December 2016 Book Review Round up -- Part One!

H-Soyuz December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!

Discussion published by Jennifer Carroll on Monday, December 19, 2016

Dear Soyuz Members,

Please find below the monthly book review round up for December 2016, Part 1!

This is our first round up in several weeks, so we have many new titles and reviews to share. For this reason, the December 2016 round up will be divided into two parts. This, the first of our 2-part round up for the end of 2016, includes 101 reviews from the following four journals:

Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 7: Reviews 1-12

Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 8: Reviews 13-24

Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 9: Reviews 25-26

Slavic Review Vol 75 Issue 3: Reviews 37-88

European Education Vol 48 Issue 3: Review 89

European Education Vol 48 Issue 4: Review 90

Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Vol 2, Issue 2: Reviews 91-101

Our next round-up, to be published shortly, will include recently published reviews from the Slavic and East European Journal; East European Jewish Affairs; Central Asian Survey; Religion, State, and Society; and Nationalities Papers.

I also have the pleasure of announcing a new book written by a Soyuz Member:Kamil Wielecki’s Coping with Uncertainty: Petty Traders in Post-Soviet Russia.

Please join me in congratulating Kamil on his new book!

As always, if you have recently published a book, OR if there is a journal, which we have not included in this round up but which you think deserves our attention, please email me directly at [email protected].

Best,

Jennifer Carroll Soyuz Book Review Editor

Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 7

1) Upravlenie vysshim obrazovaniem i naukoi: opyt, problemy, perspektivy.Robert M. Nizhegorodtsev & Semen D. Reznik (eds). 2015, Moscow: INFPA.

AND

Vysshee yuridicheskoe obrazovanie v Kazakhstane v 21 veke: reformy, problemy i perspektivy. Maksut S. Narikbayev & Sergei F. Udartsev (eds), 2914, Astana: Foliant.

AND

Sistema vysshego technicheskogo obrazovaniya Kazakhstana: dvizhenie po spirali. By Ernest A. Serikov. 2015, Almaty: Ak Shagyl. (review by Rafis Abazov & Ulukbek Aliev)

“The books under review reflect heated debates within the Eurasian space on the current situation in higher education, and on directions for much-needed reforms to make the national higher education systems in the region more globally competitive and more adaptive to the challenges of the twenty- first century. Two countries…These three books represent a very small sample of the mainstream views on the various approaches to and policy debates on directions for policy change, management of higher education, and recent developments in the field, using the examples of specialised law universities and polytechnic universities. All three works are written by leading experts in the field who focus on the realisation of long-term policy reforms in their respective countries.”

2) Compliance Patterns with EU Anti-Discrimination Legislation, by Vanja Petričević. 2015: New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Laura Asarite).

“The goal of this book is to contribute to explanations for discrepancies in compliance with EU anti- discrimination legislation across the EU member states. Petričević sets out to examine multiple factors influencing the level of compliance. By doing so she touches on a very crucial linkage—the inability to comply with EU legislation and the level of discrimination across the EU which accordingly poses threats to the unity of the EU. It must be noted that this book concentrates in particular on ethno-racial discrimination.”

3) Post-Communist Romania at Twenty-Five. Linking Past, Present, and Future. Lavinia Stan & Diane Vancea (eds). 2015, London: Lexington Books (review by Endre Borbáth).

“Two and a half decades after the Romanian regime change, Stan and Vancea convened some of the leading academics working on post-communist Romania to evaluate the country’s transition. The volume they assembled puts under scrutiny a wide range of aspects of Romania’s post-communist transition, from the expectations formulated in the beginning of the 1990s to the realities of the recent years of post-EU accession. Broadly speaking, the volume depicts an ambivalent post- communist democracy, which, although failing to live up to the expectations formulated in 1989, outperforms many other former communist regimes.”

4) The European Union’s Normative Power in Central Asia. Promoting Values and Defending Interests. By Georgiy Voloshin. 2014, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Fabienne Bossuyt).

“Anchored in the commonly-used framework of ‘Normative Power Europe’ (NPE) developed by Ian Manners, the book seeks to examine whether the EU has any normative power in Central Asia. The author frames the central research question in terms of ‘effectiveness’: is the EU’s normative power in Central Asia effective, and if not, why not?”

5) Between Europe & Asia. The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism. Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, Marlene Laruelle (eds). 2015, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press (review by Edward C. Holland).

“This volume extends academic understanding of Eurasianism as an ideology and intellectual project in interwar Europe. In contradistinction to recent work on Eurasianism in its contemporary form, as articulated in the writings of Aleksandr Dugin and others, its remit is almost exclusively historical; Dugin is not the subject of sustained discussion until the volume’s final two chapters. In turn, the pieces collected here provide an appropriate intellectual counterbalance to other recent work characterised by embroidered claims of neo-Eurasianism’s influence on contemporary Russian foreign policy.”

6) Rocking St. Petersburg. Transcultural Flows and Identity Politics in Post-Soviet Popular Music. By David-Emil Wickström. 2014, Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag (review by Natalia Khalymonchik).

“This book is an example of academic work inspired and driven by expertise in the area that lies in real life outside of academia. The author intermingles musicology, anthropology and area studies in one book and combines his academic background with the most extended form of participant observation.”

7) Russia: Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, IMEMO Supplement to the Russian Edition of the SIPRI Yearbook 2013. Alexei Arbatov & Sergey Oznobishchev (eds). 2014, Moscow: IMEMO RAN (review by Steven J. Main).

“Any publication by this prestigious academic body is worthy of serious attention and analysis. However, this one has not only dated badly—a lot of the sections were written prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, military intervention in eastern Ukraine, air war over Syria etc.—but has been extremely poorly edited, proofread and, in places, translated. Whoever is in charge of such ‘details’ should either get a new team in place—who know all the relevant English and Russian vocabulary and who have the necessary skill to proofread and edit the works into proper written English—or outsource the work to a specialised body, which can do the necessary and vital editing and proofreading work.”

8) Inequalities During and After Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Cristiano Perugini & Fabrizio Pompei (eds). 2015, New York, NY: Palgrage Macmillan (review by Ákos Máté).

“While the discussion [of the 2008 financial crisis] tended to focus on Western economies or the North–South divide, this edited volume aims to broaden the scope by examining the situation in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Baltic countries. This is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion, since it focuses on a region where inequality is often assumed to be a less pressing issue due to the common state socialist past.”

9) Civic and Uncivic Values in Kosovo. History, Politics, and Value Transformation. Sabrina P. Ramet, Albert Simkus & Ola Listhaug (eds). 2015, Budapest & New York, NY: Central European University Press (review by Michael Potter).

“The flurry of (mostly Western-authored) histories and accounts of conflict in the western Balkans in the 1990s and early 2000s has given way to more diverse and informative works covering a variety of aspects of societies in the former Yugoslav space. This collection of essays is the sixth in a series looking at civic values in Yugoslav successor states and provides a broad range of insights into the social and political spheres in Kosovo.”

10) Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy.Mikhail A. Molchanov, 2015, Farnham & Burlington, VT: Ashgate (review by Vsevolod Samokhvalov).

“Several studies have been published about Eurasian integration. Most of them, however, have a very narrow scope and look mostly at the Eurasian Economic Union, its institutions, internal politics and interaction with other international players. This book adopts a different and ambitious approach, as it tries to inscribe research on Eurasian integration into the broader context of regional studies and the research of Russian foreign policy.

11) Politika apolitichnykh: sotsialnye dvizeniya v Rossii 2011–2013 gg. Svetlana Erpileva & Artemii Magun (eds) 2014, Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (review by Andrey Semenov).

“This edited volume is the result of a broad collaboration between individual scholars and research groups, brought together by the Public Sociology Laboratory (St Petersburg, Russia). The volume focuses on the 2011–2013 wave of contention in Russia and includes a variety of topics: the ‘Za Chestnye Vybory’ (‘For Fair Elections’—FFE) campaign, the volunteers’ movement in Krymsk, anti- nickel environmental mobilisation in Voronezh, counter-public sphere formation on the web, and much more.”

12) Socialist Planning. Third Edition. By Michael Ellman. 2014, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (review by Ion Voicu Sucala).

“This latest version of Michael Ellman’s Socialist Planning follows two successful earlier editions. The first appeared in 1979, and it explored the problems faced by the planned economies of the Soviet Union and China during the Brezhnev and Mao leaderships. The second was published in 1989 and reflected the economic reforms attempted by some socialist countries, while also serving as an important source of information about the causes of the socialist system’s collapse. The third edition appeared in 2014, when socialist planning ‘has become a historical phenomenon’ (p. ix) and significantly more information is available.”

Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 8

13) Soviet Space Mythologies. Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity. By Slava Gerovitch. 2015, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press (review by Elitza Stanoeva).

“This book is a fascinating history of the triumphs and failures of the Soviet space programme in the 1960s, portraying vividly its leading figures—cosmonauts, engineers and military personnel—caught in the identity split between professional roles and public personas, and positioning them within the complicated technological and institutional settings of Soviet cosmonautics. Yet, the book is much more than a historical account of spaceflight: it elucidates how its master narrative—‘flawless cosmonauts flew perfect missions, supported by unfailing technology’ (p. xiv)—was constructed by Soviet propaganda and utilised by the political elite and various stakeholders in the space programme; how it was then contested through counter-narratives from within the professional milieu engaged in it; and finally how it shaped the collective identity and memories of the Soviet generations of the Space Age.”

14) Nationalism, Myth, and the State in Russia and Serbia. Antecedents of the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. By Veljko Vujačić. 2015, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press (review by Roland Gjoni).

“Due to the proliferation of single case and comparative studies focused on Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union aimed at explaining the unintended consequences of the nationality policies of communist states for politicising identities and fuelling ethnic conflicts, a further contribution on the same research question seems like a challenging academic endeavour. In this book, Veljko Vujačić, a long- time contributor to the scholarly debate on the role of nationalism and ethnicity, takes up this challenge in a well-researched, stimulating and interesting book which offers a complex and insightful explanation of the peaceful and violent secessions from the two multinational federations.”

15) The Revival of Islam in the Balkans. From Identity to Religiosity. Arolda Elbasani & Olivier Roy (eds). 2015, Basingstoke & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by David Henig).

“This is a timely collection of essays in that it addresses what has been the major obstacle to the study of post-communist Islam in the Balkans, namely conceiving of Islam and Muslim identity solely in terms of ethno-national categories and from a top-down perspective. The ethno-national macro- paradigm has been solidified by the wars in Bosnia & Hercegovina and Kosovo, and the conflict in Macedonia (FYROM), and by the post-conflict ethno-nationalised public discourses that have proliferated across the post-communist Balkans at large.”

16) Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Analyses of a Civil Revolution.David R. Marples & Frederick V. Mills (eds). 2015, Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag (review by Aslihan Anlar).

“This edited volume deals with the events that took place in 2013–2014 in Ukraine, called ‘Euromaidan’, and the political and territorial developments that arose afterwards. There are 13 chapters, each of which covers a wide range of issues, from media publication or digital media usage and gender issues to the position of external actors, with the aim of conveying information about this mass movement in all its aspects. In the introductory chapter, David. R. Marples sets out the purpose of the volume, which is offering new interpretations of this event by a new generation of authors, PhD students, young scholars and scholars from the West.”

17) Gazprom. An Energy Giant and Its Challenges in Europe. Andrey Vavilov (ed.). 2015, Basingstoke & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Tiziana Melchiorre).

“The value of this book is double. It is edited by Andrew Vavilov who worked in a key position at the Russian Ministry of Finance during crucial years in the history of Russia (1992–1997). These were the years after the reorganisation of the Soviet Ministry of the Gas Industry into Gazprom in 1989 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Additionally, this book is a very well documented and detailed political and historical contribution to research on the subject.”

18) The Ottoman Empire and the Bosnian Uprising. Janissaries, Modernisation and Rebellion in the Nineteenth Century. By Fatma Sel Turhan. 2014, London & New York, NY: I.B. Tauris (review by Hikmet Karčić).

“Fatma Sel Turhan’s book will not be heartily accepted by most in Bosnia since it argues against an idea Bosnians cling to. However, the most valuable aspect of this book is its new unpublished archival materials. The author gives a new perspective and places the Bosnian uprising in a new wider context. The disadvantages of the book are that most of the names and terms used are in Turkish as well as the documents obtained by the author, which represents a problem for non-Turkish speaking readers. In conclusion, whatever the spark was that started the uprising, it is certain that Husein kapudan became a central figure in Bosnia’s nation-building process and a romanticised national hero.”

19) Ukraine. What Went Wrong and How to Fix It. By Anders Åslund. 2015, Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics (review by Olena Podolian).

“The book is written on the premise that urgent and fundamental reform is needed for the national security and very survival of Ukraine as an independent state. It stays true to this throughout and lives up to the promise in its title. Ukrainian and Central and Eastern European political and economic developments are meticulously narrated and thoroughly explained. The focus is on the ongoing fight against corruption and decentralisation in Ukraine, along with its relations with the EU and Russian Federation, including the latter’s military aggression.”

20) Perceptions of the EU in Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa: Looking in from the Outside. Veit Bachmann & Martin Müller (eds), 2015, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Roman Horbyk).

“Over the past few years, the European Union has found itself entangled in a series of significant financial and security quagmires. From threats of Grexit, and now Brexit, to the Ukraine–Russia crisis, to the dramatic inflow of refugees, the political Europe is forced to face many novel challenges from both within and without. The situation is complicated by poorly understood underlying realities that make allegiances in these crises, such as the pro-European zeal of Ukrainians during the Maidan protest or Russia’s defiance against the West, unexpected even for many ‘in the know’. These and other new developments call for a more up-to-date knowledge of how Europe is seen by some key actors involved. This volume is intended to answer precisely this call, and represents a systematic and solid effort to find out how Europe is seen in some key countries of sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya and Senegal) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine and Georgia).”

21) EU Leadership in Energy and Environmental Governance. Global and Local Challenges and Responses. Jakub M. Godzimirski (ed.) 2016, Basingstoke & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan

(review by Ramazan Erdag).

“The book is a collective publication of the project entitled Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks (GR:EEN) and brings together several experts in global energy politics. The book mainly focuses on EU approaches towards changing the nature of global power and the energy environment. It also highlights the interaction of energy relationships among states and energy governance by testing whether EU values and norms shape global energy politics.”

22) European Union Delegations in EU Foreign Policy. A Diplomatic Service of Different Speeds. By Frauke Austerman. 2014, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Klodiana Beshku).

“The term ‘centralization’ is a very important concept in this book. Thanks to it, the EU is seen as a new centre of power where other states can shift their sovereignty and through this, the degree of this shifting can be measured (as it will be measured in the second part of this book). The centralisation process of the EU towards third countries is the ability of the EU to create a shared political community in terms of values and norms with these countries in the future. In this way, as the author himself admits, ‘the findings of this book can be applied to other non European cases in future studies’ (p. 16), an element that constitutes added value to this research.”

23) Securitization of Islam: A Vicious Circle. Counter-Terrorism and Freedom of Religion in Central Asia. By Katherin Lenz-Raymann. 2014, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag (review by Riccardo Mario Cucciola).

“In this book Kathrin Lenz-Raymann focuses on the revival of Islam in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, identifying a direct correlation—or even a ‘vicious circle’—between governmental repression and the radicalisation of religion.”

24) Powering Europe. Russia, Ukraine, and the Energy Squeeze.By Rafael Kandiyoti. 2015, Basingstoke & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Ioannis Galariotis).

“As Kandiyoti points out in this book, the gas equation of the EU is likely to change over the next 15 years because domestic EU production will decline and EU demand is expected to rise. Thus, the crucial question is how the EU will cover the excessive demand in the upcoming years. Bearing this hypothesis in mind, the author attempts to decode the whole energy security enigma between the EU, NATO and Russia with regard to new geopolitical evolutions, especially after the outbreak of the recent civil war in Ukraine.”

Europe-Asia Studies Vol 68 Issue 9

25) On Stalin’s Team. The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. By Sheila Firzpatrick. 2015, Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press (review by Matthew Blackburn).

“Renowned in her previous work for bold and convincing revisionist positions, here Fitzpatrick challenges the traditional view of Stalin’s immediate colleagues as servile lapdogs and yes-men to the all-powerful leader. Instead, this book offers fresh evidence to support a revisionist view of Stalinism;

26) Post Communist Translational Justice. Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience.Lavinia Stan & Nadya Nedelsky (eds). 2015, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press (review by Livia Damsa).

“Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky’s ambitious book does not propose to offer a celebration of the fall of communism in CEE. It rather constitutes an impartial and elaborated analysis of the many challenges faced by transitional justice in the region. Benefitting from the hindsight offered by the passing of 25 years, this long overdue analysis of the different facets of transitional justice in Central and Eastern Europe could also offer valuable lessons to countries engaging in future efforts at transitional justice.”

27) A Liberal Actor in a Realist World. The European Union Regulatory State and the Global Political Economy of Energy. By Andreas Goldthau & Nick Sitter. 2015, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review by Defne Gonenc).

“This book analyses the changes in the political economy of energy and the energy challenges faced by the European Union (EU). In the volume, Goldthau and Sitter examine the tools used by the EU to regulate the external dimension of its energy policies. Since at least the early 1990s, the European Union has placed liberalisation at the core of its energy policy. However, Goldthau and Sitter argue that, as the economic supremacy of the West has waned, so too has the market-facilitating environment of the 1990s. The authors hypothesise in this sense that the rising Asian markets have brought new energy consumers to the global market, while numerous actors have become assertively state-centred in their energy policies, and climate change has evolved into a critical global challenge. Nevertheless, the EU still remains the same. This gives rise to the central question of the book: ‘What does a liberal actor do in a realist world?’ (p. 6). The study, supported by the EU FP7 research project GR:EEN, answers the question through analysing a specific set of energy markets.”

28) Material Cultures, Migrations, and Identities. What the Eye Cannot See. By Anna Pechurina. 2015, Basingstoke & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Alin Croitoru).

“The book represents an articulate and detailed analysis of how Russianness is part of the everyday practices and home realities of Russian immigrants to the UK. In this intriguing work, Pechurina illustrates in an exemplary fashion how material culture can be used for unpacking Russian identities in the context of migration.”

29) Politics and Legitimacy in Post-Soviet Eurasia. Martin Brusis, Joachim Ahrens & Martin Schulze Wessel (eds). 2016, Basingstoke & New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan (Review by Mark Teramae).

“This edited volume of ten articles provides an in-depth look at various facets of the concept of institutional legitimacy, as it pertains to the states of post-Soviet Eurasia. Ranging from the study of legitimation strategies and political parties to issues as diverse as courts, memory, national identity and literature, the book’s interdisciplinary nature provides a wide scope in a variety of case studies,

30) Behind the Iron Curtain. Soviet Estonia in the Era of the Cold War,Tõnu Tannberg (ed). 2015, Frankfurt: Peter Lang (review by Geoffrey Swain).

“For Tannberg, this research project showed how Estonians came to adapt to the Soviet regime, while never accepting it uncritically. For this reviewer, the 14 essays presented here tell us something more precise than this—they show the three phases of Soviet administration: first, the determination of the Soviet regime to remove all traces of inter-war Estonia; second, the attempt to impose on Estonia and indeed the other Baltic states a universal Soviet metanarrative based around victory in the Great Patriotic War; and third, the gradual disintegration of that metanarrative in the 1970s as chinks in the armour of the totalitarian state began to appear.”

31) Kyiv, Ukraine. The City of Domes and Demons from the Collapse of Socialism to the Mass Uprising of 2013-2014. By Roman Adrian Cybriwsky. 2014, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (review by Roman Horbyk).

“As the Ukrainian state and the city itself were in relative obscurity for so long, it is possible to detect a worrying lack—metaphorically speaking—of an adequate map, a corpus of literature explaining them in all aspects. Even today, it is difficult to recall a single monograph in English about one of the oldest and largest east European cities, nor a standard book on its geography. This is the book, Roman Cybriwsky could have written but chose not to. Rather than a reference book, this is a collection of personal observations, an intimate ethnography written during the author’s sabbatical year spent teaching in Kyiv on a Fulbright scholarship. The book’s apparent subjectivity is evident to the author who admits it is ‘both reportage and ethnography’ (p. 18) but this spontaneity does not make it chaotic or whimsical. The impressions are systematically organised and structured according to a set of themes ranging from the city’s difficult history to sex tourism and civic activism to poor- quality residential developments for the nouveau-riche. As explained in the preface, each of the 72 sections articulated around the volume’s 18 themes has been written in such a way that they constitute more or less independent entries.”

32) Russia and the New World Disorder, by Bobo Lo. 2015, Washington DC & London: Brookings Institution Press and Chatham House (review by Marcin Kaczmarski).

“This book by Bobo Lo, a seasoned observer of Moscow’s international conduct, provides a comprehensive account of the context of Russian foreign policy-making, its outcomes and scenarios for future developments. As such this book might represent the necessary point of departure for every researcher dealing with contemporary Russia’s foreign policy. Lo does not only sum up very aptly the context of Russia’s foreign policy-making and the outcomes of the Kremlin’s key foreign policy directions, but also provides the reader with a comprehensive picture of how Russia perceives the world and how it acts upon these perceptions.”

33) Russia’s Foreign Policy. Ideas, Domestic Politics, and External Relations.2015, Basingstoke & New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Katarzyna Kaczmarska).

“It has become a trend to discuss the foreign policy of the post-Soviet states, and particularly that of

Russia, without taking into consideration its ideational sources and inspirations. For some time now the majority of literature has followed, rather than critically evaluated, the official stance of a pragmatic Russian foreign policy, debating ‘interests, vectors and sectors’ to borrow a subtitle from one such monograph. David Cadier and Margot Light’s edited volume is a welcome departure from this tendency. The authors, a group of eminent specialists as well as promising early career scholars in the field, take into serious consideration the ideological preferences and the worldviews of Russia’s ruling elite, asking how they interplay and shape interests, thereby influencing Russia’s foreign policy decisions.”

34) The Social Process of Globalization. Return Migration and Cultural Change in Kazakhstan. By Douglas W. Blum. 2016, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (review by Gulnar Nadirova and Anar Mustafayeva).

“Reading this book will captivate everyone interested in this field of research, especially those examining the cultural changes that have occurred in post-Soviet societies. The book focuses on the perception of ‘cultural remittances’ brought by return migrants and the social dynamic that this process has set into motion in contemporary Kazakhstan. The subjects of Blum’s sociological studies are recipients of the Bolashak state scholarship, and of other international programmes, between the ages of 17 and 27. These individuals had the opportunity to study, work or receive professional training in universities in the United States for at least three months.”

35) China’s Civil War. A Social History, 1945-1949.By Diana Lary. 2015. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (review by Ghasem Torabi).

“The author’s main objective is to illustrate the historical and social contexts that led to the Chinese civil war, while investigating also its multi-faceted consequences. For the author, the complete understanding of this war is possible only if China’s pre-war historical and social milieux are analysed with great precision. From a historical and social point of view, this war was to some extent a war between north and south, between the villagers and the urban élite, while remaining, in the background, an ideological war between nationalists and communists. This approach shows that China’s civil war cannot be considered exclusively from a political standpoint, as economic, social, historical and geographical factors played equally important roles.”

36) Japan in Central Asia. Strategies, Initiatives, and Neighboring Powers, by Nikolay Murashkin. 2016, Basingstoke & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Nikolay Murashkin ).

“The contribution of Dadabaev’s monograph is multidisciplinary and fills several gaps. Addressing the subject with conventional theories of international relations, foreign policy analysis, and area studies, the author successfully enhances the discipline of inter-Asian relations with contemporary case studies. The monograph adds to the scholarship of post-Cold War ties between East Asian states—Japan in this instance—and the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. The Central Asian states uniquely combine regional affiliations in various European and Asian international institutions, including the Asian Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and within the internal structure of the Japanese government: the Foreign Ministry treats them as European, while the Japanese International Cooperation Agency includes these states in its Asian remit.”

Slavic Review Vol 75 Issue 3

37) Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958. By Kiril Tomoff. 2015, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (review by Simon Morrison).

“Tomoff ’s broader concern is the ideological motivation behind Soviet cultural exchanges from 1945 to 1958. He focuses on conflicts surrounding the nature and content of these tours, which involved representatives of VOKS, the NKVD/KGB, the NKID/Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Committee and the Politburo, along with pro-Soviet sympathizers in the west like the impresario Sol Hurok.”

38) Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism. By Petre M. Petrov. 2015, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (review by Eric Laursen).

“Automatic for the Masses sets out to compare Stalinist socialist realism, Russian modernist literary and cultural theory of the 1920s through the prism of Roland Barthes’s notion of “the death of the author.” Petrov finds in both modernism and socialist realism a surrendering of the self in exchange for something greater, which is achieved only in socialist realism.”

39) Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe: Relations, Borders, and Invisibilities. Ed. Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen. Anthem Series on Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2015, London: Anthem Press (review by Jeremy Morris).

“The volume comprises nine empirical chapters and four more reflective “broader perspectives,” including the introduction. The volume developed out of a conference in 2013 with a similar title. The conference call and resulting book relate to a recent and dominant debate on the anthropological side of studies of the region—the critique of the teleological notion of social and political “transition” of post-socialist countries. The editors highlight the importance of focusing on the near universal experiences of increased insecurity and dislocation, despite the supposed finality and completedness of the reorientation towards liberal democracy and the market economy among post-communist, EU- accession countries.”

40) Music and Genocide. Ed. Wojciech Klimczyk and Agata Świerzowska. Studies in Social Sciences, Philosophy and History of Ideas, Vol. 9. 2015, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (review by Philip V. Bohlman).

“The disciplinary home for Music and Genocide is philosophy and aesthetics, particularly as practiced by the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilizations at Cracow’s Jagiellonian University. Several of the essays—in fact, the strongest—reflect this disciplinary point of departure. The aesthetic theories espoused by the authors of these essays—Wojciech Klimczyk, Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek, Joanna Posłuszna, Łukasz Posłuszny, and Leszek Sosnowski—contain elements of theoretical unity, above all a concern for the potential of music to represent when words are not available. New questions in this volume are most eff ectively posed in the essays devoted to specifi c historical moments, especially those in Poland during the Holocaust (Naliwajek-Mazurek, and Posłuszna and Posłuszny). The ethnographic sensibilities in these essays draw us closer to music and meaning, rather than adding to

41) Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Ed. Mark R. Beissinger and Stephen Kotkin. 2014, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (review by Henry E. Hale).

“With Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, a leading political scientist (Mark Beissinger) and a top historian (Stephen Kotkin) bring together an all-star group of academics to help crystallize a growing research agenda on historical legacies in countries that have made transitions from communist regimes. With some of these countries more than a quarter century since their transitions, the time is certainly ripe for this agenda to mature. Perhaps the volume’s core argument is that it is harder than it sounds to identify what actually is a legacy and what any such legacy’s effects are. In an introductory chapter that should become a standard reference point for future research, the editors argue that just because something looks and “quacks” like a legacy does not mean that it actually is one.”

42) Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. By Michael David-Fox. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. 2015, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (review by Mark. D Steinberg).

“Michael David-Fox’s new book, the title of which is partly a historical description and partly a call to historiographical action, is a set of essays critically examining scholarly debates in Russian and Soviet history and their comparative and theoretical contexts. His focus, chiefly concerning the 1920s and 1930s, revolves around thorny questions of Soviet “modernity,” the long struggle by the intelligentsia and the state to bring a particular vision of modernity to the masses, and the nature and role of ideology. This densely written and erudite book is less, however, a synthesis of scholarship on “modernity, ideology, and culture in Russia and the Soviet Union” than a critical deconstruction to yield a methodological argument. In David-Fox’s words, he seeks to “open up a set of desiderata” for this history (16).”

43) Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine. By Stanislav Markus. 2015, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press (review by Stephen Fortescue).

“Property rights (PR) are taken here as the most important determinant of economic development. That is not something all would agree with, but they are certainly important enough to warrant another book devoted to them. The author, in examining threats to PR in Russia and Ukraine since the turn of the century, believes that standard accounts are wrong in one fundamental way, with serious implications for remedial action. The error is in failing to recognise the distinction, within the general phenomenon of state predation, between what the author calls agent predation, attacks on PR by agents of the state, and principal predation. The standard approach to remedying state predation, increasing the commitment of the state to securing PR, will not work, since the state, or more precisely its principal, has no control over the actions of its agents. The author then claims that he has identified a more appropriate remedial approach, which is the formation by enterprises, ideally before PR attacks materialise, of stakeholder alliances—with the workforce, local communities, and investors, preferably foreign. Because agent predation is “disorganised,” that is, it consists of ad hoc attacks by individual groups without support from above, such alliances can and do beat off PR attacks. The author goes further, suggesting that such alliances, as they are copied and

44) Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 3: Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies. Ed. Roumen Daskalov and Alexander Vezenkov. 2015, Leiden: Brill (review by Evguenia Davidova).

“If one cites Carl von Clausewitz’ statement that war is a continuation of politics by other means, historiography can be interpreted as an extension of politics by scholarly means. Along these lines, the third volume of the Entangled Histories of the Balkans series focuses on the historiographical feuds over various legacies: Thracian, Byzantine/Medieval, and Ottoman. The contributors challenge ethnocentric interpretations of history and examine strategies for (re)appropriating the shared past by modern nation-states. The institutionalization of history as a discipline went hand in hand with modern states’ assertions of “historic,” “linguistic,” and “ethnographic” continuities in space and time, notions of ethnic purity, and collective identities.”

45) Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar's Yugoslavia. By Christian Axboe Nielsen. 2014, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (review by Vesna Drapac).

“Making Yugoslavs, which is based on Nielsen’s doctoral thesis, brings to light an impressive body of original material including, most interestingly, police records. Aleksandar ostensibly established the dictatorship to bring political stability, claiming he needed dictatorial control to forge “one Yugoslav identity.” The effort expended on the socialization of youth in the Sokol movement showed that the regime was not content with passivity but demanded “active participation in the cultural and political institutions of Yugoslavia” (166) in order to create “conscious Yugoslavs” (330). The state-sponsored visits of delegations of “pilgrims” from around the country to Belgrade incorporated trips to the grave of King Petar and the tomb of the unknown soldier at Avala. Aleksandar also promoted St. Sava as the nation’s patron. Thus, regardless of the seemingly endless discussions about what it meant to be Yugoslav, it was clear that attachment to the Serbian dynasty, recognition of the primacy of the Orthodox Church, and an abiding gratitude for the Serbs’ sacrifice in war were the foundation stones of Aleksandar’s Yugoslavism.”

46) Psychiatry in Communist Europe. Ed. Mat Savelli and Sarah Marks. 2015, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala).

“Psychiatry in Communist Europe, edited by Mat Savelli and Sarah Marks, features ten essays that explore the history of mental health care in Russia and eastern Europe from the early twentieth century to our days. Aiming to “stir debate” over the history of psychiatry in a region marked by “the context of Marxist-Leninism” (1), the editors raise in the introduction the questions of whether in fact there was a communist psychiatry, what it consisted of, and—implicitly—to what extent historians should study it in opposition to psychiatry in capitalist Europe.”

47) The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900–1945: Sources and Commentaries. Ed. Marius Turda. 2015, New York: Bloomsbury Academic (review by Paul Weindling).

“Eugenics and associated racial ideologies in east central Europe have been subject to considerable scholarly attention over the past 15 years. An overview volume raises the expectation of evaluation of wider genocidal and social impacts. Here the reader will be severely disappointed. This collection

48) Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania. By Roland Clark. 2015, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (review by Marius Turda).

“By clearly delineating the historical factors and human agencies that contributed to the emergence of fascist activism in Romania, this book takes a wider cultural approach, focusing on those prophets of national revolt which the interwar period so eagerly produced. The book is an accomplishment, and its author is to be congratulated for his assiduous use of newspapers, archival documents, memoirs, police reports, and lesser-known printed work, to shed light on the “history of everyday life” (Alltagsgeschichte) of fascists in Romania. In a field progressively dominated by a tendency to over- theorize what fascism is or is not, it is refreshing to read an assessment of what fascists did and how they lived in a country like Romania.”

49) Grenze(n) und Herrschaft(en) in der kleinpolnischen Stadt Sandomierz, 1772–1844. By Christoph Augustynowicz. Europa orientalis vol. 16. 2015, Munich: LIT Verlag (review by Stefan Rohdewald).

“Christoph Augustynowicz focuses in his new book on change in Sandomierz connected to newly established imperial borders or frontiers, which is understood as a hybrid space of power. In 1772, Sandomierz became a border town of the Habsburg Empire. It was later, from 1795 to 1809, a part of Austria, after which it belonged to the Duchy of Warsaw from 1809 to 1815, and then to the Russian- controlled Kingdom of Poland from 1815 to 1844. The author uses the city of Sandomierz as an example of a marginalized town—a local society whose relations with the imperial centers as well as the surrounding regions he investigates. Within the scope of everyday history, or microhistory, the main questions analyzed in this book relate to the deconstruction of existing macro- or master narratives.”

50) Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948. By Anna Cichopek-Gajraj. 2014, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (review by ).

“Although it is acknowledged that the comparative perspective is a highly desirable historical method because it oft en unsettles major interpretations of national history, it is rather rarely practiced. For that simple reason Beyond Violence is a most welcome contribution to the history of east European Jews and the consequences of the Holocaust as it aims to compare systematically the experiences of Polish and Slovak Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust… Yet, the greatest achievement of Beyond Violence is the careful comparative analysis revealing specific differences between the early postwar experiences of Polish and Slovak Jews in a broader political and social context.”

51) The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945. By Joshua D. Zimmerman. 2015, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (review by Eva Plach).

“The Polish Underground refers to those resistance organizations in Nazi-occupied Poland that swore allegiance to the Polish government-in-exile…In The Polish Underground and the Jews Joshua Zimmerman advocates for a more balanced and nuanced analysis of the Underground’s relationship to the Polish-Jewish population. The Underground was neither homogenous nor monolithic,

Zimmerman shows; it included individuals from all social classes and regions of pre-war Poland and from many different political persuasions, from socialist to right-wing nationalist. As such, individuals and units within the Underground had different attitudes toward Jews, and even then these attitudes changed through the many phases of the war.”

52) Poland's War on Radio Free Europe 1950–1989. By Paweł Machcewicz. Trans. Maya Latynski. 2014, Washington D.C. and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press (review by Andrea Orzoff).

“In this widely researched, skillful book, Paweł Machcewicz begins to tease apart the different strands of Poland’s RFE story. He argues that RFE (and the dissident and exile communities who kept them informed) were the communist regimes’ main “opposition daily” (8). His tale examines the Polish Communist Party, military, secret police, foreign service, and media as they joined in combat against RFE. The regime produced anti-RFE propaganda, persecuted listeners and informers, jammed its signals, and infiltrated its Munich operations (2).”

53) Nowa Huta: Generations of Change in a Model Socialist Town. By Kinga Pozniak. 2014, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press (review by Joanna Wawrzyniak).

“The center of attention of Pozniak’s book is remembrance of a socialist past in a country undergoing neoliberal reforms. She localizes this process in the town Nowa Huta, originally a landmark project of Stalinist industrial modernization and later one of many nests of the Solidarity movement. Pozniak conducted her field research— including reading the city space, listening to formal and informal interviews, and doing participant observation in local cultural centers and museums—after 2008 recession, in 2009–10. The year 2009 was an important moment for triggering public memories in Poland, as it marked not only the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of state socialism, but also the sixtieth anniversary of Nowa Huta.”

54) Proletarischer Mythos und realer Sozialismus: Die Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse der DDR. By Tilmann Siebeneichner. Vol. 55, Zeithistorische Studien fü. Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung. Potsdam. 2014, Cologne: Böhlau (review by Peter C. Caldwell).

“Siebeneichner succeeds in casting a new light on militias in the GDR, and connecting them to the larger narratives and basic contradictions of the GDR. At times I wished that he had cited fewer cultural theorists, but then in more detail: a systematic use of Georges Sorel on myth and violence throughout the book, for example, rather than invoking a whole list of thinkers, oft en very briefly. But on the positive side, his bibliography provides an excellent list of the basic works on East German history in both German and English.”

55) Medienlenkung in der DDR. By Anke Fiedler. Zeithistorische Studien, 52. 2014, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag (review by Christoph Classen).

“Without doubt, the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has been one of the most well- researched fields of the German past since the post-communist wave of “Aufarbeitung” (reappraisal) in the 1990s and 2000s…Anke Fiedler’s monograph stands in this tradition but differs from it as well. On the one hand, she deals with the system of propaganda guidelines and censorship as the

56) Unified Military Industries of the Soviet Bloc: Hungary and the Division of Labor in Military Production. By Pál Germushka. 2015, Lanham: Lexington Books (review by R. W. Davies).

“The account provided by Germushka is thorough and careful. However, it would have benefitted from placing military expenditure in the context of general Hungarian economic development; he does not discuss how much of a burden the military sector was for the economy as a whole. One would also like a fuller account of the specific military innovations developed in the course of these decades. With these limitations, this is an excellent contribution to our knowledge.”

57) Property in East Central Europe: Notions, Institutions and Practices of Landownership in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Hannes Siegrist and Dietamar Müller. 2015, New York: Berghahn Books (review by Andrew Cartwright).

“Hannes Siegrist and Dietamar Müller can be confident that property ownership in east central Europe is different and a good subject for research. The authors have assembled scholars from different disciplinary perspectives to outline the commonalities and alternative paths in Poland, Romania and Serbia. By investigating legal practices, governing institutions and cultural dimensions, they show how rural land practices illuminate the processes of nation building, modernization, and struggles between owners and would-be owners.”

58) The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931. By Per Anders Rudling. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. 2015, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (review by ).

“Rudling traces the origins of what he calls Belarusian nationalism to the late nineteenth century and then follows its activists forward through their interaction with major regional players—state authorities from the Russian and German empires; local nationalist and socialist movements; and an expanding array of grassroots constituencies. Throughout this discussion, Rudling is careful to stress not only the intellectual strength of the Belarusian movement, but its institutional weaknesses as well, stemming both from the divisiveness of its core thinkers and the difficulties that it faced in disseminating its ideas within Belarusian-speaking society on a mass level.”

59) Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. By Alice Lovejoy. 2015, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (review by Herbert J. Eagle).

“Through a meticulous gathering and analysis of materials from many archives (including those of Czech National Film, the Military History Institute, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), press sources, interviews, and a wealth of interrelated scholarship on media, culture and politics, Alice Lovejoy reveals the factors which led to this unit’s significant role in promoting the stylistic experimentation and sociopolitical critique which characterized the Czech New Wave. She explores

60) Taking Liberties: Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama 1786–1989. By Halina Filipowicz. 2014, Athens: Ohio University Press (Allen J. Kuharski).

“In this interdisciplinary study, Halina Filipowicz combines historical breadth, detailed research, and complex critical and theoretical lenses with startling results. She covers a wide variety of neglected theatrical “peripheries” in Polish drama since the late eighteenth century—apparently marginal theatrical works that nevertheless consistently address the central fault lines of Poland’s tumultuous political history. In content, the works Filipowicz considers actually cover over a thousand years of Polish history, reaching back to the legendary pagan Queen Wanda. The book ends with examples dating from the Soviet and Nazi occupations and the transition out of communist rule in 1989. Filipowicz’s use of feminist and gender theory to interpret both the historical subjects and their translation into dramatic form provides an essential and insightful fi lter to the sheer volume of archival material she has uncovered. It also proves highly generative to her high-risk project of moving beyond the canon of Polish drama and established categories of Polish theater history.”

61) Remarks on Architecture: The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland. By Ignacy Potocki. Ed. and Trans. Carolyn C. Guile. 2015, University Park: Penn State University Press (review by Iryna Vushko).

“Potocki wrote his book during one of the most difficult times in Polish history, when the state was experiencing a major crisis. It disappeared from the map as a result of three consecutive partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795 between the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Empires. Potocki was conscious of the political crisis, and his book was one way to respond to it. “Beware,” he wrote, “the same fate to which other fields are subject befalls architecture. This is what prompted me to collect some remarks on architecture, that every reader may easily understand what architecture is all about,” he continued (57)… Carolyn C. Guile did an excellent job with translation. An informative introduction and extensive notes help the reader to navigate through the text.”

62) Le Silence et la parole au lendemain des guerres yougoslaves. Eds. Lauren Lydic and Bertrand Westphal. Limoges cedex, 2015, France: Presses Universitaires de Limoges (review by Andrew Wachtel).

“It would be wonderful to have a synthetic academic work that could provide an analytical overview of cultural production in the former Yugoslavia since the end of the devastating wars of the 1990s. Such a book would identify the most significant and salient literary and artistic achievements and attempt to outline the main lines of thought animating them. Unfortunately, Le Silence et la parole au lendemain des guerres yougoslaves is not that book. Rather, it is a collection of essays by a variety of authors with no discernable thematic or analytic common thread.”

63) Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising. Ed. Amelia M. Glaser. 2015, Stanford: Stanford University Press (review by Natalie Kononenko).

“Art is powerful. It shapes public opinion and influences political action. As this fact is becoming increasing recognized, studies of the literary treatments of historical figures are growing in number, making this book most timely. It is a clearly written and well-researched contribution to a growing body of work. Many authors contributed to the volume, permitting it’s breadth of coverage from Khmel΄nyts΄ki’s own time until the present. The multiple authorship also makes it difficult to do justice to all of the interesting observations in this study. Readers are encouraged to read this work on their own. Much as I like this volume, I must point out one problematic feature. Quotes from literary works, especially poetic ones, are given in English translation, followed by transliteration. Why? Having the original can indeed prove useful, and many who can read transliterated Ukrainian or Russian can also read the original.”

64) Réinventer le monde- L'espace et le temps en Tchécoslovaquie communiste. By Roman Krakovsky. 2014, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne (review by Nicolas Maslowski).

“After the Second World War, the Soviet Union extended its influence to central Europe. The redefinition systems of symbolic meaning and their evolution from 1945 until 1968 is the subject of this book. It contains five chapters concerning topics of everyday life. The author sometimes goes too far, virtually eliminating state repression in his explanation of social and cultural developments. The book begins with the implementation of the planned economy. It focuses on the planning involved and its difficulties, entering a kind of dissonance with the announced conceptual and economic framework of the time. The author makes parallels with public and symbolic policies implemented in the entire Soviet space. He confronts an international project with local, concrete problems. It is regrettable that he does not put forward more local specificities. The Czech lands were among the most industrialized in the world, while Slovakia was more rural: Czechoslovakia as a whole was in a much different situation than other countries.”

65) Die Geglückte Revolution: Das Politische und der Umbruch in Polen 1976–1997. By Agnieszka Zagańczyk-Neufeld. 2014, Paderborn, Germany: Verlag Fredinand Schöningh (review by Arista Maria Cirtautas).

“While hegemonic for a time, the re-imagined relationship between Solidarity elites and communist regime reformers was not all-encompassing nor universally accepted, and so agonistic conflict, oft en deeply personalized as opponents are demonized, remains central to Polish political life. Zagańczyk - Neufeld thus sheds light on the complexities of contemporary Poland while also analyzing the discursive distance travelled in the political realm from 1976 to 1997 in clear and compelling prose. For these reasons, although the length of the work makes it somewhat difficult to read and digest, it is highly recommended.”

66) Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions. By Elton Skendaj. 2014, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (review by Nicolas Lemay-Hébert).

“Elton Skendaj’s book, Creating Kosovo, stands out for its sophisticated analysis of Kosovo’s early state-building process and to the author’s familiarity with Kosovo and its culture. The author’s main argument is that to build effective state bureaucracies, international organizations need to insulate them from political or personal influences, so that recruitment and promotion rests on merit and not on political or personal affiliations. The author offers two specific examples to support this claim: the

67) Writing Travel in Central Asian History. Ed. Nile Green. 2014, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (review by Peter Weisensel).

“Accustomed as we have become to appraise Central Asia through the prism of postcolonialism, Nile Green’s collection turns our collective head 180 degrees. The eight essays and Green’s introduction that frames them sets us off in an entirely new direction. The aim of the book, as explained in Green’s introduction, is “to trace distinct stages of global collectivity,” (1) that connect Central Asia to global history. The result, he argues, will add new layers to our understanding of both Central Asia and globalization. Neither the “hard” developments in Central Asia, fluctuating politics and trade patterns, nor the travel accounts themselves as cultural objects, can be taken in isolation from one another (1–2). The “hard” developments and the travel writings interact with and respond to one another in a context of constant mobility and circulation of peoples and information.”

68) Women, Islam and Identity: Public Life in Private Spaces in Uzbekistan. By Svetlana Peshkova. 2014, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press (review by Russell Zanca).

“An ethnography at once deeply personal and gropingly theoretically, Peshkova writes about contemporary Uzbek society and life in ways original and creative. Peshkova has written the first Anglophone book to focus not on Uzbek women per se, but Uzbek women and their religiosity—specifically, what it means to them to worship in an Islamic manner and live their lives as good Muslims.”

69) Civil Society and Politics in Central Asia. Ed. Charles E. Ziegler. 2015, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky (review by Roger D. Kangas).

“Studies of civic activism, participation, organizations, and community-based interaction that take place below, with, or apart from the “government” are how social scientists analyze the broad range of phenomena labeled “civil society.” The challenges for those studying non-democratic states (or states that are called “transitional”) range from the conceptual to the practical. Perhaps most glaring is the inability to collect data or even conduct credible field work. In short, presenting an in-depth study of “civil society and politics” in a region that does not have a track record parallel or recognizable to western liberal democracies remains a vexing one for scholars, and thus is oft en avoided. Charles Ziegler attempts to tackle this issue in this edited volume which presents a range of case studies and theoretical analyses that focus specifically, on the region of Central Asia—defined as the five states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.”

70) Corruption as a Last Resort: Adapting to the Market in Central Asia. By Kelly M. McMann. 2014, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (review by Leslie Holmes).

“The task Kelly McMann sets for herself in this insightful book is to explain why, even in highly corrupt societies, some citizens who have unmet basic needs nevertheless do not engage in

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 19 H-Soyuz corruption (bribe-paying to, or using contacts among, state officials) to obtain these while others do. Her answer is that most people find corruption abhorrent, and will avoid it if they can meet their needs through alternative sources— notably the market, groups, or the extended family; where such opportunities do not exist, citizens will typically engage in corruption of state officials. A second component of her argument is that inadequate market reforms can actually limit access to alternatives, and hence increase corruption—so that she rightly challenges the naïve argument of some that merely downsizing the state will in itself reduce corruption. McMann calls her two-pronged argument the “absence of alternatives” framework.”

71) The Flow of Ideas. Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to the Religious-Philosophical Renaissance. By Andrzej Walicki. Eastern European Culture, Politics and Societies. 2015, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (review by Anton Fedyashin).

“This volume is an expanded version of Andrzej Walicki’s original Rosyjska fi losofi a i myśl spoleczna od Oświecenia do marksizmu (1973) and its English translation A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (1979). As Walicki himself put it, the volume came about “from the awareness, shared by many people in my country, that a sympathetic understanding of Russian culture is of vital importance to the Poles” (13). Because he was a part of the “Warsaw School of Ideas,” Walicki dedicated a good part of his writing to exploring Russian ideas in the broader western context.”

72) Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter. By Frithjof Benjamin Schenk. 2014, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag (review by Daniel Beer).

“Russia’s Journey into the Modern Age is a richly textured account of the paradoxical impact of railway expansion in late imperial Russia. Rail travel destabilized and unsettled the empire just as it bound the empire more tightly together. This nuanced and innovative study deserves the widest possible readership.”

73) Zhenshchiny v evangel'skikh obshchinakh poslevoennogo SSSR, 1940–1980-e gg.: Issledovanie i istochniki. By Miriam Dobson and Nadezhda Beliakova. 2015, Moscow: Indrik (review by Emily B. Baran).

“Women outnumbered men, oft en dramatically so, in religious communities in the Soviet Union, a fact noted with derision in state antireligious propaganda. Recognizing the centrality of women in sustaining and shaping the Soviet evangelical experience, this volume documents and analyzes the contributions and the multifaceted roles of women in evangelical communities. Women have too oft en been either lost in the historical record, or accorded purely domestic roles. Dobson and Beliakova demonstrate that women actively participated in vital functions both in the family and the church, and also that they assumed public roles in order to protect their families and their faith communities.”

74) Socialist Countries Face the European Community: Soviet-Bloc Controversies over East-West Trade. By Suvi Kansikas. 2014, Frankfurt: Peter Lang (review by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony).

““At the 1974 Session,” Suvi Kansikas writes, “after five years of negotiations, bargaining and

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 20 H-Soyuz deliberation, the CMEA finally sealed its attempts at rapprochement” (177). The reader will greet this development with some relief after observing five years of deliberations among the countries of the CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) on whether or not to make direct contact with the European Commission in order to protect the privileged commercial access that the eastern bloc had been enjoying to western European markets. This should have been a simple decision, but Brezhnev and his colleagues feared that western Europe’s newly established Common Commercial Policy would put individual eastern bloc countries at a disadvantage at the negotiating table against this freshly aggregated economic behemoth. So communist leaders did what they had learned to do best: they dithered and deliberated for five years. These deliberations form the bulk of Kansikas’ thorough and useful book on the CMEA. The plot itself may be a bit repetitive, and ultimately disappointing, though this has little to do with the author’s scholarship and everything to do with the nature of the CMEA.”

75) Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. By Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Trans. Nora Seligman Favorov. 2015, New Haven: Yale University Press (review by J. Arch Getty).

“Oleg Khlevniuk’s previous works have been monographs and document collections with extensive critical and comparative documentation. These works have been the best scholarly studies of Soviet history to emerge in Russia since perestroika. The foremost expert on Soviet-era archives offers here a different kind of book, a more popularly written biography that saves the reader from “fat tomes that will never be conquered” (xvi). The book is attractively organized and presented. Moving back and forth between Stalin’s death and previous chronological events, many of the chapters begin with a progressive hour by hour dramatic description of Stalin’s death agonies in March 1953 before resuming the biographical chronology of earlier times. Nora Favorov’s translation is excellent.”

76) Saving Stalin's Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930–1950. By Steven Maddox. 2015, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (review by Irina Sandomirskaia).

“Based on extensive archival research, Steven Maddox’s book makes use of formerly unread sources to elucidate the dramatic case of the preservation of Leningrad’s historical sites shortly before, during, and after World War II. This episode is highly significant for the understanding of the uses of the past in the USSR and afterwards, and especially because of its historical context, the period of the first five-year plan, repressions, and wars: “the time of cataclysmic upheavals and hardships,” according to Maddox (2). Maddox explains the successes and failures of historical preservation by the regime’s desire to be recognized as the legitimate successor to the imperial and military glory of the Romanovs’ Russia. It is a detailed account of how the conservator and architect communities of Leningrad joined all human and institutional efforts to save museum objects and historical sites from theft and destruction during the war and how they contributed with expertise and enthusiasm to the solidification of the Stalinist imperial myth.”

77) L'URSS contre ses traîtres: l'épuration soviétique (1941–1945). By Vanessa Voisin. 2015, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne (review by François-Xavier Nérard).

“As Voisin shows, the end of occupation in the USSR is not thought of as a rebirth of the state—an emergence of something new, as was the case in France. On the contrary, the official discourse and practices put emphasis on the continuity of the State. The same Soviet state returned after liberation. Voisin demonstrates striking continuities in the forms, tools and categories of repression between the

1930s and the period she studies. She even calls this épuration “a typical Stalinist repression” (470).”

78) The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Ed. Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. 2015, New York: Penguin Books (review by Martha M. F. Kelly).

“Chandler, Dralyuk and Mashinski’s anthology represents a new era in the study of Russian literature, at a time when the electrifying polarities of the Cold War have given way to the more diff use currents of globalization. All three editors bring to the anthology a deep awareness of the international world of translation and Translation Studies. Chandler, an established master translator, has teamed up with accomplished translator and scholar Dralyuk and gifted poet Mashinski, who is also chief editor for the Russian-language New-York-based literary press StoSvet. In fact, the three are experienced collaborators as the editorial team for literary journal Cardinal Points, which features a designated section on “The Art of Translation.” This aspect is felt in translations and discussions of translation, in commentary by translators, and in a general awareness of how poems and translations themselves comprise interpretation: poem snippets inform biographies, poem selections advance the historical narrative, and the book even ends with English poems about Russia.”

79) Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories. Mikhail Shishkin. Trans. Marian Schwartz, Leo Shtutin, Sylvia Maizell, and Mariya Bashkatova. 2015, Dallas: Deep Vellum Publishing (review by Sibelan Forrester).

“Mikhail Shishkin (born in 1961) now lives in Switzerland, but unlike some other wellknown Russian expatriate authors he chooses to write in Russian. He is increasingly prominent; his novel Венерин волос (2005) was published in Marian Schwartz’s translation as Maidenhair in 2012 to very warm reviews. The question of what a writer does when no longer writing at home turns out to be central to the works in Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories. The authorial auto-commentary is just one reason why the stories are engaging, informative and worth reading.”

80) Aleksandr Nikolaevič Radiščev (1749–1802): Leben und Werk. By Peter Hoffmann. 2015, Frankfurt: Peter Lang (review by Andrew Kahn).

“This monograph does exactly what the title advertises by providing an account of Aleksandr Radishchev’s life, work and activities from cradle to historical legacy beyond the grave. The larger part of the book concentrates on Radishchev’s life set against the backdrop of a Russia in which Enlightenment policies and intellectual advances struggle to gain momentum. Chapter 2 covers the subject’s years in Leipzig, a seminal period in his education and the formation of his sensibility and ideas about philosophical friendship (the subject of his consolatory essay on his classmate Fedor Ushakov). The narrative folds in much useful information. It contains lists of the names of his fellow students, a digest of the coursework, a snapshot of the book-trade between Leipzig and Russia that brings into focus some of Radishchev’s reading.”

81) Turgenjew: Eine Einführung für den Leser von heute. By Horst-Jürgen Gerigk. 2015, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg (review by Inessa Medzhibovskaya).

“Horst-Jürgen Gerigk’s newest book—as per its German title, an introduction to Turgenev for today’s

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 22 H-Soyuz readers—appeared in the prestigious series Contributions to the Study of Modern Literary History published by Heidelberg University (Beiträge zur Neueren Literaturgeschichte, volume 338). A stance of “reflections” executed in the best traditions of German literary criticism defines its tone. Despite its deceptively slim size, the book’s two parts contain an astonishing twenty-one chapters. Each of these provides illuminating readings of Turgenev’s works (and their adaptations), addressed to key problems of his developing artistic vision as it is both nurtured and compromised by specific traits of his personality, his environment, and the historical context.”

82) Dostoevsky and the Law. By Amy D. Ronner. 2015, Durham: Carolina Academic Press (review by Cristina Vatulescu).

“In Dostoevsky and the Law, Amy D. Ronner offers her readers an ambitious wager: “reading Dostoevsky with an intensified, legal lens . . . can be fruitful and enlightening. Such a perspective will not merely disclose the failings and salutary potential of legal institutions, but also illuminate what it truly means to live a rich, human life” (5). This opening, and the thought-provoking book that lives up to its promise, also generously draws the boundaries of Ronner’s audience to include legal scholars and students interested in the relationship between law and literature. At the same time, Ronner, a Law Professor and Literature PhD, wrote a significant book that should appeal to many in the Slavic field. The book offers a model of reframing a canonical author in an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, diachronic context (juxtaposing Dostoevskii with US legal history and practice).”

83) Sowjetische Kindheit im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Generationsentwürfe im Kontext nationaler Erinnerungskultur. By Oxane Leingang. 2014, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter (review by Larissa Rudova).

“In her monograph, rendered in English as “Soviet Childhood During WWII: Sketches of a Generation in the Context of the National Culture of Remembrance,” Oxane Leingang explores how the generation of war children reflects on their traumatic experiences as adults in the post-Soviet era. Through an extensive study of personal war accounts, autobiographical and literary texts, most of which have not been translated either into German or English, she constructs a profile of the generation whose wartime experiences were excluded from Soviet commemoration culture. Leingang argues that in the Soviet Union, the official discourse about the “Great Patriotic War” privileged the heroism and collective struggle of the Soviet people against the Nazis over narratives of individual suffering and trauma.”

84) Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrushchev Era Soviet Union. By Samantha Sherry. 2015, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (review by Carol Any).

“At the core of Samantha Sherry’s welcome study are the two journals that were devoted to introducing Soviet readers to foreign literature: the Stalin-era Internatsional΄naia literatura (1933–1943), and the Khrushchev-era Inostrannaia literatura, begun in 1955. A brief survey of censorship theory, plus a description of Soviet censorship operations, provide the context for Sherry’s examination of the translated literature in these two journals. Archival sources offer insight into the censorship process.”

85) Uncensored: Samizdat Novels and the Quest for Autonomy in Soviet Dissidence. By Ann Komaromi. 2015, Evanston: Northwestern University Press (review by Samantha Sherry).

“Ann Komaromi’s fascinating book takes a new perspective on samizdat and dissidence. She focuses on three detailed case studies of novels by celebrated authors of unofficial literature: Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Bitov and Venedikt Erofeev, which represent a space “for exploring new images of the self and society” (6). Komaromi combines literary analysis with the study of distribution and production practices in a richly nuanced description of unofficial literature that makes use of a wide range of archival and interview material. Linking the two levels of investigation allows Komaromi to offer a sophisticated new theoretical perspective on dissidence that reconsiders not only the boundary between official and non-official culture, but also that between political dissidence and autonomous art.”

86) Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia. By Jennifer Utrata. 2015, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (review by Barbara Alpern Engel).

“[The author’s] depiction of the phenomenon in Russia, illustrated and enlivened as it is with the voices and experiences of her interviewees, rings sadly true. Even as I would have welcomed more discussion of single motherhood’s impact on children; of fathers’ treatment of children as a factor in mothers’ decisions to leave or stay; and (the historian in me) a longer temporal perspective, I very much appreciated what Utrata does accomplish. For its illuminating treatment not only of single motherhood but also of Russia’s contemporary gender order and the policies and rhetoric that have shaped it, I recommend her book enthusiastically.”

87) Wandering Workers: Mores, Behavior, Way of Life, and Political Status of Domestic Russian Labor Migrants. By Juri Plusnin, Yana Zausaeva, Natalia Zhidkevich, and Artemy Pozanenko. Ed. Andreas Umland. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. 2015, Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag (review by Lewis H. Siegelbaum).

“What kind of a book is this? It is the most recent in the series of 141 scholarly works edited by Andreas Umland and published in Russian, English, and German as Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS). It could be classified as labor sociology except that “labor” usually implies collectivities of workers or their institutional representation, whereas this interview-based study is of groups of usually related individuals, each pursuing their own itinerary and line of work. It consists of ten chapters of uneven length covering the pursuits of otkhodniki, their family situations, conditions of work, attitudes toward politics and the state, status in their home towns, and much else. The production value of the book is not very high. Words like “however” and “therefore” frequently appear as conjunctions; syllables are split in impossible ways; two photographs are identified as being from “the first half of the nineteenth century;” and the multitude of indented quotations from interviews are in microscopic print.”

88) Gangs of Russia: From the Streets to the Corridors of Power. By Svetlana Stephenson. 2015, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (review by Louise Shelley).

“This fascinating new book provides important insights into the evolution of gang life and organized crime in Russia. Clearly written, with illuminating interviews with gang members and a firm

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part One!. H-Soyuz. 12-19-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/157343/december-2016-book-review-round-part-one Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 24 H-Soyuz grounding in English and Russian-language sources, it provides a major new addition to the literature on the nature of urban life and violence. Following on the strong tradition of Vadim Volkov’s, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (2002), also published by Cornell University Press, Stephenson’s work expands our understanding of gang life in the decade since Volkov completed his work. Unlike Volkov, she does not focus on the violence that is central to his book but on the relationship between the gangs and the society in which they function. She does not find entrepreneurial violence among the gang members she interviews (191).”

European Education Vol 48 Issue 3

89) Across Three Continents: Reflections on Immigration, Education, and Personal Survival, by Katerina Bodovski. 2015, New York, NY: Peter Lang (Review by Tatsiana Amosava).

“In Across Three Continents, Katerina Bodovski shares her rich experience of living in three countries—the USSR, Israel, and the United States, and describes the idiosyncrasies of the educational systems in each country. In the introduction, Bodovski explains that she understands the term “personal survival” as “the survival of one’s identity, of staying true to oneself “p/ 2). The author defines the goal of her book according to what C. W. Mills suggested in his famousSociological Imagination—to grasp history through biography. She deploys autoethnography as a method of her study.”

European Education Vol 48 Issue 4

90) Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education, by Jonathan Zimmerman. 2015, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (review by Theodore G. Zervas).

“In Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education, educational historian Jonathan Zimmerman traces the history of sex education in the late nineteenth century to the current political and social controversies that surround the subject. According to Zimmerman, while the “…United States actually pioneered [sex education]… the Europeans created a differenttype of sex education; one focused less on public consequences and dangers than on individual rights and pleasures” (p. x). How sex education was taught in countries around the world, and how many countries resisted sex education, are central themes in Zimmerman’s book.”

Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Vol 2, Issue 2

91) Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post‐Cold War Order. By Rajan Menon and Eugene B. Rumer. 2016, Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press (review by Vsevolod Samokhvalov).

“Two major approaches have framed interpretations to the Ukrainian crisis. The pro‐European approach blames Russia for its aggression. The pro‐Russian one blames the West for encroaching on

Russia’s Near Abroad and not respecting Moscow’s sensitivities. Apart from being implicitly normative in essence, both approaches tend to reduce the complexity of the events to a mere geopolitical competition. This book by Menon and Rumer tries to escape this reductionist paradigm and to explain the context, causes, and consequences of the crisis in Ukraine.”

92) Negotiating Armenian‐Azerbaijani Peace: Opportunities, Obstacles, Prospects by Ohannes Geukjian. 2014, Farnham: Ashgate (review by Kevork Oskanian).

“Early in his work, Geukjian provides three hypotheses that could potentially explain this failure (4): first, the “BATNA” hypothesis, or the argument that both sides had a “Better Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement” throughout the period in question. Second, the author posits that the failure to agree could be tied to the “lying and bluffing” of the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides, preventing the emergence of the mutual trust required for a solution. The third hypothesis takes on normative overtones by postulating that “fairness and justice mattered,” insofar as an acceptable solution would have to satisfy incompatible notions of equity among the disputants. The limited amount of data available on the hitherto opaque negotiations process itself would make it difficult for anyone to empirically prove or disprove any of the above hypotheses; and, in fact, towards the end of the monograph, their secondary importance becomes clear. There is little discussion of their relative merits, as would be expected in a more strictly structured work; instead, in the final chapter—on the obstacles to an agreement—elements largely left outside their scope, like the negotiators’ “top‐level approach” (212), and their failure to build peace constituency in the societies concerned, are identified as the main obstacles to resolution.”

93) Stalin: The Biography of a Dictator by Oleg V. Khlevniuk. 2015, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (review by Rodric Braithwaite).

“Written with fluent sobriety, and humor (“It is rarely helpful when politicians involve themselves in the interpretation of past events”), the book is a constant pleasure to read. No book of history is ever definitive: new facts trickle out, new writers bring new perspectives to bear. That is the charm of the genre. But some history books can become classics for later generations. Khlevniuk’s Stalin is likely to be one of them. Khlevniuk has been very fortunate in his translator Nora Seligman Favorov. She has rendered his book into delightfully flexible, clear, and fluent English. Her contribution was fully recognized when the judges of this year’s Pushkin House Book prize gave Khlevniuk’s book a special award as Best Russian Book in Translation.”

94) The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums, by Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer, and Maria Senina, 2015, New York: Berghahn Books (review by Kateryna Smagliy).

“The Enemy on Display is a collection of essays by an international team of scholars that analyzes how museums in Eastern Europe narrate World War II, and, specifically, how they present the image of the enemy. The case studies are focused on three museums—the Dresden City Museum, the Historical Museum of Warsaw, and the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg—but they also touch upon other recently opened museums devoted to the period of 1939– 45.”

95) BorBoris Yeltsin: The Decade that Shook the World, by is Minaev. 2015, London: Glagoslav

AND

A Man of Change: A Study of the Political Life of Boris Yeltsin, by the Yeltsin Center. 2015 London: Glagoslav (review by Niel Robinson).

“The two volumes under review are published with the support of the President B. Yeltsin Center Foundation. A Man of Change: A Study of the Political Life of Boris Yeltsin is a collective effort by four historians. Minaev’s Boris Yeltsin: The Decade that Shook the World is a translation of his 2010 biography (published by Molodaia Gvardiia, but available as a free download on the Yeltsin Center’s website). It has been edited and the text reorganized to some extent. Most notably the foreword to the Russian original has been taken out. It’s probably good commercial sense not to have a foreword by Putin in an English language book at the present time, particularly if the most notable thing about that foreword is Putin’s recollection that Yeltsin’s parting shot as he left the Kremlin and the presidency was to order Putin to “Save Russia.” As one might expect from their pedigree, neither volume presents a searing critique of Yeltsin. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Yeltsin’s press is usually bad and some correction of an exclusively negative view of Yeltsin is useful. That said, Yeltsin has not been badly served by his biographers already.”

96) Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism, Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, and Marlene Laruelle (eds.) 2015, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (review by Olga R. Gulina).

“This book summarizes the evolution of the political thought of Russian philosophers, historians, political theorists, and sociologists in the 20th century, an evolution that is still underway and continues to dominate the modern Russian consciousness. Today’s Russia aspires to play a global political role, at least on the Eurasian continent. Therefore, the idea of a Russia‐centered “sphere of influence” and “pole of power,” often defined as the “Eurasian vision of Russian interests,” wins special attention among contemporary academia and practitioners.”

97) Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post‐Soviet Regime Changes, by Vladimir Gel’man. 2015, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, (review by David White).

“Gel’man has written extensively in the past on topics as diverse as institutional choice, center‐ regionalrelations, the party system, elections, the role of opposition, and Russia’s resource curse. Here he brings many of those strands together to provide a relatively short but sophisticated account of Russia’s political development since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, explaining why democracy failed to take root. It is a hugely readable book and avoids getting bogged down in detail (there is an awful lot to cover) whilst leaving you with the confidence that this is the work of someone with a deep knowledge of the Russian political system. Neither does Gel’man over‐theorize. Indeed, the shortcomings of theorists are laid bare, none more so than the assumption in the early 1990s that Russia would obligingly fit in to the Third Wave mode and move seamlessly towards democratization. In just over 150 pages this book explains why that was never going to happen.”

98) The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, , by David Satter. 2016, New Haven and London: Yale University Press (review by John B. Dunlop).

“This collection of book chapters which treat a range of disparate topics constitutes David Satter’s attempt to sum up the lessons that he learned during the approximately forty years that he worked as a journalist covering both the USSR and post‐communist Russia. One of the chapters extends the coverage to the revolutionary events occurring in Ukraine which led to the ouster of a pro‐Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, from power.”

99) Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe‐Russia Relationship, Marlene Laruelle (ed.). 2015, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (review by Rasmus Nilsson).

“In recent years, political parties on the European Far Right as well as on the Far Left have benefited from political, economic, and social uncertainty bedeviling Europe. At the same time, from the east, Eurasianism—the belief that Russia is a distinct civilization—has offered an alternative Europe to those dissatisfied with the status quo. In that context, this book offers to show the influence of Eurasianism in a Europe ranging from France to Turkey—an admirable ambition. Yet this study tries to pursue three lines of inquiry in ways that are not always compatible. First, the development of European Far Right movements—a development often described here in minute detail, for example, in Giovanni Savino’s chapter on Italy. Second, the involvement of Russian individual actors with these movements. Here, the focus is mostly on Alexander Dugin, who merits a chapter of his own by Anton Shekhovtsov. Third, the involvement of Russian state actors with European Far Right movements. This line of inquiry is mainly present in the concluding chapter by Shekhovtsov on Far Right election monitors in Europe.”

100) Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine, by Elizabeth A. Wood, William E. Pomeranz, E. Wayne Merry and Maxim Trudolyubov. 2016, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press (review by Patrick M. Bell).

“What Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine reveals yet again is the importance of contextualization. Moreover, this work should remind us that large‐scale changes in the post‐Soviet space are “embedded,” to quote Karl Polyani, in an institutional and even cultural context. In terms of the crisis in Ukraine this means taking into account the effect of previous regimes on the current conflict. Previous regimes contributed important structural factors (i.e. Soviet, Imperial Russian geographic conceptions) and processes (such as Russification) that have an important impact on the events that are happening even today. Russian aggression is real. Understanding Russian actions requires that they be “embedded” within the larger socio‐cultural transformation that is occurring in the post‐ Soviet space.”

101) Handbook of the Economics and Political Economy of Transition, by Paul Hare and Gerard Turley. 2013, New York and London: Routledge (review by Jokunas Salyga).

“The Russian economist Igor Birman, commenting on post‐ communist transition trajectories, once remarked that the centuries‐long development of capitalism had never depended on educated or uneducated economists, their advice and recipes. Against this backdrop the Handbook of the Economics and Political Economy of Transition constitutes one of the most comprehensive attempts on the part of the leading experts in the field, many of whom were directly involved in the transition process as policymakers or advisors themselves, at critically surveying the course of transformation from central planning to a market economy over the past twenty years.”