire socialist system. Because many Jews who applied for
permission to emigrate were qualified specialists, the Soviets also were afraid of a brain
drain from the country.
The breakthrough opening-up of Jewish emigration resulted from the attempt of a
group of Soviet Jews to hijack a plane to fly to Israel in 1971. Although the hijacking was
unsuccessful, it attracted worldwide attention to the Jewish problem in the Soviet Union.
Under pressure from mass protests abroad, the Soviet authorities commuted the death
sentences of the leaders of the hijacking to fifteen years in prison. Simultaneously, they
allowed 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 hunger
strikes 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 to
suppress 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, with
public protests in the United States against restrictions on Jewish emigration, pressure from
high-ranking American officials (including passage of the Jackson-Vanick Amendment trade
restrictions), and financial and moral support to refuseniks (Jews denied the right to emigrate).
Members of the Jewish movement often coordinated their activities with other dissident
and national movements in the Soviet Union. Some participated in the human rights
movement. This cooperation helped them to undermine the empire of evil and paved the
road to the democratic changes in the late 1980s that finally opened the gate to emigration
for all who desired it.
The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union is an important contribution to Soviet Jewish
history, revealing new aspects of the Jewish and other dissident movements in the Soviet

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Union. This book will be interesting for scholars as well for a wider audience interested in
the 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 European
history by expanding beyond the traditional focus on national narratives of the Cold War
years and considering the similarities and differences between the impact of this conflict on
different countries in Europe. One of several recent edited volumes to take a cultural
approach to the Cold War conflict in Europe, this one is the first to deploy the analytical
category of Cold War Culture as its primary tool of interpretation. The resulting analysis
demonstrates the benefits of this approach, and some of the challenges involved.
Written by the three editors, the Introduction explains key terms and ideas and suggests
some overall conclusions. The concept Cold War Culture refers to the diverse
experiences, 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 sufficient
parallels between Eastern and Western European cultures to justify a specifically European
perspective on the Cold War? Would it make more sense to stick to national perspectives
on the one hand, and transnational perspectives independent of Cold War politics on the
other? 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 the
present stem from the systemic conflict? What are the different ways in which societies
remember the Cold War? (p. 9) Drawing some preliminary conclusions, the editors suggest
that substantial parallels existed between European Cold War experiences. These similarities
justify the use of Cold War Culture as a tool of analysis. However, they nuance their
claim by underscoring that we should rather speak of European Cold War Cultures than of
one 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 over
others, for instance the Cold War-informed interactions between European states themselves
and European influence on the two hegemons. This is especially surprising since several
recent edited volumes, for instance by Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklossy, deal with
this 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 postwar
European history, such as modernity. The editors do speak briefly of modernity at the end
of 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 of
Europe 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 own
version of modernity. This oversight within the Introduction reflects the broader issue that
the Third World gets practically no attention from the editors, despite the importance of
this 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 Slobodians essay
on the World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959, Helsinki in 1962, and Sofia in 1968 focuses
on how West German participants sought to sell their model of capitalist democracy to the
delegates from developing countries. He finds that the Soviet rhetoric of equality and
economic justice had more sway at the first two festivals, but that West Germans in 1968
gained more sympathy by deploying Maoist-informed practices. Slobodian convincingly
demonstrates the significance to both blocs of targeting global south countries, and also
highlights 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 Miheljs
chapter. 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 of
civilization 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 eastern
Europe that stem back to the Enlightenment.
Marsha Siefert explicitly considers Cold War-influenced interactions between European
states in her study of film circulation within the Soviet bloc. She points to cooperation in
the 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 of
cultural cohesion and unity within the bloc, illustrate the analytical usefulness of the term
East European Cold War Culture(s) used by Siefert. Edward Larkeys examination of
how 1980s radio programming in West Berlin impacted East Berlin broadcasts in the sphere
of 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 German
media illustrates the fun, excitement, innovation, and freedom that was missing from the
experience of daily life in the GDR (p. 88). This widespread misconception about socialist
cultural life, expressed by Reinhold Wagnleitner and many others, does not reflect the
reality that multitudes of people within the Soviet bloc enjoyed officially sponsored cultural
activities, as demonstrated in my published and forthcoming work. The lack of space
hinders 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 War
efforts to deal with the memory and physical legacy of this conflict.
My criticisms should not detract from reader attention to this thought-provoking and
high-quality book. The editors and contributors deserve praise for helping revise our
understanding of post-1945 European experience and in particular the Cold War impact on
Europe. This volume likewise demonstrates the usefulness of Cold War Culture as an
analytical instrument. The book constitutes required reading for anyone interested in the
Cold 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: The
Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History. New York: Central European
University 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 to
provide a re-thinking, re-visiting, and re-assessing of this singular event, not just as it

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played out in Eastern Europe but as it germinated in Gorbachevs foreign policy in the
1980s and as it continues to influence politics and society in the region today. Not
surprisingly, it soon becomes clear that rethinking on such a scale is no less ambitious and
lengthy an undertaking than the search for new truths.
The volumes chapters probe an almost ostentatiously eclectic set of topicsfrom
electrification policy in Ceauescu-era Romania, to Ukraines Orange Revolution, to
consumer behavior in communist Czechoslovakia. However, four overarching themes stand
out. 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 communisms legacy for politics in the
region today. (Perhaps not surprisingly, we find consensus among the contributors of its
enduring relevance.) The fourth theme is Romania, which, despite its idiosyncrasies as the
only violent 1989 revolution, figures here as the case study of choice. Within each of these
themes, we find broad reflective chapters (often anchored within a debate over Francis
Fukuyamas end of history thesis) paired with microhistories of illuminating episodes
(for example, the development of Ceauescus rhetorical style, the politics of transitional
justice across countries).
In general, the mode of analysis is that of the history of ideastheir genesis, their
explanatory power vis--vis material or institutional constraints, and their decay. There is
much analysis here of the thinking behind Gorbachevs radical reorientation of Soviet foreign
policy, of the ideological lineages of Romanias peculiar brand of national Stalinism, and
of the significance of dissident intellectuals like Vclav Havel and Adam Michnik. This
emphasis on the power of ideas is perhaps most pithily encapsulated by the title of a chapter
probing the origins of Yugoslavias tragic civil wars: Where Was the Serbian Havel?
To those more skeptical about the causal force of ideas in politicscompared with,
say, economic interests or institutionsthis volume will seem limited, or at least partial.
That, to my mind, is not really a persuasive criticism because the editors are quite explicit
about their goals. My concern is rather that, in attempting as broad and interdisciplinary a
retrospective as this, the volume succumbs to a loss of focus and misses opportunities for
the 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 Mark
Kramer and Vladislav Zubok on Gorbachevs foreign policy goalsit succeeds beautifully.
A second critique, which will no doubt sound paradoxical given the first, is that the
contributors heavy concentration on topics like Gorbachev, Ceauescu, and lustration politics
crowds out others seemingly natural for a volume aiming to reassess 1989. The discussion
of, say, the politics of economic reform, European integration, political party development,
and majority-minority tensions is surprisingly underdeveloped. Fortunately, these
shortcomings do not detract from this books valuable contribution to the project of rethinking
1989s significance; instead, they show why more such rethinking is needed.
Conor ODwyer, University of Florida

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SOCIAL SCIENCES, CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA, AND OTHER

Stevenson, Struan. Stalins 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 Soviet
environmental policy or an account of Stalins attitude toward nature, but rather a travelogue
of recent trips taken by the author, a Scottish delegate to the European Parliament, to the
former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Stevenson recounts his visits to a number of
ecological hot spots, dedicating the most space to the Polygon, the site in Kazakhstan
where hundreds of nuclear tests were conducted from the 1950s to the 1980s, but also
discusses the environmental catastrophes related to the diversion of the rivers that feed the
Aral Sea. Stevensons main contention is that Central Asias current environmental woes
are the result of a conscious Stalinist plan to disrupt nature, although he does not prove his
case so much as frequently assert it.
This is not a book designed to satisfy scholars, historians especially. Although there is
a brief bibliography, none of the works consulted are historical in nature. There are no
footnotes or citations in the text, preventing the reader from verifying the authors claims.
This decision is more problematic given the authors penchant for hyperbole; twice the
author blames Stalin for the death of sixty million people, a number far out of line with
published 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 Soviet
Union would be better served to consult Murray Feshbach and Arthur Friendlys wellsourced Ecocide in the USSR.
Most likely, the true purpose of this book is to assist Stevenson in his laudable efforts
to raise awareness of the public health problems in Central Asia, but while it may be
rhetorically effective to link environmental destruction to Stalinism, there is a danger in
doing 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 nuclear
tests in Kazakhstan.) Holding Stalin personally responsible for the consequences of
industrialization and the Cold War testing may be comforting, but doing so assumes an allencompassing Soviet animus toward the natural world that Stevenson supports only with
one tendentiously selected quote from Maxim Gorky, and more importantly,
compartmentalizes the environmental crisis as a vestige of a social movement receding
into 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 developing
countriesa process that the Soviet Union did not take part in.
At the same time, Stevenson is oddly ambivalent about a more direct legacy of the
Soviet era: the personalized, authoritarian, and corrupt rule of figures like Islam Karimov
and Nursultan Nazarbayev, who receive praise for their achievements and even for their
plans to divert rivers in ways that the Soviets rejected as too radical. There may be deeper,
altruistic motives behind Stevensons often puzzling characterizations of Soviet and postSoviet environmental attitudes, but the finished result is a lost opportunity to present a
nuanced study of the lasting impact of communism on Central Asia in the twenty-first
century.
Stephen Brain, Mississippi State University

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Hardman, Helen. Gorbachevs Export of Perestroika to Eastern Europe: Democratisation

Reconsidered? Perspectives on Democratic Practice. Manchester: Manchester
University 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 to
liberal democracy is thought by the United States to be inadequate. Their privatization
measures have gone off according to specifications and will no doubt continue. But most
American observers of consequence think their transition to democracy is in need of a new
chapter. No wonder that, when Russian crowds demand leniency for Pussy Riot, Vladimir
Putin thinks he sees the hand of Hillary Clinton. Has Putinism really turned back the
democratic 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 against
the opponents of perestroika, especially in 198789, on which she centers her attention,
was not, in her view, a fight for democracy in any recognizable western sense, but only an
attempt to shore up the power of the one-party regime and carry out economic reform
based on the Chinese model. Accordingly, the managed pseudo-democracy that clothes
Putins Our Russia party in an impenetrable shell is no accident. It is more or less the
fruition of Gorbachevs campaigns to put a democratic face on his dictatorship.
Historians of the end of Communism and students of todays Russia cannot say that
they have heard all this before. They will want to consider Hardmans study and weigh the
array of evidence, much of it from archives, press sources in several languages, including
Hungarian, and interviews with actors in the drama. Careful readers will want to peruse the
copious quotations, even if they do not interpret them exactly as Hardman does. They
might even want to compare what Hardman says in this volume to the remarks of Stephen
Cohen on the possibilities of Gorbachevian democratization. Not that these two would be
likely to agree. However, according to both authors, Gorbachev does indeed appear to be
trying 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 in
Eastern Europe when he took on the Stalinists, whom he called the right? Hardman does
not think that Gorbachevs opponents were really on the right. She sees Egor Ligachev, the
second secretary around whom opposition to perestroika coalesced, perhaps against his
own 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 the
winning centrist, as in previous Soviet succession struggles. But why the drive to churn
cadres so persistently from the moment he took office? Hardman does not know how to
answer this, so she falls back on the assumption, rather weakly stated, that it was all for the
purpose of economic reform. Were all of Gorbachevs ruinous struggles for the fundamental
purpose of restoring market economy to the bloc? Hardman cites cartoons in the Yugoslav
press making the case that it was all a matter of hard currency debt to the West that led to
perestroika. To my mind, Hardman takes this much too seriously, as she does the story of
Leonid Abalkin, to the effect that Gorbachev was actually in cahoots with his captors during
the August coup of 1991. She seems not to reckon with any of the imperatives of the
succession process, the role of the second secretary as established under Mikhail Suslov, or
the experience of the past. Even so, this book must be read.
Anthony DAgostino, San Francisco State University

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Kostadinova, Tatiana. Political Corruption in Eastern Europe: Politics after Communism.

Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2012. xiv + 303 pp. $62.50. ISBN 978-158826-811-2.
Back in 198990 hardly anyone would have mentioned corruption if asked about the
most formidable problems the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe would have to
cope with. Today it would be impossible to imagine a serious discussion of postcommunist
politics from which this problem is omitted. What are the causes of corruption? What are
its manifestations? What are its effects? These questions attract and will continue to
attract considerable scholarly attention.
Tatiana Kostadinovas new book is a valuable contribution to the vibrant subfield of
corruption studies. Relying on two specific measurements of corruption, Transparency
Internationals Corruption Perception Index and the World Banks Control of Corruption
Index, the author offers analyses of various factors that affect the spread of corrupt practices
as well as the impact of such practices on postcommunist polities. The book consists of an
introduction, conclusion, and eight substantive chapters. The chapters are tightly organized
and well structured; each begins with an informative literature review followed by a
discussion of various hypotheses which the author intends to explore, whereupon the
hypotheses are tested by means of an array of quantitative techniques (the regression analysis
seems to be the authors preferred analytical tool). The chapters conclude with lucidly
written discussions of the essential findings.
Of central importance are the findings presented in chapter 3, where the author
demonstrates that politics is cleaner in countries that share the following characteristics:
lighter regulatory burden, relatively high GDP per capita, and an association agreement
with the European Union. In contrast, factors such as openness to trade and the type of
electoral system are shown to have a minor impact on levels of corruption. Chapter 4
addresses issues related to party finance regulations, and what the author establishes there
is that such regulations actually do matter: in countries where parties are directly subsidized
by the state (as opposed to relying exclusively on donors) and where parties are required to
disclose their financials accounts corruption is less widespread. A case study of the rise of
what the author describes as networks of corruption in Bulgaria and a survey of regional
developments in the Balkans are followed by the concluding two chapters, in which the
author deals with the consequences of corruption. Perhaps her most important finding is
that even though the attitude of most East Europeans towards the political classes that
govern them is negative, this attitude does not translate into antidemocratic sentiments.
Using the World Values Survey data set, Kostadinova demonstrates that even though the
citizens of postcommunist countries perceive politicians as corrupt and political institutions
as dysfunctional, support for democracy is still very strong. She also shows that it is difficult
to predict whether the widespread perception that politicians abuse their power in order to
enrich themselves will result in lower electoral participation (alienation) or higher electoral
participation (efforts to throw the rascals out): the relative size of the clusters of active
and demobilized voters may vary across countries and over time, depending on the level of
democratization and the scale of corruption (p. 230). While some readers may regard this
conclusion as heuristically stale, in my view it is important because it implies that the
impact of corruption on democratic political processes cannot be straight-jacketed in a
universally valid formula.
Inevitably, some readers will notice problems with the book. For example, in the
beginning Kostadinova announces that she will deal only with grand, not petty

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corruption, and this statement is problematic in at least three ways: the distinction is not
explained in a satisfactory manner; the data sets the author uses are not compiled with such
a distinction in mind; and in subsequent chapters she routinely deals with what can only be
described as petty corruption, including the misbehavior of civil servants and party
functionaries. Another problem with the book is the questionable conceptualization of
culture. She rank-orders East European nations on a secular-traditional continuum, but
this 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 social
structure (for example, patrimonial versus modernized societies). This book also exhibits
the limitations of strictly quantitative approaches to the study of corruption: readers interested
not 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 do
various distinct forms of corrupt behavior affect political processes? will perhaps remain
disappointed. Such critical comments notwithstanding, the fact remains that Kostadionva
has written an important book which presents important data in a systematic way and
improves 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. New
York: 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 review
tribunals, the interplay between law and politics in post-authoritarian regimes, and the
creation and maintenance of the rules of the game in the high-level body politic. By analyzing
the unexpected trajectories of the USSR Constitutional Oversight Committee (198991)
and of the Russian Constitutional Court (19912010) through the lenses of political science
interest-centered approaches, this book attempts to define conditions in which constitutional
courts are likely to flourish or fail. Importantly, the argument distinguishes between
conditions necessary for the creation of independent and powerful judicial review tribunals
and those necessary for the maintenance of such tribunals. To set up an independent
constitutional court, Carla Thorson argues, the presence of three conditions is necessary: a
proper 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 constitutional
court, however, depends on a greater number of factors. Some of them are outside the
control of the court: interests of politicians who must prefer a strong and autonomous court
and be satisfied with the outcomes of court judgments (pp. 19 and 26), litigants perception
that 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 of
constitutional rules (p. 23). Other factors are under control of the court: interests of judges
who 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 that
both the Soviet Constitutional Oversight Committee, which disappeared together with the
USSR, and the first Russian Constitutional Court, which President Yeltsin suspended shortly
after the bloody confrontation with the Parliament in the fall of 1993, scored low on these
factors. In contrast, the second Russian Constitutional Court, which had been reactivated

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355

by Yeltsin after court-packing in 1995, scored higher than its predecessors, albeit without
having reached actual power and independence.
The key reason for this difference (and the inability of the Constitutional Court to
become a powerful and independent tribunal) is the instrumental use of judicial review as
a 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 Russias leaders,
as Thorson correctly points out throughout the book. This conclusion is not surprising to
Russia watchers. Indeed, the literatures on legal transplants and on other post-Communist
constitutional courts, which Thorson ignores, show that instrumentality underlies many
constitutional, legal, and judicial reforms. Thorsons contribution is that she assembles
and analyzes evidence of this instrumental approach of key politicians toward the institution
that is supposed to police them. She does this skillfully for the two-year period (199596)
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 more
systematic way. The book briefly mentions that this tribunal is perceived as biased toward
the 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. 14146). If this is indeed true,
then it poses an interesting puzzle for comparative politics. The books discussion of the
development of the Court between 1997 and 2010 is very short (pp. 14552) and lacks an
analysis 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 politicians
are crucial for judicial empowerment, then their interests in making the court strong or
weak should have been defined and examined more directly and systematically. For example,
concrete and reliable evidence could strengthen the authors claim that Russian politicians
continued to find a constitutional court both viable and valuable as a means to continue a
political discussion (p. 147).
In addition, the text suffers from numerous conceptual and factual errors. Discussion
of the forms of judicial reviewabstract 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 USSR
Constitutional Oversight Committee never had the status of highest judicial body in the
country (p. 33). Justice Vladimir Strekozovs last name is repeatedly spelled as Strekazov
(pp. 41, 16263). 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 on
the Russian Constitutional Court does not provide for presidential nominations of candidates
for the bench based on recommendations from a judicial qualifications commission.
Similarly, Russias council of judges does not oversee judges discipline throughout the
country, contrary to the statement on page 152. Instead, Russias council of judges is a
body of judicial self-government responsible for drafting judicial budgets, while judicial
qualification commissions oversee judicial discipline.
These shortcomings notwithstanding, the book helps to explain, in an accessible way,
high-level judicial politics in Yeltsins tumultuous Russia (199296), makes clear that courts
become powerful only when politicians want them to become powerful, and develops a
number of interesting hypotheses. These could be tested not just on the basis of Russias
experiments with judicial review, but also on the basis of the development of accountability
mechanisms in other post-authoritarian regimes.
Alexei Trochev, Nazarbayev University

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Sutela, Pekka. The Political Economy of Putins Russia. Routledge Frontiers of Political
Economy. New York: Routledge, 2012. xx + 256 pp. $145.00. ISBN 978-0-41569737-8.
The second decade of Russias market economy, admits Pekka Sutela, was not as exciting
as 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, argues
Sutela, lends itself better to conventional economic analysis than before. A main purpose
of 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 of
Putins system, economic and political. A final chapter deals with Russias response to the
global financial crisis after 2008. In between are chapters on four particular dimensions of
the 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, Russia
remains a special case. The factor that Sutela emphasizes above all is the countrys history.
For this book the key fact about Russia is that it used to be the Soviet Union (p. 2). By
that 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 brings
that 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 Putins 1997
dissertation for a graduate degree in economics.
Each of the middle chapters combines extensive discussion of economists theories
and 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 economy
has performed. A chapter on Energy is mainly about the oil and gas sectors and their
relationship 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 as
head of a research arm of the Finnish central bank, devotes one chapter to the financial
system (again, describing the evolution of institutions but also of policy). The fourth of the
main chapters, which bears the heading Welfare, is a disjointed one, with much preliminary
discussion before moving, finally, to some direct welfare issues: demography, health, and
income distribution.
As extensive as the book is, it is not fully comprehensive. Notably absent is any
separate discussion of Russias foreign economic activity. Regional issuesor indeed
anything relating to the spatial dimensions of Russias economyare another neglected
area.
This is a dense volume. With well over four hundred references cited, it is an
encyclopedic review of research on what happened in Russia from 2000 through 2008. As
such, it is a useful book. But it is not a user-friendly one. Too often, having presented a
large amount of information on a topic, it then fails to interpret and evaluate. The reader
reaches the end of a chapter or section and begs for a bottom line: What is it that is important
here? 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 of
everything that provides hierarchy. There are very few subheads. There are no footnotes
and no endnotes. The index is so terse and has so many omissions as to be almost without
value. The effect is that there is little sense of priority. All this means that the book will
work best for those with much inside knowledge already, or those willing to use the book as

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357

a starting point for their own further research and reading, to consult other works and
references.
Clifford G. Gaddy, The Brookings Institution
Mendras, Marie. Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State. New York: Columbia
University 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 the
structural tension between a highly effective authoritarian political machine and a
governmental system that cannot effectively manage the modernization of post-Communist
Russia. Vladimir Putins accomplishments, and they are many, have also defined the limits
of the political system over which he presides. On the one hand, Putin proved able to assert
the interests of the state over Russias financial barons sufficiently to establish several
reserve funds out of energy revenues that allowed Russia to absorb the collapse of oil
prices in 20089 (in stark contrast to Yeltsin in 1998 and Gorbachev after 1986). On the
other, Putins Russia is more dependent on rents from energy receipts than ever, with the
fuels sector accounting for two-thirds of Russias exports, a third of the countrys GDP, up
to half of all public sector budget revenue, while employing just two percent of the countrys
workforce. Corruption remains rampant and Russias privileged elites themselves do not
believe that Russia can truly be modernized. The economy remains characterized by growth
without development, with GDP growth today half of what it was before the crash in 2008
(34 percent vs. 78 percent). In effect, Russias elites, who have parked the bulk of their
liquid assets abroad in safe Western accounts, do not require that Russia be modernized in
the 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 long
as they stay out of high politics and manage insider networks paying due deference (and
dues) to Putins various policy subalterns, Russias economic elites can maintain their
economic and social position.
Within this context, Mendras analyses a series of apparent paradoxes, for example: a
strong regime but a weak state; elite loyalty without trust; a civil society without a political
society; mass support for Putin but not his government; and, as noted, economic growth in
the absence of economic development. Mendras concludes by analyzing the evidently
fixed December 2011 parliamentary elections and their implications for the future of Putins
regime. She believes that the mass protests triggered by the evidence disseminated by
social media of crass regime manipulation of the vote constitute a bell-weather of future
problems for the regime. But is Putins system really as unstable as Mendras asserts?
(p. 231) No doubt, his regime has become dependent on relatively high prices of oil and
natural gas to maintain living standards and co-opt political clients. Should the price of
fossil fuels fall deeply and remain low for a long time, Putins regime would come under
substantial stress. Yet by comparison, the Brezhnev regime with which Putins is often
compared was profoundly stable (if increasingly ineffectual) until Gorbachev moved to
undermine the institutional foundations of the Soviet system (that is, the centrally planned
economy, which required a Communist party with a political monopoly; the Communist
party, 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 alternative
emerges either from among Russias elites or Russian societyand Mendras has given us

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a vivid analysis of how improbable either isPutin may well be able to maintain the integrity
of 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 Putins
achievement; for Russia remains the only post-Communist country in Europe (including
Belarus) where executive power has yet to yield to the opposition through free and fair
elections.
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 transformation
in Russia and beyond. The volume presents a rich array of perspectives on class identities
and practices, with a focus on qualitative approaches (primarily interview data) and with
attention to working class, middle class, and (to a lesser extent) elite experiences. The
twelve research articles foreground subjective perceptions and/or discursive representations
of class; less attention is given to empirical measures (though many authors situate their
interviewees professionally or otherwise). Rather, class is illuminated in terms of how
people narrate their own positionings and in terms of how moralized discussions of class
(both informal and institutionalized) have tangible effects in peoples lives. For example,
Olga Gurovas essay describes how middle-class subjects talk about the significance of
clothing, which they tend to identify as both central to their own sense of class positioning
and as unimportant, insofar as they distance themselves from materialist snobbishness.
Marja Rytknen and Ilkka Pietil highlight how health itself is viewed as a sign of class
privilege, while Anna Rotkirch, Olga Tkach, and Elena Zdravomyslova examine the mixture
of class distance and pseudo-kin closeness that is negotiated by domestic workers and their
employers. Sirke Mkinen considers how class identifications are invoked in the rhetorics
of two of Russias major political parties. Several essays consider the intersection of class
and gender identities. We see how the glamour of wealthy Russian wives is depicted in
popular media (Saara Ratilainen) and how gender ideologies inform representations of
poverty and neblagopoluchnye sem'i (Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov). We
observe 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 in
labor markets, and we gain glimpses into the gender and kinship concerns that shape single
mothers decisions about legal claims and property ownership (Vikki Turbine).
As a group the articles draw attention to both the legacies of Soviet class and gender
ideologies and the ways in which current realities are aptly described as neoliberal,
paralleling developments elsewhere in the world. Trubina links young peoples ideas about
class mobility with neoliberal individual-centred discourse (p. 204). In her essay on
contemporary self-help literature, Salmenniemi comments that responsibility has become
a dominant moral virtue and a key class-making discourse in Russia (and beyond), proposing
an individual-centred cure to a range of problems originating from social-structural
relationships of power (p. 81). This neoliberal convergence might not seem surprising or
unique; but given that just a few years ago many qualitative social scientists were warning
against the assumption that Russias marketization would yield predictable and familiar
forms 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 Western
European countries, the United States, and Russia clearly share the normalization of class
privilege ... and the symbolic denigration and devaluation of those who are dominated in
class terms (p. 264). But to what extent do these normalization processes function in
similar ways? How does the normalization of inequality operate differently in Russia today
than in the Soviet era? Given that we see both historical continuities in Russia and clear
parallels with capitalist experiences elsewhere in the world, how are we to piece through
the layered, persistent, and tensive effects of Soviet ideologies such as kul'turnost' and
their more recent, neoliberal transformations? Many of the articles render glimpses of
insight on these issues, but the volume does not offer strong take-away answers to these
admittedly sticky questions (despite Salmenniemis thorough Introduction and her useful
overview, with Harri Melin, of literatures on Soviet and Russian class). While in this sense
the volume underplays its own contributions, this is a rich collection that should be relevant
for 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 978-08032-3509-0.
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 into
popular usage, and these popular uses have their own genealogies. Alexander Kings book
seeks to remedy this. It is, he argues, not an ethnography of Koryak culture but rather an
ethnography of speaking about indigenous culture in Kamchatka, Russia (p. 2), a delicate
but important distinction which King carries successfully throughout the book. His
ethnography effectively illustrates the gap between hegemonic institutionalized structures
that presume such a thing as Koryak culture corresponds to an identifiable group of
people and can be described, taught, and preserved and the lived experience of people in
Kamchatka 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 2
and 3 focus on Koryak dance, both in small village ensembles and urban performance
groups. Dance provides King with a lens to examine how different local conceptions of
authenticity, culture, and getting it right are brought into play in trying to determine what
is Koryak about Koryak dance. Chapter 4 examines The Culture of Schools and
Museums. Schools and museums, he argues, are designed around a symbolic definition of
culture, in which cultural differences are symbols that can be learned (p. 169). King
shows very clearly how success in learning the symbolic forms of culture taught in school
takes people further and further away from the ways of life in which these cultural forms
are 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 chapters
very nicely illustrate the reasons why indigenous arts and languages are at risk in the
contemporary world, not just in Russia.

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Kings discussion of attempts to teach Koryak in schools is particularly useful in this

regard. Everyone involved in the process is well intentioned and invested in the revival of
Koryak language use. However, the act of writing a textbook presumes, one might say
even requires, a standardized language, and given dialect variation among Kamchatkan
groups, 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 so
often 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.
Kings text fits well into a larger body of work on nationalism and national identity in
Russia produced as a result of Stalins vision of a nationality policy defined by national in
form, socialist in content. He contributes to this literature by undercutting the sharp
distinction usually drawn between museum culture and lived or embodied knowing
(p. 262), showing instead the interplay between these two conceptions of culture in everyday
interactions, both among native intellectuals and reindeer-herding villagers. It is a potent
reminder of the way in which culture is now a native term. Unlike in many contemporary
ethnographies, however, the theoretical framework takes a back seat in favor of evocative
descriptions that make the book very readable for undergraduates. I found that the text
enabled my students to have a productive discussion about the ideas of culture, tradition,
and authenticity in everyday life. Their only critique was that Kings closing sentence, in
which he argues that the future of Koryak tradition is secure (p. 262), is far more optimistic
than the rest of his descriptions warrant.
Justine Buck Quijada, Wesleyan University