Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics

Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey Into Space

BY STEPHEN WALKER. HarperCollins, 2021, 512 pp.

Walker’s enthralling book covers the early stages of the space race, when the Soviet Union—despite the country’s utter devastation in World War II, in which 27 million Soviet citizens perished—demonstrated technological supremacy over the United States, the world’s richest and most advanced country. In 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first man into space. U.S. President John F. Kennedy, then newly in office, did not prioritize the space race with the Soviet Union; he was focused instead on Soviet meddling in Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion, which Kennedy secretly authorized, ended in a disaster just days after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin triumphantly orbited the earth. Walker’s narrative alternates between Soviet preparations for Gagarin’s flight and U.S. preparations for the United States’ first manned flight. It culminates in a suspenseful 50-page account of Gagarin’s 108-minute journey that reads in one breath. The Soviet space program was strictly classified. Gagarin’s name was first made public only when he was already in orbit; Sergey Korolyov, the program’s chief designer, was not identified by name until after his death in 1966; and some of the serious malfunctions during Gagarin’s flight remained secret until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River

BY JANET M. HARTLEY. Yale University Press, 2021, 400 pp.

Hartley’s chronological narrative, rich in vivid detail, begins over 1,000 years ago, when the principality of Kievan

Rus vied with the Khazar Khaganate and the Bulgars for the lucrative trade on the Volga River. By the mid-sixteenth century, Tsar Ivan IV had established control along the entire length of the river, thereby turning Russia into a multiethnic and multiconfessional empire. The Russian state’s dominance, however, was not yet secure: in the eighteenth century, the Volga was the scene of massive Cossack revolts that sparked outbursts of peasant violence.

Russian authorities struggled to protect the transportation of valuable goods on the Volga against banditry. Hartley offers a fascinating account of the logistics of navigating the Volga before the introduction of steamships, including the herculean work of barge haulers, who had to drag boats upstream. In the nineteenth century, the Volga, which had once been the marker of a frontier, came to be seen as an intrinsically Russian river, the “Mother Volga” glorified in art, music, poetry, and later also film. In 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad, fought on the river’s west bank, produced the ultimate victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany and reinforced the Volga’s standing as a powerful national symbol.

We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia From Peter the Great to Putin BY CHRIS MILLER. Harvard University Press, 2021, 384 pp.

Miller’s broad historical overview of Russian foreign policy in Asia challenges the conventional view that the country has enduring interests in the Far East. He demonstrates that over the past two centuries, Russia has followed periods of deep engagement in Asia— involving territorial expansion, military buildups, and the intensification of commercial ties—with times of neglect and disengagement. For instance, in the early nineteenth century, Russia established colonies in Alaska and California but soon came to see those outposts as an unprofitable distraction and gave them up to the Americans. In the 1860s, Russia conquered the territories around the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, on the Chinese border, but made no use of those sparsely populated lands for three decades. Soviet leaders sought to build a broad anti-imperialist front in Asia, but hostilities with China undermined that effort. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s influence in Asia had significantly decreased. For Russia, Miller argues, Asia has been a land of unfulfilled promises, which makes him skeptical about the long-term prospects of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current pivot to the east and his attempted rapprochement with China.

Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War

BY IAN ONA JOHNSON. Oxford University Press, 2021, 384 pp.

Drawing on archives in five countries, Johnson delves into the fascinating secret military cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period. After the end of World War I, a defeated and disarmed Germany sought ways to rearm despite the severe restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Meanwhile, most major powers refused to recognize the new Bolshevik government in Russia, which was in dire need of investment and foreign assistance to build up its armed forces. The two countries’ pariah status drew them together. The Soviet Union provided a place—beyond the reach of Allied inspectors—for the research, development, and testing of German combat aircraft, tanks, and chemical weapons. Cooperation with Germany played a crucial role in the development of the

Soviet military industry and Red Army cadres. Thousands of Soviet military officers trained alongside their German

counterparts. Later on, Hitler’s massive rearmament was enabled in part by the military capabilities that Germany had developed in the Soviet Union before the Nazis came to power. Hitler ended German-Soviet military cooperation in 1933, soon after he became chancellor. But in 1939, the two countries grew close again: they signed the Treaty of Nonaggression, renewed their military ties, and agreed to partition eastern Europe between them. Their extensive trade partnership continued until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War

BY RICHARD SAKWA. Lexington

Books, 2021, 382 pp.

Sakwa contends that the investigations into “Russiagate”—the alleged collusion of the Russian government with Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election—were politically biased and rested on unverified material. In the end, the main investigation, headed by the U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller, concluded that the Russian government and the Trump campaign did not engage in a criminal conspiracy, thus throwing cold water on the notion that Trump owed his victory to Russian interference and was therefore beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The investigations themselves, Sakwa argues, did grave damage to the United States by exacerbating the polarization of U.S. society, compromising the media, and politicizing the security services. Russiagate reduced relations between the United States and Russia to a new Cold War and ruled out any rapprochement between them. Sakwa is not the first to make these points, but his is an exceptionally detailed and well-documented account of all the major episodes covered by the TrumpRussia probes. He aims to help his audience “understand the main issues and facts” of Russiagate. But in the divisive social and political environment that spurred the investigations in the first place, his argument is unlikely to change the minds of those Americans who were anxious to blame outside forces for the defeat of Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.