Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2018 -

This is a fascinating, often very moving study of how Jewish Holocaust survivors remembered coming home at war's end to find only traces of annihilated Jewish communities. Historian Rice (Seton Hall Univ.) focuses on how Jewish and Israeli popular historical memory was formed through the process of recollection in thousands of written survivor testimonies collected in Poland and Israel in the immediate aftermath of the German defeat, the rise of a communist Poland, and the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. For many, the first words of "welcome" on returning home were, "What! You still alive?," as Polish neighbors expressed resentment and fear that surviving Jews might seek return of their homes, businesses, and possessions in a country badly ravaged during German occupation and terrorized by the postwar Soviet communist "liberation," for which many Poles blamed the Jews. The appearance of this book is quite timely in view of the recent rise of controversy over Polish-Jewish relations and allegations of complicity by some Poles in attacks on Jews both during and immediately after the German occupation. Rice explores the processes of memory of traumatic events among survivors. Very highly recommended.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Taubman (political science, Amherst College) has written a monumental, groundbreaking study of Soviet President Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Using extensive new archives available following the collapse of the USSR and Communist Party in Russia in 1991, Taubman combines political and diplomatic history with personal details (letters, diaries) to allow readers to see the "human" Gorbachev behind the scenes. Gorbachev grew up under Stalin and personally found his dictatorship reprehensible. However, to advance in the Soviet system, he had to adhere to the party line. When in power, he forcibly introduced glasnost, then perestroika, and, finally, his interpretation of Soviet "socialist democracy." He reduced the nuclear arsenal and in a series of US-USSR summits helped end the Cold War. But domestically, he failed to improve the economy and became less popular. He failed to anticipate the August 1991 hard-line coup and did not work well with Yeltsin, his eventual successor, or the current president, Vladimir Putin. Nonetheless, Gorbachev deserved the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize and can be viewed in the long term as the only truly moderate voice since the Russian Revolution and the Cold War. Taubman is to be congratulated for conveying this in such an ecumenical manner.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Lenin was a complex figure who was defined more by myth than historical reality until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening of the Soviet archives. Journalist Sebestyen has taken advantage of this to post a lengthy portrait of Lenin the man and ruler of Communist Russia. Lenin was born to well-to-do parents who encouraged an intellectual upbringing. He was a lawyer before he was a radical revolutionary, but the execution of his older brother and the death of his father in 1886-7 changed his personality. He turned against the Tsarist state and beginning in 1893 was either in exile or in prison or Siberia. Sebestyen's remarkable portrayal shows Lenin's human side toward his wife, mother, sisters, and mistress. Lenin as party leader and dictator was far more severe than has been depicted. He used Stalin and Trotsky against one another but never declared for either as his successor. Eventually, due to a series of strokes in 1921-23, Lenin fell out of the picture, and Stalin used the vacuum to seize power. Sebestyen is to be commended for bringing the true Lenin to life for historians to consider. His study will rank with those of Richard Pipes and Robert Service in modern historiography.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Anyone involved in Slavic studies knows the work of Harvard historian Plokhy, in particular his pathbreaking study The Origins of the Slavic Nations (CH, May'07, 44-5211), and his many works on the Russian-Ukrainian encounter. The current book, while on a high scholarly level, is written for a general audience. Plokhy aims to illuminate recent events--in particular, the Russian annexation of Crimea--by examining the history of "Russia" as a concept, culture, and political entity. The result is a highly readable history of Russia that will be familiar to most specialists, but with a twist: an emphasis on Russians' perceptions of their relationship with Ukrainian nationality. As Plokhy demonstrates, for centuries and to this day many Russians have a very difficult time conceptualizing, much less accepting, Ukraine as an equal and independent culture and nation-state. Plokhy persuasively argues that only when the Russian political elite and Russian society detaches from this imperial mindset will Russian democracy flourish. There is perhaps no more important book published in recent years for a non-specialist interested in understanding the roots of the recent Russian-Ukrainian conflict.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Dunn (geography, Indiana Univ., Bloomington) has written a heart-wrenching, sophisticated, yet readable analysis of the experiences of Georgians internally displaced by the 2008 war with Russia. She uses her significant ethnographic skills and her empathy with the encamped Georgian IDPs and their humanitarian "managers" to examine a moral dilemma: Why were encamped IDPs receiving high levels of aid faring so poorly? Dunn traces people's chronic health problems, growing suspicion of supernatural interference, and utter despair not to the fact of their displacement but to the relief effort. Specifically, she unpacks with great nuance how forces of capitalist neoliberalism and Georgian and Russian authoritarianism have structured the humanitarian system along various bureaucratic, economic, and political axes that reward humanitarian action no matter how poorly it fits people's needs. Dunn's participants respond in culturally logical ways: initially with grief and near paralysis, but eventually--through having to care for IDPs and mourn those who die--by reviving their connections to their home villages, to each other, and ultimately to the place where they are objects of relief.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

With the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian scholars unleashed a plethora of new works examining the upheavals in prewar Russia and the ensuing collapse of czarism. One study stands out among the others. Laura Engelstein (emer., Russian history, Yale) embarked upon a mammoth undertaking with her exploration of the revolutionary cataclysm that engulfed Russia and still haunts the post-Soviet Russian Federation. The outstanding strength of her narrative is her account of prewar Russia and the failure of the autocracy to address the mounting political and social crises that plagued Nicholas II. As Engelstein relates, this cauldron of unaddressed grievances and political corruption, as well the battlefield horrors of a failed war, ignited the fuse of revolution. Her detailed account of Lenin's mobilization of Bolshevik cadres and how Lenin weaponized the revolutionary situation to topple the first and only Russian democratic experiment highlights her book. The author's detailed depiction of not only what happened in revolutionary Russia but also the ensuing legacy of a failed experiment based on terror and bloodshed that has enduring meaning today will captivate readers.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

Smith's history of the Russian Revolution is quite possibly the very best of the many books published in this centenary of what was once considered the epochal event of the 20th century. The author brings an astonishing degree of detail to his wide-ranging, comprehensive study of every possible facet of Russian life (as well as that of its captive peoples) during this period. With remarkable evenhandedness, Smith (All Souls College, Oxford) ably introduces general readers, to whom this book is directed, to virtually every debate that has so roiled the field over the past few decades. He studiously avoids making any definitive judgments but does note that neither the revolution itself nor the Bolshevik victory were "preordained." His terminal date of 1928 is somewhat puzzling, however, as it could be argued that Stalin's "Second Revolution" completed the revolutionary transformation of Russia's social, political, and economic structures. Smith seems to see Stalinism as not being the logical outcome of Bolshevism and makes that point by omission. Perhaps his most provocative assertion is that a century later, the revolution of China, Russia's more successful progeny, may ultimately be more important in the 20th century.Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries.

This impressive survey of the territory between German lands and those of Russia, including the Balkans, treats history and historiography. It is fully abreast of current scholarship and methodology, clearly written by a first-rate international team of contributors whose own research is evident, shows the region in all its complexities, and is well edited by Livezeanu (Univ. of Pittsburgh) and von Klimo (Catholic Univ.). The introduction and ten chapters discuss a broad range of topics: geographic and political space treated transnationally, economic modernization and the problem of backwardness, demography, religion and ethnicity, literary culture, gender issues, ideology and political movements, the communist era and the region since 1989, and the way history has been used and abused. The twin themes of empire (German, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, Ottoman) and nationalism drive the narrative and analysis. Each chapter treats its topic during the age of empires, the 20th century interwar era, and the decades of the Cold War and after, and includes excellent documentation and bibliography. For a region that has traditionally been riven by nationalistic and ethnic controversy, the treatment is remarkably balanced. Good maps, figures, and tables complement the volume.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Almost 80 years ago, John Wheeler-Bennett's Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (1938) established the abiding narrative of the treaty that ended the war between Lenin's Russia and the Central Powers: a brutal, German-dictated peace. Wheeler-Bennett was a marvelous narrative historian, but his limited access to archival sources and, doubtless, the looming threat of Nazi Germany focused his account. Chernev (modern European history, Univ. of Exeter) has written a superb new monograph reflecting his expanded research in Austrian and Bulgarian as well as German archival sources. The two treaties signed at Brest-Litovsk, one with a newly (and for a limited time only) independent Ukraine, the other with the Bolsheviks, reflected the complex interplay of ideology, the economic plight of the "Quadruple Alliance" (as the Central Powers called themselves), and political-military realities. Chernev's impressive research makes clear that Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, even the Ottoman Empire were far from passive witnesses to a German Diktat. Though the peace itself was short-lived, the author makes a convincing case for the settlement's deep influence on the geopolitics of interwar Eastern Europe. Bottom line: this modern account of these 1918 negotiations--an encounter between cabinet and public, ideologically driven diplomacy--is mandatory for modern European collections.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.