Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics

Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World by jeremy friedman. Harvard University Press, 2022, 368 pp.

Many developing countries that had liberated themselves from Western, capitalist rulers in the twentieth century were naturally drawn to socialism. Friedman’s impressive study, which spans several decades and five countries—Angola, Chile, Indonesia, Iran, and Tanzania—is devoted to “the trial and error”of postcolonial socialist projects in these places. China, the Soviet Union, and other communist countries tried to guide these initiatives, but they found that promoting an ideology based on class was almost impossible in societies where social relations were often defined by race. Friedman points out that citizens in newly independent countries frequently saw the Soviets as “whites”—that is, the same as their former imperialist oppressors. And although militant atheism remained the cornerstone of communist ideology, the Soviets had to learn to regard Islam as a positive force in national liberation movements in countries such as Indonesia and Iran. The communist mentors also grappled with the independent ambitions of their protégés, such as Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, who firmly insisted that his country was building its own kind of socialism and would not become a client of either China or the Soviet Union, despite relying on their economic aid and expert assistance. Although the pursuit of socialism in the global South generally ended in failure, Friedman argues that it left lasting legacies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Strategic Uses of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Interest and Identity in Russia and the Post-Soviet Space by pal kolsto. Edinburgh University Press, 2022, 294 pp.

Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era by vera michlin-shapir. Northern Illinois University Press, 2021, 264 pp.

Two books explore the evolution of Russian national identity in recent decades. Kolsto’s in-depth study looks at the intricacies of nationalism in the post-Soviet space, from perestroika in the late 1980s to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas in 2014. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, leaders of the newly independent states promptly switched from championing communism to embracing ethnic nationalism. In Russia, however, national identity remained vague, and the term “Russianness” was ambiguous and politically charged. On the one hand, Russia was (and remains) a multiethnic nation comprising two dozen ethnic territories, some of them ethnocracies in their own right. On the other hand, “Russianness” was not confined

to Russia’s borders: the government and the people alike tend to claim that their neighbors, Ukrainians and Belarusians, are mere subgroups of a larger Russian nation, and self-identified ethnic Russians live across the post-Soviet space. Kolsto’s thorough analysis portrays Russian identity as an entanglement of the imperial and the ethnic. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was universally applauded in Russia, including by ethnonationalists who used to criticize Putin for neglecting the interests of ethnic Russians. They subsequently condemned Putin, however, for not going all the way to Kyiv in what they saw as a betrayal of their Russian kin in Ukraine. With his new invasion of Ukraine, Putin has suppressed his ethnonationalist opponents and fully appropriated the broad nationalist cause.

Michlin-Shapir posits, contrary to many scholars, that the blurred character of Russian national identity—its “fluid Russianness,” variably about language, culture, ethnicity, citizenship, and residence—is neither abnormal nor a source of crisis.The collapse of habitual social routines and the withdrawal of the state from people’s lives following the disintegration of the Soviet Union left Russians confused and disoriented. But it was not simply the destruction of the Soviet state that shook Russians. Michlin-Shapir emphasizes that there was another, more common factor at play: postcommunist Russia was exposed to the forces of globalization. The experience of freedom of movement, the free flow of information and capital, and a fast-changing social environment produced in Russia a fragmented national identity and a sense of insecurity, familiar to many societies in the globalized West. Putin worked to instill a sense of stability and security among Russians after becoming president in 2000 but, Michlin-Shapir writes, his attempts to grant his people a unified identity proved unsuccessful because “he never isolated Russia from the global world.” Soon after her book was published, the invasion of Ukraine led to Russia’s radical deglobalization, demonstrating how even the most insightful analysis may be tested by the heinous actions of a dictator.

Soviet Nightingales:

Care Under Communism by susan grant. Cornell University Press, 2022, 336 pp.

Grant delves into a fascinating yet understudied topic: the history of nursing in the Soviet Union. The pre-revolutionary Sisters of Mercy were strongly associated with religious virtue but became increasingly secularized and professionalized during World War I. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, these nurses were reinvented as Soviet medical workers. Any religious connections were banned, and political instruction became an indispensable element of nursing education. In 1920, the Sisters of Mercy became simply known as “sisters.” Grant emphasizes the incongruity between the brutal reality of the communist regime and its inexorable demand—even during Stalin’s Great Terror—that nurses be kind, caring, and devoted to their patients. The government took very seriously patients’ complaints about neglect or callousness on the part of nurses. Meanwhile, nurses suffered low wages,

long shifts, and a chronic shortage of housing and often worked in dismal conditions without running water or functioning sewage systems. Grant admits that some of these problems also troubled nurses in Western countries, but even by the end of its existence, in 1991, the Soviet Union had not improved the lot of these workers.

Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia by marlene laruelle. UCL Press, 2021, 264 pp.

Laruelle, a prolific expert on postSoviet Central Asia, compiles ten updated essays on nationalist ideologies in the post-Soviet era. The oldest of the essays here—a 2007 paper positing the resurgence of pagan Tengrism, the old Turko-Mongolic religion of the Eurasian steppes, as a rival for Islam—admittedly feels a bit dated; Islam still dominates in all Central Asian republics. Fortunately, the rest of the book offers a stronger introduction to Laruelle’s important work. One highlight is her alarming study of the embrace of “Aryanism” in Tajikistan, where President Emomali Rahmon dubbed 2006 “The Year of Aryan Civilization” and Tajik historians proposed that their “Aryan” ancestors embarked on a civilizing mission against neighboring Turkic nomads. Another is her incisive survey of Soviet ethnography, in which she connects Soviet forms of “race science” to the ethnic chauvinism endorsed by some post-Soviet regimes. The volume’s second half uses case studies from Kazakhstan to show how the country has at once embraced globalization as well as the kind of classical ethnonationalism that globalization is often presumed to undermine. Kazakh citizens are encouraged to engage with the world but to speak Kazakh at home, or else risk marginalization. Ethnic minorities, meanwhile, have left the country in droves despite its post-Soviet prosperity.