War and Peace in the Caucasus: Ethnic Conflict and the New Geopolitics by VICKENCHETERIANReview by: ROBERT LEGVOLDForeign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 5 (September/October 2009), pp. 159-160Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20699683 .

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Recent Books

Eastern Europe and Former

Soviet Republics ROBERT LEGVOLD

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the NewRussia. by Jonathan brent.

Atlas 8c Co., 2008,336 pp. $26.00.

This book is one of the most remarkable recent undertakings in publishing and

certainly the most important for the Soviet period. Brent has overseen Yale

University Press' exceedingly ambitious

project to expose the hidden details of the Stalin period contained in the Soviet archives. His tales of how he picked his way through the decrepit labyrinth guarding these secrets, his surprising finds, and the deals he cut are the book's great virtues.

But in full-flavored fashion, he also shares

his experiences living on the hard side of life in Boris Yeltsin's Russia, albeit as

something of a naive without the compar ative perspective of what came before.

Similarly, his deeper insights into the echoes of Stalin's Soviet Union in the Russia he

encountered overly mimic the world

preoccupying him in the archives. Brent

is not merely a good writer; he is an artist, and the book is a pleasure to read.

Indeed, the authors' core thesis blames

the dogged persistence of "Muscovite Russia"?the tyrannical and militarized

state formed in the fifteenth century? for the failings of all who have since led the

country, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. As they put it, Putins Russia is like its predecessors, "a repressive neoimperial authoritarian

martial police state." The more mundane

explanation supplied for why Gorbachev's

perestroika and Yeltsin s democratic promise came to nothing, however, has to do with

those leaders' complicity, witting or not, in ceding the process of liberalization to

"profiteers," who turned it to their own selfish ends. All this is argued with an elaborate exploration of economic data.

The authors reach the melancholy con

clusion that Russia will in the future be as before: "a major player on the global stage, vulnerable to internal rent-seeking subversion, international overreach, and

sudden catastrophic collapse."

War and Peace in the Caucasus: Ethnic

Conflict and the New Geopolitics, by vicken cheterian. Columbia

University Press, 2009, 288 pp. $40.00.

Mostly it has been war or its ersatz for the

Caucasian states over the 18 years since

they gained independence. The reasons

are tangled and reach back into a complex

history, but, Cheterian argues, they come

down to a common cause: the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nationalism did not

destroy the Soviet Union; the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed national grievances and anxieties to flourish. How this worked in three early wars?those in Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Chechnya?he probes in intricate detail, a good deal of which he knows first

Russia Since 1980. by steven rosefielde

and stefan hedlund. Cambridge

University Press, 2008,374 pp. $90.00 (paper, $25.99).

Among books deeply critical of contem

porary Russia, this may be the hardest of the hard?partly because it finds so little

inspiration in all of Russian history.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS September/October200g [159]

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Recent Books

hand from his days as a newspaper reporter in the region. He insists that although his

tory played its role, the violence had its own causes. Russia may have been an abettor, but it was neither the source nor the essence

of the problem. One cannot understand the

current unresolved turmoil in the Caucasus,

including last falls war in Georgia, without

having read this book.

modern form originated in tsarist Russia in the 1870s with the birth of the revolutionary organization known as the People s Will. Verhoeven argues that the real forerunner

was the psychologically unbalanced, self

imagined revolutionary Dmitry Karakozov, who in 1866 committed the until-then

unthinkable public act of attempting to shoot the tsar. (He missed.) His arrest,

trial, and execution and the frenzied efforts

of the regime to prove a vast revolutionary

conspiracy, she contends, rippled through society, affecting everything from who

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov became to the symbolism invested in the most mundane aspects of Karakozov's being. To make the case, Verhoeven engages in sweeping meta

historical analysis that stretches the reader s

imagination almost as much as her own.

This allows her to extract a great deal

from a case whose essential questions remain unanswered almost a century and a half later.

Zhivagos Children: The Last Russian

Intelligentsia, by Vladislav zubok.

Harvard University Press, 2009,

464 pp. $35.00. The Soviet Union, even in its dreariest

periods, percolated with a restless

intelligentsia?many of whose members

were disillusioned and divorced from the

system, still more of whom were fired by a recrudescent idealism. They came in waves, and Zubok uses the author Boris Pasternak

as the symbol of an earlier generation in

spired by nineteenth-century cultural icons

who then energized a generation of writers,

artists, and scientists in the Khrushchev

era?that is, until Nikita Khrushchev and the wardens of ideology clamped down in

1963. Zubok, who grew up in the Soviet Union a child of "Zhivagos children," weaves a rich tapestry that portrays the

surges and ebbs in passions, the divisions

and betrayals, the quasi alliances with en

lightened apparatchiks, and, ultimately, the milieus fragmentation and atrophy after

1968. The result is a pulsing, full-bodied

history of people and trends that were only glimpsed in detached pieces at the time.

Stalins Police: Public Order and Mass

Repression in the USSR, 1926?1941. by Paul hagenloh. Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2009, 480 pp. $45.00. The near torrent of works attempting to

reconstruct and rectify the historical record

of the Stalin era continues, and this one is a

worthy example. In July 1937, Stalin ordered the mass purging of "kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements." These were not

the party officials, diplomats, and military officers already consumed earlier in the

purges but ordinary criminals, peasants

guilty only of being better off, and mem bers of "suspect" ethnic groups. They died

by quota, and before the operations were

called off, more than 1.15 million had been arrested and 683,000 shot. This phase of

The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia,

Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism. by Claudia verhoeven. Cornell

University Press, 2009, 248 pp. $39.95. It is often argued that terrorism in its

[l6o] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume88No.5

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