New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

Jan PlamperView on AmazonJan Plamper begins in his book, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale University Press, 2012), with two illuminating anecdotes that demonstrate the power and scope of Stalin's personality cult. The first comes from Sergei Kavtaradze, an Old Bolshevik and longtime friend of Stalin. Upon his release from the gulag in 1940, Stalin and Beria accompanied Kavtaradze to his old apartment, which was then occupied by an old woman. When he woman saw Stalin at her door she staggered back and fainted. When Beria asked why she was scared by the "father of all peoples," the woman replied, "I thought that a portrait of Stalin was moving towards me." The second tale comes from Artyom Sergeev, Stalin's adopted son. Sergeev recalled one night when Stalin learned that his biological son, Vasily, used his famous name to escape punishment from one of drunken binges. In response to Stalin's rage, Vasily said, "But I'm a Stalin too." "No you're not," Stalin rebuffed. "You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!" The production of the Stalin personality cult that disembodied the man and turned him into a symbol of Soviet power is at the heart of Plamper's text. The cult made Stalin more than a leader–it transformed him into the Archimedean point of historical time and space. For Stalin represented the communist future as well as the vantage point in the socialist present. At the heart of this cult was Stalin's image, which was reproduced in a variety of media, including portraiture and film. But the crafting, production, and canonization of Stalin's image was no simple endeavor. It involved technologies that gave Stalin's cult a particularly modern flavor. As Plamper shows, the production and dissemination of Stalin's cult, which began in earnest with his 50th birthday in 1929, involved an entire institutional apparatus including mass media, artistic unions, art criticism, artistic competitions, individual filters, particularly Stalin's secretaries Lev Mekhils and Aleksandr Poskryobyshev, and art patrons like Defense Minister Kliment Voroshilov, on top of which stood Stalin at the apex. Indeed, Stalin's personal role in crafting his cult has undergone much debate. Plamper finds that it is best to view Stalin's relationship to his cult as a form of "immodest modesty." Stalin wanted his own cult and meticulously controlled it, at the same time he purposefully disavowed it. And through this alchemy of institutional and individual power did Stalin's personality cult penetrate the psyche of the Soviet citizenry. This interview with Jan Plamper is part of joint project with Russian History Blog. Please visit Russian History Blog beginning March 28 to join a discussion among several scholars on the significance of The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power.

Jeffery MankoffView on AmazonIn this episode, I spoke with Jeffrey Mankoff, an adjunct fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. Mankoff recently released a second edition of his book Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). As the book's subtitle suggests, Mankoff's primary focus is on explaining the origins and engine of Russia's post-Yeltsin resurgence in geopolitics, as well as exploring possible trajectories for its future development. This book is wonderfully structured, breaking down the production and execution of Russian foreign policy into chapters on its general contours, its internal influences, and Russia's relationship with the United States, as well as its neighbors in Europe, China, and the former Soviet regions. In this interview, Mankoff and I had particularly interesting conversation about Russian domestic interest groups and the impact of their competition on foreign policy-makers. Mankoff also applied the lessons of his book to the recent friction between Russia and the West over events in Libya and Syria. Given the byzantine nature of Russian policymaking, as well as the continuing record of disagreements and mutual confusion between Russian and Western observers about certain geopolitical hotspots, Mankoff's book is a welcome study of the opinions and pressures that shape Russian foreign policy.

Artemy KalinovskyView on AmazonIt's been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization, nationalism–the Soviet war in Afghanistan figures in many narratives. Indeed, the ten-year intervention was the one of hottest and bloodiest conflicts in the Cold War, and its traumatic legacies among a generation of Russian citizens continue to resonate. Interestingly, Artemy Kalinovsky emphasizes in A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) that the intervention was a "reluctant one," which the Soviet leadership quickly recognized as a quagmire. Yet the Soviets postponed the inevitable out of a belief that they could stabilize country, help build an Afghan army, and create legitimacy for the government in Kabul. In the end it took Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign policy of New Political Thinking to extricate a beleaguered Red Army, and save whatever face possible, despite its all-too-visible scars on the polity. Simultaneously historical and prescient, A Long Goodbye provides clarity to the logic of Soviet decision making in accepting Afghanistan as intractable and as its echoes amplify in our present day.

Jarrod TannyView on Amazon"Ah, nostalgia is such an illness, and what a beautiful illness. There is no medicine for it! And thank God there isn't." This was how one of the Soviet Union's most famous jazz singers and actors, Leonid Utyosov, concluded his memoirs. Utyosov was referring to his ironic relationship with the city of his birth and the source of so much of his material over the years: the city of Odessa, which he both ridiculed for its decadence and celebrated for the magic of its legends. Nostalgia and paradox are at the center of a new book by Jarrod Tanny, Assistant Professor of History at UNC Wilmington, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia's Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Indiana University Press, 2011). As the title indicates, the book is immersed in Jewish language — particularly Jewish humor — and Tanny delivers readers an inspired analysis of Odessa's role in Soviet history as a city that fueled cultural irreverence throughout the humorlessness of the Tsarist and Soviet ages. Given the rather grim reputation left by Russian monarchy and communism, Tanny's book is a refreshing and essential reminder that levity has played a central role in Soviet (and now Russian and Ukrainian) identity. City of Rogues and Schnorrers is at times a story of indirect resistance, but it's also a chronicle of the evolution of Jewishness, first in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union. And more than a narrative only about Jewishness, Tanny's book studies the cultural infusion that occurred in Old Odessa, explaining how Soviet culture at large came to take pride in Odessa's mythology as a national treasure.

Frank WcisloView on AmazonWhen it comes to Russia's great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regime's last quarter century. As Finance Minister he oversaw the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. As a diplomat, he was Russia's chief negotiator of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that ended his country's disastrous war with Japan.  As Prime Minister, Witte authored the October Manifesto which crowned a series of sweeping reforms of Russia's political system with a parliament, the State Duma. But as Frank Wcislo emphasizes in his biography, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Witte was also a great storyteller, as exemplified in his memoirs The Notes of Count Witte.  Wcislo shows in this fascinating book how Witte's stories reveal the times of the man as a man of the times.  Witte was an archetypical New Russian torn by his affinity for the conservativism of the Russian elite and his recognition that those very values were fetters on his nation's modernization. At the same time Witte's stories reveal a man prone to masculine hero worship, gossip, vindictiveness, and embellishment of his own role in Russia's high politics.

Andrew GentesView on AmazonThe Russian practice of exiling criminals, dissidents, and other marginal people to the remote corners of Siberia began in the 16th century as the Russian state conquered new lands in the east. Exile to Siberia continued in the Tsarist period and the Soviets expanded it into the vast penal system known as the Gulag.  Andrew Gentes wrote about the early history of this phenomenon in Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Palgrave, 2008). He continues the story in Exile, Murder, and Madness in Siberia, 1823-1861 (Palgrave, 2010). The book focuses on the reign of Nicholas I, a period in which an estimated 300,000 people were sent to Russia's eastern frontier. But as Gentes notes, the Tsarist exile system was more than a means of categorizing, punishing, and policing the Russia population for the economic interests of the state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of "governmenality," Gentes also shows that the exile system was emblematic of the struggle between the sovereignty of the tsar and the emerging, multi-layered, and dispersed authority of the Russian bureaucracy.  In addition to giving us this general, theoretical understanding of Imperial Russian Katorga, Gentes also gets us "on the ground." He tells rich, compelling stories regarding malfeasance by local administrators, the endurance and survival of political prisoners, and the fate of thousands relegated to Russia's margins.

Steven BarnesView on AmazonMost Westerners know about the Gulag (aka "Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies") thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the publication of that book in 1973 (and largely thanks to it), the Gulag has come to symbolize the horrors of Stalinism. Made up of a vast network of concentration camps, slave labor camps, and (according to some) death camps, the Gulag was a horrible thing indeed. Under Stalin some 18 million people were imprisoned in it; no less than 1.6 million of them died while inmates. The incredible brutality and injustice of the Gulag system is beyond dispute. Yet, as Steven Barnes points out in his new book Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton UP, 2011), the Soviet authorities used the Gulag not only to punish and kill, but also to "correct." They invested significant resources in the reeducation, rehabilitation, and redemption of prisoners, over 20% of whom were released every year. The vast majority of Gulag prisoners did not die there; they survived the experience and (for good or ill) were changed by it. And as they moved through the system in their millions, and were transformed by Gulag incarceration, Soviet society changed as well. In this fine book Barnes tells us how.

Charles KingView on Amazon"Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America," wrote Mark Twain to capture his visit to Odessa in 1867. In a way, it's not too farfetched that Twain saw his homeland in the Black Sea port city. Odessa was very much a modern city with its right-angled streets, buzzing markets, and cultural bricolage. "What Twain saw in the streets and courtyards of Odessa," writes Charles King in his Odessa: Genius and Death in the City of Dreams, (W. W. Norton, 2011), "was a place that had cultivated like his homeland a remarkable ability to unite nationalities and reshape itself on its own terms, generation after generation."  However, what Twain failed to see King continues "was the city's tendency to tip with deadly regularity over the precipice of self-destruction." Odessa has always been a city of in-betweens. A Russian imperial outpost as it gestured to the north and a "window the Middle East" as it looked south. A Russian city that is closer to Vienna and Athens than Moscow and St. Petersburg. A city that is "in Russia but not of it." King's chronicles Odessa's contradictory attributes and their impact on its identity. He asks how Odessa survived as a city of Enlightenment and Holocaust, high culture and revolutionary violence, multiculturalism and ethnic hatred, a bastion of freedom and victim of military occupation. In all, King concludes that Odessa is one of those cities where perpetually "teetering between genius and devastation may be the normal state of affairs."

Lewis SiegelbaumView on AmazonA recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow "the car is king." Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Russian life itself, and for some not necessarily for the better.  "The joy of personal mobility — that is, automobile ownership — has completely eclipsed the value of community life. But the joy of car ownership has long ceased being a joy and has instead become a burden, with traffic jams causing frequent delays, smog and even clogged sidewalks. We have created an environment that is environmentally, socially and economically harmful." While the detrimental effects of the car have only recently hit Russia, the automobile's political, economic, and cultural significance dates from the early Soviet period. According to Lewis Siegelbaum's recent book Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell UP, 2008), what the Soviets called "automobilism" had multiple meanings. It represented a particularly Soviet understanding of modernity, one rooted in the promise of the socialist system itself. The car also symbolized power and freedom. Power in that the elite usually had cars and, during the Great Terror, cars came to be equated with the secret police. The car meant freedom in that those citizens lucky enough to get one expanded their "private" sphere through greater mobility and leisure.  As Siegelbaum shows, the Soviet car may have been an unobtainable luxury for the vast majority of Soviet citizens, but its effects on the Soviet imagination were deep and long lasting.

Daniel TreismanView on AmazonSince the collapse of the Soviet Union, journalists, academics, and policymakers have sought to make sense of post-Soviet Russia.  Is Russia an emerging or retrograde democracy? A free-market or crony capitalism? Adopting Western values or forever steeped in Asiatic mores? Is Russia in transition, and if so, transition to what? Usually the answers to these questions are rooted in Russophilia or Russophobia, colored by teleological assumptions and crude stereotypes.  As if to reaffirm Churchill's quip that "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," too many find the nature of today's Russia remains elusive. The first lines of Daniel Treisman's new book The Return: Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev (Free Press, 2011) signifies a change of tone. Whatever Russia is, Treisman asserts, one indisputable fact is clear: "Russia has returned. Not to the West, of which it was never truly a part. But to the world." Tresiman's text is a refreshing, unbiased, and erudite exploration of the journey Russia has taken over the last twenty years. The Return begins with Gorbachev's attempts to save the moribund Soviet system and ends with a sober evaluation of its achievements and problems.  In between are discussions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev as political personalities, the collapse of the USSR, the economic turmoil of the 1990s, the war in Chechnya, and US-Russian relations. With each step the reader is urged to rethink, speculate, and reevaluate many of myths about Russia's past, present, and future. For these challenges, Treisman has done a great service.

Maria YatskovaBuy the DVD In this episode of NBRES, we're doing something a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of interviewing an author about his or her new book, we are going to talk to filmarker Maria Yatskova about her documentary film, Miss Gulag (Neihausen-Yatskova & Vodar Films, 2007), on the women's prison UF-91/9 in Novosibirsk. The film is now available on DVD. As of January 2011, the Russian prison population numbered 819,200 people, of which 66,400 were women. Given that women make up only eight percent of the Russian penal system, their stories inside and outside the justice system are rarely told.  Thankfully, Miss Gulag fills this gap by providing a rare glimpse into a women's prison. The film follows Yulia, Tatiana, and Natasha, through UF-91/9's annual "Miss Spring" beauty pageant.  Begun in 1991, the "Miss Spring" beauty pageant contributes to an inmate's rehabilitation by giving her a means to participate in the prison's social and cultural life. Also, given the importance of femininity in Russian culture, the pageant allows prisoners to express their womanhood in an institution that, as one warden says, "is not a place for women."  The stories of Yulia, Tatiana, and Natasha, however, go beyond the pageant. They are emblematic of life in post-Soviet Russia and the difficulties the first generation of young women and their families have experienced in adjusting to its realities.

Charles EmmersonView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in European Studies] I don't know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson and myself. Charles' interest in the Arctic was born from a childhood of staring at those strange names fringing the Arctic Ocean – Novaya Zemlya, Svalbad, Murmansk and Baffin Bay. Look at the far North from a pole-centric map and the whole geography of the Arctic starts to make sense. Charles' book, The Future History of the Arctic (Vintage Books, 2010) takes in the entire history and geography of the Arctic in a broad sweep – from the Norwegian explorers and the Alaskan purchase to the past and future hardships of Iceland and the Soviet dreams of expansion and riches. Now, of course, climate change is altering the very geography of the place. But how? The best word that I have for the book is 'fascinating'. It is a rich subject and this is an excellent guide to a place that is increasing in economic, geopolitical and strategic significance. I thoroughly recommend getting hold of a copy – but first, enjoy the interview.

Doug RogersView on AmazonWhat are ethics? What are morals? How are they constituted, practiced, and regulated? How do they change over time? My own research is informed by these question; so is Douglas Rogers'. So it was only natural that I would be drawn to Rogers' new book The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Cornell UP, 2009). I was not disappointed. Blending history with ethnography, Rodgers carefully examines how the priestless Old Believer community in the small Russian town of Sepych adapted its ethical practices in three historical episodes.  First, the abolition of serfdom. It caused a spiritual schism among the failthful.  Second, The coming of Soviet power, and particularly the violent, forced resettlement of collectivization, anti-religious campaigns, and the labor incentives of socialism. Soviet power broadened generational gaps within Sepych, though, paradoxically, it also strengthened the Old Belief in Sepych (via the help of Soviet archaeographers). Finally, the arrival of Post-Soviet Russia. It brought increasing social inequality, privatization, and new notions of the community's ethical leadership and repertoire. During each of these tumultuous moments, the Old Believers' tried mightily to square how they ought to act with the way they actually act. and to reaffirm the borders between "this world" and the "other world." In the end, Rogers' findings not only point to the resilience of Old Belief, but also its adaptability to the pressures of modernity.

View on AmazonThe lives, let alone the fates, of Imperial Russia's priesthood have garnered little attention among historians. I think the reason is partially because the research of most Russian historians has been focused on explaining the country's torturous modernization. The orthodox clergy were hardly (so the story goes) modernizers, so they could be ignored. I, too, accepted the clergy as a moribund social caste after reading I. S. Belliustin's Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia in graduate school.  A parish priest himself, Belliutsin lambasted his colleagues for their drunkenness, parasitism, and utter disregard for the souls of their flock. Only Bolshevik anti-religious propaganda could surpass the passion of Belliutsin's indictment. Enter Laurie Manchester's Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (Northern Illinois UP, 2008). In this fascinating book, Manchester traces the paths of the sons of priests (popovichi) out of the castelike clergy and into more "modern" and "secular" professions and political movements.  After their emancipation in 1860s, popovichi increasingly became academics, doctors, journalists, educators, businessmen, and revolutionaries. Manchester explains, however, that we would be wrong to assume that this departure from traditional roles meant the priest's sons abandoned their Orthodox upbringing. On the contrary, many popovichi stressed their religious traditions, ethics, and worldview in their new "secular" mission to save Russia. Their Orthodox values provided a moral foundation that made them distinct in the ranks of Russia's intelligentsia. These values also outlasted the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks may have destroyed the Orthodox clergy as a social class, but eliminating its ethos proved far more difficult.  Manchester's complex tale provides a much needed challenge to our image of the backward priest and secular, westernized intelligent by showing that for the sons of priests the self-fashioning of a secular identity never strayed to far from its religious antecedents.

Michael ReynoldsView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] Most of us live in a world of nations. If you were born and live in the Republic of X, then you probably speak X-ian, are a citizen of X, and would gladly fight and die for your X-ian brothers and sisters. If, however, you were born and live in the Republic of X and you are not–by self-proclaimed identity–X-ian, then you are, well, a problem. But it wasn't always so. Prior to the nineteenth century, people generally did not live in a world of nations. They lived in a world of empires. Now in hindsight, we say that these empires were "multinational," that is, they were made up of nations. But the elites who ran the empires didn't think so. They saw them as made up of territories where the sovereign's writ ran, not "nations" that the sovereign ruled (though there was some of that as well). As Michael A. Reynolds points out in his fine book Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge UP, 2011), European imperial elites of the nineteenth century faced a crisis when nations–and the political doctrine that said they should be self-governing, "nationalism"–began to grow in strength. The idea of nations and the program of nationalism were born in Western and Central Europe, where they caused some but not too much difficulty, at least at first (a story we will have to leave aside). When, however, the nation-states of Western and Central Europe began to threaten, territorially speaking, the empires of Eastern Europe, and to export the doctrine of nationalism to those regions, the real trouble began. For Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman elites understood that war and nationalism in the imperial context would likely mean the end of empire. One could not fight external and internal enemies at the same time. They were not wrong in this. As Reynolds shows, they did the best they could, creating alliances with Western and Central European powers to buy time, fostering subversive nationalisms within the borders of their opponents, and, eventually, embracing nationalism and embarking on massive campaigns of ethnic cleansing and killing (most infamously in the case of the Armenians). In one case, they succeeded after a fashion in holding the empire together, at least for a time (Russia); in two others they failed (Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire). But they were all victims of war and nationalism, forces they helped create and could not control.