Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics

Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022

By Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 320 pp.

Arel and Driscoll offer a meticulous and nuanced account of the developments in Ukraine that preceded the Russian invasion of 2022. After the antigovernment Maidan revolution in 2014 in Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin moved to annex Crimea in a bloodless operation enabled by the popular local rejection of the Maidan revolution and by the defection of Crimean elites to the Russian state. Events were quite different in the eastern region of Donbas. There, opposition to the Maidan revolt sparked violent insurgency in the streets, but the local elites chose not to break with the Ukrainian government. Initially, the Russian role in the conflict was limited to information warfare. (The Kremlin only got involved militarily several months later.) Populations were also divided elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, precipitating bloody conflict. At the root of this violence, the authors emphasize, was not Russian aggression, as is commonly believed in the West, but real divisions between those Ukrainians who aligned with Ukraine and those who aligned with Russia. At that stage, the authors claim, the current war might have been avoided. Several months after the beginning of the civil conflict, Russia began direct military intervention but never admitted to it, which was one reason European attempts to mediate were stymied. Another was Ukraine’s steadfast refusal to grant electoral legitimacy to its de facto breakaway territories in eastern Donbas. After a six-year stalemate, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War World

By Erik R. Scott. Oxford University Press, 2023, 328 pp.

Drawing on archival documents from several former Soviet republics and from the United States, this highly persuasive work studies defection as an important element of the Cold War. The United States championed freedom of movement and personal choice and condemned the Soviet government

for keeping its citizens in captivity. But even as it encouraged all Soviet people to escape to “the free world,” the United States maintained strict immigration restrictions and showed a clear preference for defectors it deemed valuable, such as Soviet diplomats. The Soviet Union sought to repatriate those defectors who had begun to regret fleeing to the West, stressing the comforts of family and homeland. This effort was more successful than is commonly known, especially since ideological defections were, in fact, quite rare. Illustrated with fascinating stories of individual defectors, Scott’s book also documents the surprisingly productive cooperation of the two superpowers in deterring unwanted migrants, including those who sought asylum in foreign embassies, smuggled themselves aboard “capitalist” Western vessels, and hijacked planes. Cooperation between Washington and Moscow from the 1960s to the 1980s led to the codification of diplomatic representation and behavior on the high seas and the treatment of acts of hijacking as terrorism.

Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia

By Adrienne Edgar. Cornell University Press, 2022, 300 pp.

For many decades, Soviet authorities encouraged intermarriage between ethnic groups as part of a social engineering project aimed at building a Soviet nation, one free of ethnic or racial biases. Edgar’s absorbing historical study of intermarriage is based on policy documents, Soviet ethnographic research, and over 80 in-depth interviews with members of mixed marriages and their adult children in the ethnically diverse Soviet republic of Kazakhstan and less diverse Tajikistan. During the last three decades of the Soviet Union, the policy on intermarriage backfired: instead of erasing national distinctions, it contributed to the rise of a racialized notion of nationality. Identity documents required all citizens to list their “nationality,” and “Soviet” was not an option. At the age of 16, the offspring of mixed marriages had to choose one of their parents’ ethnicities. This made young people keenly aware of their bloodlines and descent and promoted an increasingly primordial concept of nationality. As the Soviet Union collapsed, nationalism in the Central Asian republics was ascendant.

The Soviet Sixties

By Robert Hornsby.

Yale University Press, 2023, 496 pp.

Based on an immense body of scholarly literature, Hornsby’s narrative is broad rather than deep. His “sixties” begin in 1953, with the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, became his castigator, putting an end to Stalin’s rule of terror and releasing hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. Khrushchev radically expanded the Soviet Union’s international ties and promoted anticolonialism. Concerned for public welfare, he launched a mass housing program and allowed a breath of freedom in the arts and culture. He oversaw amazing successes in the

exploration of space. Hornsby also discusses the more negative aspects of Khrushchev’s leadership, including the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and, at home, the bloody suppression in 1962 of workers’ protests in Novocherkassk, a harsh antireligious campaign, and the Soviet leader’s angry distaste for modern art. In 1964, Khrushchev was ousted by his Politburo rivals, who opted to further harden the regime. Only about a quarter of the book, which is ostensibly about the 1960s, is devoted to the six years of the decade that followed Khrushchev’s ouster. The book is rich in material, but those familiar with Soviet history will find few new facts or interpretations.

Communism’s Public Sphere:

Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany

By Kyrill Kunakhovich. Cornell University Press, 2023, 354 pp.

Kunakhovich presents a richly detailed chronicle of the relations between political and cultural actors in the East German city of Leipzig and the Polish city of Krakow during the Cold War. He shows how artists and artistic spaces contributed to the evolution of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. After World War II, Stalinist regimes forcefully shaped art and imposed it on the masses in the hope of building socialism. Stalin’s death in 1953 eased the dependence of Eastern European leaders on Moscow and heralded a shift in those countries toward “national communism,” with governments seeking to engage the people and cater to local needs and desires. Communist leaders granted more freedom to artists, expecting to turn them into political allies. But those hopes were dashed. As the only civil actors allowed to address the public, artists endured close state scrutiny, but they never stopped pushing boundaries. The repression that followed the quashing of the Prague Spring in 1968 in Czechoslovakia gave rise to broad resistance in Eastern Europe, with artists and cultural places at the forefront. The push for artistic and political freedoms was more radical in Poland than in East Germany, but this process was also transnational: the two societies’ interactions led to the simultaneous collapse of both communist regimes in 1989.