Category Archives: Book Reviews

co-written with Maya Haber Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin, Cornell University Press, 2009.

Studies of the Soviet gulag encompass a cottage industry of its own in Russian historiography.  Since 1991, a torrent of studies have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy.  Few, however, have delved into how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over 4 million prisoners from labor camps and colonies to society between 1953 and 1958.  It is for this reason that Miriam Dobson‘s Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin is a welcomed and refreshing edition to so-called “Gulag Studies.”

In it we don’t find the heroic gulag returnee (“Khrushchev’s zeks,” as Stephen Cohen affectionately calls them), who was unjustly persecuted under Stalin for his political views, but more a tragic figure whose finds himself indelibly marked by his years ..read more

Two weeks ago, I did a post on 75 years since the Kirov law.  I was happy to find that the New Times published an interview with Matthew Lenoe whose forthcoming book, Kirov’s Murder and Soviet History, is a hefty reexamination of the famous assassination.  Below is a translation I did of the interview.

*****

“Stalin used Kirov’s murder as justification for mass executions”

by Evgeniia Albats

Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee, VKP(b), was killed by a shot to the back of the head. The bloody bacchanalia known in history as the Great Terror followed. Violence became the means to rule an huge country. Show trials of then leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Rykov, who were all accused of the murder, became the symbol of Stalinist justice.  Millions of people, including almost all of the Society of Political Prisoners ..read more

Lewis Siegelbaum has a cover interview with Rorotoko for his recent book Cars for Comrades.  I didn’t know about this interview until I received an email from Cornell University Press’ Publicity Manager.  I should note, however, posting a blurb about Siegelbaum’s interview isn’t purely out of disinterest.  He’s on my dissertation committee and bringing attention to his book is the least I can do to thank him for his quick and gracious reading.  Plus Cars for Comrades is a book worth mentioning regardless of my relationship with him.  For car lovers it tells a story virtually unknown in the West.  For lovers of Russian history, it adds to our knowledge of Soviet culture and consumerism through something we in the United States take completely for granted: the car.

Cars for Comrades also provides some historical context to accompany all the recent articles decrying the state of Russia’s roads and how Russia ..read more

David Woodruff gives a brutal assessment of Anders Aslund’s How Capitalism Was Built in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of the New Left Review.  It’s unfortunate that the review is only accessible to subscribers.

Readers should know Aslund’s own personal contribution to the building of Russian capitalism well.  In the 1990s, he was part of the Jeffrey Sachs’ team of Western economists that “advised” the Yeltsin government on “shock therapy.” Despite the disastrous social costs of his “market bolshevism,” Aslund remains a frequent commentator on Russian affairs by providing a well rehearsed and repeated denunciatory performance.  Aslund’s trick is to emphasize the standard narrative about Russia with all the appropriate mentions of Khodorkovsky, liberal oppositionists like Nemtsov and Milov, “transparency,” and the impending doom of “Putinomics.” Most of all, Aslund’s move is to give a uncompromising defense of his contribution to the “reforms” of the 1990s.

It is Aslund’s continued championing of the ..read more

I usually don’t cheerlead the work my adviser and friend, J. Arch Getty, but if you have any interest in his new book Stalin’s Iron Fist, read Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s review in the Telegraph. If you’re not familiar Getty’s work, over the last two decades he has single handedly rewritten the history of the Terror as we know it. In Stalin’s Iron Fist, he explores the meteoric rise of the modest, hardworking Nikolai Ezhov from a worker in the famed Putilov factory to the head of the NKVD.  In many ways, Ezhov’s rise and fall is an archetype of the inner dichotomies of the Stalinist new man: he was a benefiary, shaper, power player, perpetrator, and victim of the very system that created him.

But I’m hardly an impartial critic of Getty’s work, so instead I’ll let Montefiore sing its praises:

J. Arch Getty, an American professor, and Oleg Naumov, ..read more

My new eXile article, Nemtsov’s White Paper: Bombshell or Dud?, is now online. Here is an excerpt:

Lilia Shevtsova, a fellow at Moscow’s Carnegie Center, called it a “bomb, which anywhere but in Russia would cause the country to collapse.” Writing in the New York Review of Books, Amy Knight called it “a devastating picture of Putin’s eight years in the Kremlin.” In the Daily Mail, Jonathan Dimbleby declared that if such information was released about Britain, it “would certainly have provoked mass outrage, urgent official inquiries and a major police investigation – if not the downfall of the government.”

What, pray tell, is this devastating toppler of governments? Why, it’s Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov’s Putin -The Results: An Independent Expert Report (2008).

Russia watchers might have already heard about the liberal dynamic duo’s breakdown of Russia after eight years of Putin. If you’ve never heard of them, Boris Nemtsov is ..read more