New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies

View on AmazonAt the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress in 1974, Leonid Brezhnev announced the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, or BAM.  This "Path to the Future" would prove to be the Soviet Union's last flirt with socialist gigantism.  The cost, poor planning, waste, and environmental damage associated with the construction BAM's 2,687 miles of track served as an allegory for the Soviet system as a whole. To say that the BAM, which was to serve as an alternative to the strategically vulnerable and aging Trans-Siberian Railway, was a colossal failure is a colossal understatement. It's troubles linger even today. But BAM's story is not merely tragic.  As Christopher Ward's book Brezhnev's Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism demonstrates, the tale of BAM is also a window into the complexities of the Brezhnev era. Historians commonly view this period as one of "zastoi," or stagnation. The BAM project, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. As Ward shows, we find a lot of things in the BAM initiative that are not captured by the "zastoi" interpretation, for example: a nascent Soviet environmental movement at loggerheads with the ecological destructiveness of Soviet Prometheanism; a flood of young volunteers driven by enthusiasm, opportunity, and a desire for freedom in the more libertine Soviet Far East; and, finally, a lot of crime, corruption, and sex (together with futile attempts to regulate and punish all of them). Ward's study of BAM suggests that the Soviet Union under Brezhnev wasn't so much stagnating as it was running about without any real idea of where it was going.

Thomas de WaalView on AmazonOn August 8, 2008 many Americans learned that Russia had gone to war with a mysterious country called Georgia over an even stranger territory called South Ossetia. Both Georgia and South Ossetia were located not on the southeastern seaboard of the United States, but in a mountainous region south of Russia called the Caucasus.  The war was short, a mere four days, but during that time it became an campaign issue between Barack Obama and John McCain, a moment made memorable when McCain declared "We are all Georgians now." For the Cold Warriors of yesteryear the world was remade familiar: Russia was enemy #1 again, Mikheil Saakashvili's was a victim of Russian imperialism, and the Cold War was back as if it had never left. Those familiar with the South Caucasus know that the region is allergic to Cold War binaries.  Its ethnic, linguistic, and religious complexity defy even the best social scientific models. Persistent conflicts mark the region.  Azerbaijan and Armenia are at odds over Nagorno-Karabakh.  Georgia has had to contend with seperatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both Russian protectorates.  Of course, we can't forget that the region also hosts two important energy pipelines–the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline–making the South Caucasus a geopolitical focus of the United States, the EU, and Russia. The 2008 South Ossetian War might have brought the region to the attention of many, but its origins have deep roots in the intricacies of the region's history. Luckily, to make sense of the South Caucasus' complicated past and volatile present, we have Thomas de Waal's The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford UP, 2010).  De Waal clearly and succinctly outlines the morass that is the South Caucasus by laying out the histories, relations, and issues that drive present day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and their place in the world. Whether as a refresher or an initiation, The Caucasus: An Introduction is an important primer.

Miriam DobsonView on AmazonExaminations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies.  Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag's construction, management, memory, and legacy.  Few scholars, however, have investigated how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over four million prisoners from labor camps and colonies between 1953 and 1958.  How were they received? How did they reintegrate themselves into Soviet society?  How did the specter of the "gulag returnee" impact policy on crime and social regulation? To answer these questions we have to turn to Miriam Dobson's Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin (Cornell UP, 2009). In Dobson's book we don't find the heroic gulag returnee ("Khrushchev's zeks," as Stephen Cohen affectionately calls them) who was unjustly persecuted under Stalin for his political views. Rather, Dobson gives us a tragic figure who finds himself indelibly scarred by his years in exile.  Soviet citizens seemed to have cared little as to whether the returnee was a political or an ordinary criminal, innocent or guilty. People viewed all the returnees as suspicious outsiders, marked as such by their gulag slang, prison tattoos, and coarse appearance. They were, in a word, a problem, one that eventually caused a series of moral panics. For Dobson, Stalin's death, Khrushchev's denunciation of him, and the release of his victims did not (alas) evoke a collective sigh of relief within the body politic.  Rather these acts inaugurated an era of confusion and anxiety articulated in society's attempts to make sense of the gulag returnee's place in the post-Stalin order.

Claudia VerhoevenView on AmazonScan the historical literature of the Russian revolutionary movement and you'll find that Dmitrii Vladimirovich Karakozov occupies no more than a footnote.  After all, Karakozov was no great theorist.  He led no political organization.  He hardly fit the image of the iron willed, revolutionary aesthetic who preached the maxim 'The ends justifies the means.'  No, to his contemporaries, Karakozov was a nobody, an odd and sickly school dropout who, like so many of his ilk, dabbled in student radicalism.  That is until he tried to assassinate the tsar. And with that act he unleashed the unthinkable. Pinpointing the exact moment a historical phenomenon is born is no easy endeavor.  But after reading Claudia Verhoeven's The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009), we can now locate the birth of terrorism in its more or less modern form.  Terrorism was born on April 4, 1866 at around 3:45 pm.  It's father was the aforementioned odd student, who pulled out a double-barreled flintlock pistol and shot at Alexander II as he stepped out of St. Petersburg's Summer Garden on to the boulevard.  Karakozov missed, and perhaps his act would have remained a historical abortion if it weren't for terrorism's mother: modernity.  For, according to Verhoeven, it was the modern conditions of Imperial Russia that allowed Karakozov's shot to reverberate throughout the Russian body politic.  It was modernity that gave us a new form of political violence, and perhaps more important a new political subject, the terrorist, who through his or her political will could alter the course of history. The Odd Man Karakozov is, in  Verhoeven's words, truly a work of nanohistory.  Through a singular moment she shows how the consummation between an odd man like Karakozov and modernity influenced the idea of revolutionary conspiracy, literature, celebrity, revolutionary fashion, art, and our present understanding of terrorism and the terrorist.

J. Arch GettyView on AmazonWhen you think of the Great Terror, Stalin immediately comes to mind, and rightly so.  But what of Nikolai Ezhov, the man who as head of the NKVD prosecuted Stalin reign of terror?  We've learned a lot about Ezhov's involvement in the Terror since the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. We know about his fanaticism, how he manufactured confessions, was present at his victims' torture, and even kept the bullets that killed his victims, wrapped and labeled them, and tucked them in his desk.  Less is known about Ezhov before he became the personification of Stalinist political violence. To understand Ezhov's life before the Terror, we have to turn to J. Arch Getty's book Ezhov: The Rise of Stalin's Iron Fist (Yale UP, 2008). Getty's focus isn't on Ezhov, Stalin's "iron fist," but on Ezhov the "good party worker."  In particular, Getty is interested in Ezhov's meteoric rise through the Party ranks to become the head of the NKVD and, by 1936, the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union.  Ezhov's story is a mixture of hard work and ambition, patrons and clients, devotion, and Manichean political culture  in post-revolutionary Russia.  How did Ezhov successfully navigate all this?  The answer to this question says less about Ezhov as an individual than it does about the Soviet system in the 1920s and 1930s.

John SteinbergView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It's little wonder, then, that historians have expended oceans of effort and ink trying to explain why and how it happened. The answer is complex, but it boils down to this: Nicholas II's armies had a rough time of it in World War I, his regime lost credibility, the hungry cities revolted, and the Bolsheviks usurped power in an armed coup. The key event was, then, the Russian loss to the Germans on the Eastern Front. Surprisingly, the Russian defeat –arguably the second most important political event of the twentieth century because it triggered the first–has not been widely studied. For my generation of Russian historians (and, I should add, the one that preceded it), the Revolution–the last, best hope of mankind to many–was a sexy topic indeed; the failure of the Russian Imperial Army, not so much. So we were left in the dark (or, rather, left ourselves in the dark). There were, however, historians who went against this grain. Among them are (to name only a few and those who write in English): John Bushnell, William Fuller, Peter Gatrell, Hubertus Jahn, Eric Lohr, Bruce Menning, David Rich, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Norman Stone, Allen Wildman and our guest today John Steinberg. Steinberg's wonderful new book All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914 (Johns Hopkins/Wilson Center, 2010) is a significant contribution to our understanding of the roots of the Russian defeat in World War I. His focus is the Imperial General Staff and its struggle (failed, as it turned out) to reform itself and the army that it commanded. As Steinberg points out, their task was a difficult one, made much more so by Russia's all-encompassing (and to a considerable degree self-imposed) backwardness. The leaders of the General Staff were smart people. They knew what to do to make the Imperial Army a first-rate fighting force. Under other leadership, they might have succeeded in modernizing the army. But Nicholas did not lead, and so nothing could be done. Autocracies depend on autocrats, and Russia had none when it needed one most.

View on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of building socialism. Certain "elements" needed to be sent for re-education (the Kulaks), others to build new socialist cities (Magnitogorsk), and still others back to where–ethnically speaking–they "belonged" (Baltic Germans). Thus when the Germans attacked, the Bolsheviks were ready to move their "assets" out of the way. Sort of.  In To the Tashkent Station. Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Cornell UP, 2009), Rebecca Manley does a fine job of telling the tale of how they evacuated millions of people as the Germans advanced in 1941 and 1942. Though the Party had plans (the Bolsheviks were great planners…), everything did not, as the Russians say, go po planu. As the enemy advance, threatened people did what threatened people always do–they ran off (or, as the Soviet authorities said, "self-evacuated."). The Party was not really in a position to control this mass exodus as many members of the Party itself had hit the road. Of course some Soviet citizens stayed put, comforting themselves with the (false) hope that the Nazis were really only after the Jews and Communists. But most didn't, particularly if they had sufficient blat ("pull") to get a train ticket to a place like Tashkent. Under Communism, everyone is equal. In the real world, everyone isn't, as many Soviet citizens found out. Some were allowed to leave, others weren't. Some were given shelter, others weren't. Some were fed, others weren't. In this time of crisis, all of the dirty secrets of Communism were revealed. This is not to say, of course, that it wasn't a heroic effort. It was, and a largely successful one. The Party managed to save much of its human and physical capital, and this fact contributed mightily to its eventual triumph in the war. Moreover, it saved millions of Jews from certain death, a fact that deserves to be acknowledged more often than it is. There are, then, many reasons to be thankful the Soviets bugged out as fast as they did. And there are also many reasons to be thankful Rebecca Manley has told us the story of how they did it.

Kenneth MossView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] For us, every "nation" has and has always had a "culture," meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word "nation," this idea of "culture" or "a culture" is not very old. According to the OED, the modern meaning gained currency in English only in the nineteenth century. In a way, that's not surprising: the nineteenth century was the era of high-nationalism and, as we've said, every "nation" had to have an essence that distinguished it from all others. That essence came to be called "culture." This nation-culture equivalency, however, presented some nationalists with a problem, particularly if their "nation" had what looked to be several cultures. Jews are the archetypal example. They were spread all over the place, spoke many languages, and practiced many customs. There was nothing to unite them except Judaism–itself hardly unified. If you believed in a Jewish nation, then you had to believe that there could be a "Jewish culture." But what would it be? In his fascinating new book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2010), Kenneth Moss explores the ways in which Eastern European Jewish culture-builders attempted to answer this question in the Russian Revolutionary era. As Ken points out, there was no simple answer. Rather, there were a lot of competing answers (Yiddishist, Hebraist, Socialist, etc.). But there was also a lot of deep, deep thought about what it meant to build and have a culture. These thinkers knew what we have forgotten, namely, that all cultures are made. They knew this because they were making one. Whether we admit it or not, we are too…

Katy TurtonView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] A number of years ago I read Robert Service's excellent biography of Lenin and came away thinking "We don't really know enough about the women who surrounded Lenin throughout his life." Katy Turton, a lecturer in modern European history at Queen's University Belfast, has fixed that. Her Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin's Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937 (Palgrave, 2007) does a wonderful job of filling in the many blanks. She shows that the Lenin's sisters, as well as his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia, were not merely caretakers. Rather, they were powerful political actors in their own right. It's a terrific book.

Simon MorrisonView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] In the Soviet Union, artists lived lives that were at once charmed and cursed. Though relatively poor, the USSR poured resources into the arts. The Party created a large, well-funded cultural elite of which only two things were expected. First, that they practice their art. Second–and here's the rub–that they tow the Party's ideological line. Art under Communism was intended to enlighten the working class. In practice, that meant hewing to hackneyed tropes ("Socialist Realism"). Worse still, the Party could and did change its line at will. What was "progressive" one day could be "reactionary" the next. This made the lives of Soviet artists unpredictable. It was hard to say what the Party bosses' would want from one year to the next. In his masterful The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford UP, 2009),  Simon Morrison offers an excellent example and analysis of the dilemmas Soviet artists faced. When Prokofiev came back to the Soviet Union in 1935, he was asked to accommodate his work to the "needs of the Party." He did so and became a Party darling. But then things changed. Stalin–an expert in all things–decided that Prokofiev's work was too "formal" (whatever that meant). And so he was out of favor, and remained so for the rest of his life. When he died–ironically on the same day as Stalin–his passing was hardly noticed. It's a sad and instructive story, and we should all thank Simon Morrison for telling it.

David ShearerView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most important of modern history, primarily because it shapes what we are likely to think about communism. There are two schools of thought. On the one hand, there are those who feel Stalin launched the Great Purges because "social cleansing" was (and is) intrinsic to communist ideology and practice. On this gloss, communism itself is responsible for Stalin's bloodletting. On the other hand, there are those who hold that Stalin launched the Great Purges in response to a momentary crisis, or perceived crisis, that had little to do with building communism per se. On this understanding, Stalin and his colleagues believed that the destruction of the Soviet Union, either by internal or external enemies, was an imminent possibility. Thus they felt they had to act, and act decisively. Who's right? In his path-breaking Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (Yale UP, 2010) David Shearer offers the most nuanced answer yet. He argues that the Bolsheviks believed class war was an essential and unavoidable part of building communism. The logic here is simple: if you are going to build a classless society, you have to destroy existing classes. This is precisely what the Bolsheviks did, and said they were doing, during the mass repression campaigns–especially de-kulakization–of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Great Purges, however, were different. Here Stalin was not building communism via class war, but preparing the Soviet Union for what he believed would be a decisive battle with capitalist states without and "socially harmful elements" within. By the mid-1930s, all the top Bolsheviks were truly frightened. They thought the end might well be nigh, and they knew that something had to be done about it. In desperation (delusional though it may have been), they used the police organs developed during the the period of class war (the NKVD, the GUGB) to root out any potential opponents of the regime. Who were they? Basically anyone who had run afoul of the law or was a member of a suspect political class or ethnic group. Stalin ordered the police to tally these "socially harmful elements" and transmit the results to Moscow. On the basis of the tallies, Stalin issued arrest quotas and commanded that they be filled and over-fulfilled. The Great Purges began. And then, after roughly 17 months, they stopped. The Germans invaded, were defeated, and the Bolsheviks set about rebuilding the country. The repression continued during this period, but, as Shearer shows, it was different from what had come immediately before. The political police were no longer rounding up masses of potential counter-revolutionaries (except in the newly occupied territories such as the Baltic States, Eastern Poland, and Western Ukraine; there class war and social cleansing still had to be undertaken). Instead, the civil police arrested and exiled hundreds of thousands because they had abused socialist propriety by pilfering food, refusing to work, or committing one or another crime. What Shearer demonstrates is that while Soviet communism was inherently oppressive, it was not inherently murderous. Communism did not uniquely cause the Great Purges; Stalin's paranoia and power did.

David Schimmelpenninck van der OyeView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] There's a saying, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar." I've scratched a Russian (I won't say anything more about that) and I can tell you that the saying is false: all I found was more Russian. It's true, however, that Russians have always known a lot about Tatars because they've lived cheek-by-jowl with them for many centuries. Before the beginning of European contact with Russia in the sixteenth century, Russians didn't really think the Tatars were terribly exotic. They were just neighbors, albeit occasionally hostile and profoundly heretical ones. The same could be said of the early modern Russian view of, say, Poles and Germans. Things changed, however, when the Russians decided they weren't just "Russians" but were also "Europeans." That happened, roughly, in the eighteenth century. The Europeans, not being terribly experienced with the peoples of eastern climes, had some rather odd notions about the folks they often called "Orientals." Over time, the Europhilic Russian elite began to assimilate the Europeans' views of "Orientals." The process by which they did so, and the cultural consequences thereof, are the topic of David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye's lucid, witty, and thought-provoking Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (Yale UP, 2010). David explores how the Russians came to construct their own unique "Orient," one that wasn't exactly like the Western version and yet was clearly different from the thing itself. For unlike their imaginative European counterparts, the Russians–in my reading–could never really accept the Western image of "Orientals." They knew the Tatars and other Asian peoples too well and could see that the Western view didn't match. And then there was the needling suspicion that they themselves were "Orientals". Thus Russian "Orientalism" was hardly the supposedly subtle yet powerful tool of pith-helmeted, empire-building, expansionists, but instead an attempt at self-understanding.

John RandolphView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] John Randolph, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is our guest on the show this week. His book The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Cornell University Press, 2007) has just appeared. As a sometime Russian historian myself, I was very interested in reading the book. I knew a bit about Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist famous for running around nineteenth-century Europe fomenting revolution, but I knew virtually nothing about his family. I'd guess the same is true of many of you. John traces the Bakunins from their earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century, and along the way significantly revises the history of Russian radicalism in the period. The book is a model for historians who wish to weave together the private and the public, the personal and the political, the familial and the social. Highly recommended.

Alex RabinowitchView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] It's hard to know what to think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Was it a military coup led by a band of ideological fanatics bent on the seizure of power? Was it a popular uprising led by an iron-willed party against a bankrupt political order? Or something else?  The debate began immediately after the October Revolution and continues to this day. No one is in a better position to answer these and related questions about early Soviet power than Alex Rabinowitch. For over forty years he has been at the forefront of scholars trying to figure out just what happened in 1917 and the years that followed. His Prelude to Revolution. The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Indiana UP, 1968) was "revisionist" before Revisionism and remains a classic of Soviet history today. The same might be said of his follow up book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power. The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (Norton, 1976; Haymarket, 2004). Now Professor Rabinowitch has treated us with yet a third installment in what is destined to become the standard work on the Bolsheviks in the Revolutionary period: The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Indiana UP, 2008). The book, as we might well expect, is terribly impressive. It does all the things critical history should: debunks myths, establishes facts, and sets the story in a framework that makes what happened understandable. Thanks to Professor Rabinowitch's work, it's now much easier to know what to think about the Russian Revolution.

Norman NaimarkView on Amazon[Crossposted from New Books in History] Absolutely no one doubts that Stalin murdered millions of people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. His ruthless campaign of "dekulakization," his pitiless deportation of "unreliable" ethnic groups, his senseless starvation of Ukrainian peasants, his cruel attempt to "cleanse" the Communist Party of supposed "enemies of the people"–all of these actions resulted in mass death. In total, Stalin is responsible for the murder of roughly 10 million Soviet citizens. Again, this is well established. What is not well established is what to call Stalin's crimes. As Norman Naimark points out in his thought-provoking Stalin's Genocides (Princeton UP, 2010), historians and others have been peculiarly conflicted about this issue. Everyone agrees it's mass murder. But is it "genocide," with all that term entails? Etymologically, it doesn't seem so: gens is Latin for "people who claim common descent," that is, a clan, tribe, or even nation. The Kulaks were not a gens. Historically, genocide doesn't fit well either: after World War II, the UN decided that it would mean "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial religious group, as such." Again, the Kulaks are none of these things. Naimark, however, argues Stalin's crimes should be considered genocide on three grounds. First, he demonstrates that some of Stalin's attacks were genocide under the UN definition, for example his exile and starvation of minority ethnic groups. Second, he shows that some of those who sought to define genocide during and after World War II did not intend to restrict it to gens: they included political groups, that is, entities like the Kulaks. The Soviets and others demanded these groups be removed from the definition, and they were. Third, he demonstrates that international law has evolved, and with it the legal meaning of genocide: recent proceedings in the Baltic states, for example, have broadened the definition. Some might ask "What does it matter what we call it?" I think it matters a lot. Words are not only an interpretation of the world, but they are also a reflection of who we are. The words the Nazis used to describe their crimes–"final solution," "transport to the East," "special handling"–tell us much about them. The words the Stalinists used to describe their crimes–"purge," "evacuation," "re-education"–tell us much about them as well. And so we have to ask: What does our persistent failure to call Stalin's crimes "genocide" say about us? Nothing very good, I think.