Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War
BY RICHARD SAKWA. Yale University Press, 2023, 448 pp.
Sakwa, a political scientist, offers an eloquent and persuasive argument about how the world squandered the promise of the end of the Cold War and plunged into what he calls “Cold War II,” epitomized by the ongoing proxy war between Russia and the West over Ukraine. Although he condemns Russia’s brutal 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a villainous act, Sakwa insists that the United States bears some responsibility for the erosion of the international order. The U.S.-led NATO enlargement was guided by the lofty principle of “freedom of choice” when it comes to alliances, but it led to the alienation of Russia and the subsequent breakdown of security in Europe, undermining another principle, that of the “indivisibility of security” in Europe. The rules-based order that after 1991 gradually supplanted the internationalism of the UN Charter was the United States’ thinly disguised claim to hegemony, unacceptable to Russia as well as to China, now Washington’s chief rival. Sakwa concludes his bitter analysis by comparing the current moment to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The latter was peacefully resolved, but he notes that humanity “may not be so lucky” this time.
Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States
BY MARIA POPOVA AND OXANA SHEVEL. Polity, 2024, 288 pp.
As they meticulously trace developments in Russia and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Popova and Shevel point out that the current war was not preordained. In the early 1990s, both countries followed parallel tracks as they struggled to overcome dysfunctional economies and social and political chaos. Their decisive disentanglement followed later as Ukraine got firmly on the path to democracy and the West while Russia moved toward autocracy and “re-imperialization.” Still, there were important forks in the road, such as when Ukraine’s democratic development faltered during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych in the early 2010s. If Ukraine had taken an autocratic path, it could have become a willing Russian vassal, and the war would have been avoided. The book minimizes the role of the West in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and it pays little attention to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s growing distrust of the West, which long predated the war and made Ukraine’s pivot westward unacceptable to him. The authors dismiss Russia’s security concerns as “paranoia” and criticize the West for being too soft on Russia instead of opting in the first decade of the twenty-first century for a policy of containment and punishment.
The Kremlin’s Noose: Putin’s Bitter Feud With the Oligarch Who Made Him Ruler of Russia
BY AMY KNIGHT. Northern Illinois University Press, 2024, 296 pp.
Knight tells the riveting story of the Russian tycoon and political operator Boris Berezovsky and his role in the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000. Drawing on many books and articles, as well as interviews with Berezovsky’s family and associates, she chronicles how Berezovsky made his incredible fortune through get-richquick schemes; his close ties with the family of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin; his contributions to the neutralizing of Putin’s rivals; his falling out with Putin almost as soon as the latter became acting president and his forced exile in 2000; and his mysterious death in his London home in 2013. Berezovsky, as portrayed by Knight, marks a striking contrast to Putin: the former boisterous and mercurial, a charmer and a womanizer, a super-ambitious man with an “insatiable need for publicity”; the latter secretive, cold, and calculating. Those familiar with Russia’s post-Soviet history will not find many new facts in Knight’s book, but others are sure to enjoy her narrative, which covers the tumultuous political developments in Russia in the 1990s and the first decade of the next century, replete with terrorist attacks, hostage takings, wars, and vicious political intrigue, including an especially murky period preceding Putin’s anointment as Yeltsin’s successor.
The Gulag: A Very Short Introduction BY ALAN BARENBERG. Oxford University Press, 2024, 168 pp.
After the Gulag: A History of Memory in Russia’s Far North
BY TYLER C. KIRK. Indiana University Press, 2023, 308 pp.
Two books delve into the ordeal of the prison camps known as the gulag in the Soviet Union. Barenberg offers an overview of the Soviet penal system, masterminded by Stalin, between 1930 and 1960, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially abolished it. Millions of prisoners were held in a sprawling network of “correctional labor camps,” while entire ethnic and social groups were uprooted from their homelands and exiled to places with harsh conditions. Beyond isolating and punishing its inmates, the gulag abetted Stalin’s ambitious modernization goals. Prisoners harvested timber, mined mineral resources, and were used to build new cities, railroads, dams, canals, and hydroelectric stations. Roughly one in five inmates died from hard labor, cruel treatment, and the severe deprivations of the camps. The “enemies of the people” convicted of made-up political crimes accounted for a quarter to a third of the overall gulag population. Barenberg points out the difference between the gulag and Nazi extermination camps: unlike Nazi prisoners, most labor camp inmates (although not the deportees) had finite sentences and could expect to be released—if they were lucky enough to survive.
Kirk’s unique contribution to the history of Stalin’s labor camps is based on his research in the archives of the Komi Republic in the Russian Far North. These archives contain the testimonies of returnees from the gulag, a collecting project initiated in the late 1980s by local branches of Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the height of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and banned by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021. The initiative generated a flood of prisoner’s memoirs that sparked privately funded attempts to find mass graves associated with the camps; 83 such gravesites were discovered in three decades. In their memoirs, the returnees emphasized the importance of the brotherhood of zeks (prisoners), a solidarity that helped them survive the camps and adjust to life after their release. For many former prisoners, their former fellow inmates were the only family they had. Some former zeks were also proud of their contributions to Soviet achievements (six out of seven cities in the Komi Republic were built by prisoners). A striking chapter is devoted to one former prisoner, an artist who sent over 150 letters about his imprisonment and his life after release to a local museum, along with poignant drawings of his camp experience, some of which are reproduced in the book.