Institute of History in Moscow. He has lectured on military history at the Minsk Institute of Foreign Languages and is currently a professor at the Belarus Agro-Technical University. Grenvevich presents a general chronological narrative, with useful digressions to ex- plain and analyze supply, provisioning, propaganda, recruitment, and so forth. After a foreword by the editor, David M. Glantz, the study formally begins with the author's intro- duction, in which he outlines the work and provides an excellent historiographical essay. There are likewise many maps and pictures, which enhance the book. The work reflects in an amusing way the author's Soviet training. He includes a section outlining what Lenin, Marx and Engels had to say on the subject of partisan warfare, reminiscent of the old days when Soviet historians had to lard their works, no matter what the subject or the period, with quotes from these figures, including Stalin in his heyday ("As our great leader Lenin has said.... "). Previous studies of the partisan war in were largely researched in German and other Western sources, giving a bias in that direction, while Russian historiography on the matter has consisted of biased memoirs and been to some extent propagandistic. Grenke- vich has done a masterly job of reconciling the two, with the additional use of some newly opened military archives, to present the first broadly based, professional analysis of the guerrilla war that turned Russia into the "bleeding ulcer" that Spain had been for Napoleon. Grenkevich clearly and effectively demonstrates (and this point is his overall thesis) the greatness of the role that the partisans played in the Russian and hence in the entire Allied war effort. The author shows that the partisans engaged, and thus kept from useful service on other fronts, almost twice the effectives that the Axis powers had in North Africa. These units were clearly indispensable to the entire Allied war effort. In addition to the tying down of German troops, the author shows the value of the partisans' reconnaissance for and cooperation with the Red Army and the extent and effect of their sabotage in denying the Germans badly needed supplies at crucial times (e.g., Kursk). So effective was their contribution to the Allied war effort, they became a model for the formation of the U. S. Special Forces. I . Grenkevich's research is extensive. He uses some archival materials, but he has largely mined a wealth of both Western and Russian printed sources. The bibliography alone is a major contribution to the study of the topic. The author writes with a mild, yet inoffensive, patriotic bias, but he without hesitation tackles Soviet "Great Patriotic War" hagiography and challenges Russian historical theses as eagerly as he does those in Western histo- riographical accounts. The work should have a broad readership. Despite the scholarly depth of the study, which of course would make it of interest to the professional historian, The Soviet Partisan Movement is written and presented in such a clear and interesting manner which armchair generals and amateur historians would find it delightful as well. Even to the casually inter- ested, the work would be a good read.

Jamie H. Cockfield Mercer University

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer. The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Per- spective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv, 317 pp. $19.95 (paper). Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko. Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. xiii, 170 pp. $29.95.

These two books will dispel the oft-quoted view that the Russian and Soviet experience with indigenous people of Northern was more benign than the genocide of the North American indigenous people. This reviewer will identify two themes of importance in both books: the persistence over time of a vital native culture in Western Siberia and the challenges to the preservation of the traditional way of life of the and the Nenets posed by continued oil and natural gas exploitation. The anthropologist Dr. Marjorie Balzer treats the ethnic group formation of the Khanty of Western Siberia (called Ostiak in historical accounts), an -Ugrian people with hunt- ing, fishing, and breeding adaption to the harsh Siberian climate. She examines their social survival over several centuries against severe ecological, demographic and po- litical odds, focusing on colonization, Christianization, revitalization, Sovietization and re- gionalization. The intense development of oil and natural gas fields in Western Siberia since the 1960s has not seen the Khanty sharing the wealth of resource extraction but rather the disruption of . In her introduction Balzer recounts meeting with Rus- sian oil tycoons in a Paris restaurant and their negative views of the so-called primitive Khanty. Golovnev, a Russian ethnographer and Osherenko, a specialist on the , treat the in Northeastern Siberia, one of the few remaining places on earth where a nomadic people retain a traditional nomadic culture. Here in the north of the the follow a pattern of life shaped by the seasonal migration of rein- deer herds. The Nenets now face a new challenge, for they are on the site of the world's largest natural gas deposits. Full development of the oil and natural gas reserves of Yamal awaits the building of a pipeline or a liquid gas terminal early in the twenty-first century. The two authors stress the need of the Russian state and the Yamal regional authorities to devise a policy of sharing the petroleum wealth with the Nenets and preserving nomadic culture. The reviewer hopes that the mistakes in dealing with the Khanty will be avoided with the Nenets in Yamal. Balzer began fieldwork among the Khanty in 1976 and spent nearly forty months in vil- lages and cities in Russia in nine extended trips. The work on the Khanty is valuable be- cause no Western ethnography based on post-1917 fieldwork has been published and few works on native Siberians have appeared in post- Russia now open to Western anthropologists. Golovnev has conducted ethnographic and ethno-archeological research in northern Siberia since the mid-1970s, and Osherenko hopes to understand how impending oil and gas development might affect the native population. Balzer, a Research Professor at Georgetown University, studied the Association for the Salvation of the Ugra that emerged in the 1990s with its sponsorship of native rituals such as weddings and bear festivals that had survived Soviet rule and re-emerged. She showed how the Khanty joined with other indigenous people of Siberia to advance a common plat- form of grass roots mobilization, ecological action, and religious renewal, as well as older historical memory, and loyalty to the homeland. The rapid influx of settlers because of this has reduced indigenous groups to about 3 percent of the Khanty-Mansai Region by the 1970s, yet many villages retain Khanty predominance. Golovnev and Osharenko in their accounts of Nenets rebellions against Soviet pressures in the 1930s provide for the first time in Western sources eyewitness accounts as well as NKVD documents. Despite adversity, Nenets culture has remained resilient with doctors, technicians, and teachers returning to the tundra because "here on the tundra things are bet- ter for us while there in the city everything is foreign" (p. 111). _ Systemic problems of the native reindeer-based culture include loss of markets resulting in large surpluses of reindeer meat and lack of adequate processing factories. Comparisons with the indigenous people of Canada and Alaska may help offer a solution for the Nenets People of Western Siberia. The Nenets people moved from hunting and foraging to the production of domestic reindeer in response to initial encounters with the . This