Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics

Getting Russia Right

BY THOMAS GRAHAM. Polity, 2023, 272 pp.

Graham, who spent over 30 years studying Russia and working on Russian affairs in the U.S. government, offers a forthright analysis of Washington’s Russia policy. The United States, he claims, bears significant responsibility for U.S.-Russian relations now “scraping the depths of Cold War hostility.” Deluded by post-Soviet Russia’s weakness, the United States grew oblivious to Russia’s sense of its immutable historical self: its deeply ingrained self-perception as a great power and its perennial security concerns over its long and mostly indefensible borders. Washington would not recognize Moscow’s national interests unless they were compatible with U.S. goals. Graham condemns American hubris as post–Cold War administrations aspired to transform Russia into a free-market democracy. The U.S. commitment to integrating Russia into the liberal Western world sounded insincere at best as it went hand-in-hand with fierce hedging against Russia’s great-power aspirations. Yet Russia’s autocratic regime does not need to be the United States’ implacable foe. To bring about more constructive relations, Graham urges, Washington must reassess the goals and limits of its power and frame its rivalry with Moscow in terms of geopolitical competition rather than as an existential contest between good and evil.

Detroit–Moscow–Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917–1945

EDITED BY JEAN-LOUIS COHEN, CHRISTINA E. CRAWFORD, AND CLAIRE ZIMMERMAN. MIT Press, 2023, 432 pp.

During the Soviet Union’s First FiveYear Plan—a development initiative that lasted from 1928 to 1932—a group of American architects and engineers worked from a Moscow office to help implement Stalin’s highly ambitious program to industrialize his agricultural country. Their Soviet counterparts were eager to borrow American

expertise, and the Americans enjoyed the challenge of their task and were amazed to encounter female Soviet engineers. (The profession had yet to open up to women in the United States.) The editors of this volume have put together a gripping collection of scholarly essays detailing this cooperation, richly illustrated with photographs and designs. The Americans contributed to the construction of over 500 heavy-industry plants across the Soviet Union, many of which are still in operation. In the mid-1930s, the Soviets also turned to the Americans to help design the Moscow Palace of the Soviets, which was to become the world’s tallest building but was never built. In contrast to earlier historians, the collection’s authors emphasize that American-Soviet collaboration was not a one-way street: construction practices developed in the Soviet Union were implemented by American architects and engineers when they returned home to work on the New Deal’s vast infrastructure projects.

I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country

BY ELENA KOSTYUCHENKO. TRANSLATED BY BELA SHAYEVICH AND ILONA YAZHBIN CHAVASSE. Penguin Press, 2023, 384 pp.

Kostyuchenko, a reporter who has won several international awards, is one of the very few Russian journalists who covered Russian military atrocities in Ukraine in the early weeks following the February 2022 invasion. She is a person of outstanding courage, even by the standards of her independent paper, Novaya Gazeta (now shuttered in Russia). At least five Novaya journalists have been assassinated, including Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. Kostyuchenko sees Politkovskaya as her role model. “There was nobody in the world I respected more,” she writes. Her book combines her published articles with more memoiristic chapters about her childhood in a provincial town, her mother who trusts Russian TV propaganda over Kostyuchenko’s own eyewitness accounts, and her LGBTQ activism. She has a predilection for the down-and-out and the dismal, and the book immerses the reader in a world of roadside prostitutes, care homes that isolate people with disabilities, and the struggles of dwindling ethnic minorities in Russia’s far north.

Moscow’s Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR

BY ISAAC MCKEAN SCARBOROUGH. Cornell University Press, 2023, 294 pp.

Based on extensive primary sources, Scarborough’s book describes in minute detail how the Soviet republic of Tajikistan plunged into a bloody civil war following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Scarborough blames the war on the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, which resulted in mass unemployment and the precipitous decline of living standards. “A handful of unsatisfied cosmopolitan cities,” Scarborough argues, as well as members of the Soviet elite, expected to benefit from the transition to a market economy. In Tajikistan,

however, one of the poorest and least developed Soviet republics, people were reasonably content with what the Soviet system provided. Unlike other Soviet republics, Tajikistan showed “little stomach for independence,” and when the Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Tajikistan a de facto independent state, the republic’s leadership continued to hold on to its close ties with the Kremlin. Moscow, however, would not help restore order when socioeconomic chaos led to violence among rival factions. Scarborough’s narrative leaves one wondering whether, instead of embarking on seismic reform, the Soviet Union should have remained a “benevolent empire” for its poor periphery, but the book fails to answer this question.

The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family, and Kingdom

BY CHRISTIAN RAFFENSPERGER and DONALD OSTROWSKI. Reaktion Books, 2023, 320 pp.

Based on a considerable amount of research, this book by two academic historians takes a novel approach to the political history of the medieval Rus princedoms (from the ninth to the sixteenth century), to which modern Russians and Ukrainians trace the origins of their countries. Raffensperger and Ostrowski argue that the “Ryurikid dynasty,” to which Rus medieval princes are traditionally attributed, is a later construct devised in the fifteenth century. For earlier periods, they insist, it is more appropriate to talk about discrete ruling families that were, however, still aware of belonging to a loosely defined “clan.”That this clan consisted of the progeny of the tenth-century Prince Vladimir, the famous Christianizer of the Rus, was often unimportant to contemporaries. The authors also depart from the traditional focus on a dynastic, patrilinear succession by considering the origins and connections of the princes’ wives, who commonly came from other clans and countries and maintained ties with their motherlands. The book thus places medieval Rus in a broader context, challenging the conventional perception of Russian statehood as evolving over the centuries from Kyiv to Moscow.