Natalia Pushkarevna has produced an incredible wealth of material gleaned from resources now available in Russia. You will truly enjoy her perspective of women from the earliest days of the Kievian Russ through the Soviet Union. She dicusses political dynasties, cultural and social norms as well as offering a valuable introduction into each period of history.

Especially interesting are her descriptions of little known women of influence and authority rarely spoken of in traditional histories, beginning with Grand Pricess Olga in the 10th century. She provides a somewhat contrary view of Catherine the Great compared to other Russian histories that tend to whitewash her atrocities with trappings of the Enlightenment. She offers equally thought provoking treatments of women through every era.

You will find this a refreshing and revealing volume. I encourage you to read it.

Well worth reading for those interested either in Russian history and culture or women's studies.

This is a 'must have' for the train enthusiast and history buff alike. The author has outdone herself with outstanding photography of Union Station and was able to create a history of Worcester Mass, to be read again and again, through the use of old photos and spoken word. Highly Recommeded!

I found this book to be extremely fascinating and well written. Its Author, gives a warm and welcomed nostalgic view of what life was like in a small yet florishing Town, back in the early nineteen hundreds and beyond. Throughout its pages it recaptures the splendor and thrill of ones first train ride in Worcester Massachusetts. Cherished memories indeed! Also, through these pages and its beautifully portrayed pictures, it memorializes "The Union Station, The Monument and The Memories." My sincere congratulations to the Author for this wonderful expression of written and pictoral art!!!

A World Apart is reminiscent of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. Where A Day in the Life... is defined by a mood of monotony and despair, A World Apart provides greater detail in the events defining the two year prison existence of Gustaw Herling.

The book is beautifully written and completely unsentimental. There are no lessons in the power of the human spirit. It is the men who do not cling to hope who have a chance of survival. Hope means recognizing the obliqueness of the present situation. This knowledge is what brings despair and death.

This is the most graphic account I have read of the gulags. Gustaw manages to step back from the events taking place and with out sentiment or condemnation report. Herling writes that inhumane conditions will change the behavior of those individuals affected. Some of the prisoners actions can be explained in light of this. Highly recommended.

It's the book, which should be read by evryone who wants to understnd what hell is. It's a book about the hell of Russia, the hell of Communism. The wrost thing is that it was all truth... Everybody who want understand why we are like that should read it...

One of Europians

The journal Isaac Babel kept when he rode with the Cossacks in the 1919-20 war the Soviet Union waged against Poland served as source material for the stories in his brilliant collection, RED CALVARY. The diaries are a gem in themselves, displaying Babel's immediate response to the situation at hand, later to be transmuted by the writer's alchemy into the gold of the stories. It is a little slice of history in the raw, viewed through the eyes of a great writer, a writer who refused to conform to "socialist realism," a writer who 20 years later would be executed by the State Security Apparatus of the USSR.

Two Tiers or Two Speeds? is a useful collection of ten essays edited by James Sperling, professor of political science at the University of Akron, Ohio. Like Building a Bigger Europe by Smith and Timmins (2000), this book also fills a significant gap in the scholarly literature on the dual enlargement processes of the EU and NATO. They agree with Smith and Timmins that both EU and NATO enlargement are necessary to build a viable European security community. While both the EU and NATO have their origins in the cold war, the disappearance of the Soviet threat in the 1990s in no way undermined the cohesion and purpose of these institutions, as John Mearsheimer and other political scientists predicted a decade ago, Sperling notes. He emphasizes that the original purpose of the EU and NATO was to contain Germany and Russia. Even in the late 1990s, according to the author: 1) Russia still had the ability to disrupt the European order both economically and militarily: 2) the absence of ideological enmity between Russia and the United States did not alter the balance of nuclear power substantially, nor did it reduce German power in Central Europe. Therefore, "if nothing else the EU and NATO will retain the residual function of containment into the third millennium" (p. 4).
Like Smith and Timmins, Sperling stresses that the EU is an economic and political entity, whereas NATO is a military machine. He somewhat dourly concludes that "EU enlargement will remain a tortuous process with an uncertain outcome owing to an array of institutional, financial, and political liabilities of the accession states and constraints within the EU (p. x)." In contrast, NATO enlargement has been "a relatively swift and painless process because there have been no compelling reasons not to proceed" (page x). In this way, Sperling takes a more optimistic view than Smith and Timmins of the expansion of NATO and its post-Cold War military achievements.
The book is evenly divided---four essays on NATO and four on the EU. The contributors include: Erik Jones (University of Nottingham), Thomas-Durrell Young (Naval Postgraduate School), Emil J. Kirchner (University of Essex), Gale A. Mattox (U.S. Naval Academy), Daniel Whiteneck (Towson University), Michael Huelshoff (University of New Orleans), Clay Clemens (College of William and Mary), and others.
---Reviewed by Dr. Johanna Granville, Stanford University

This books is an easy read - not dry or scholarly - which provides for the reader a tremendous insight into what the authors call the 'banalities,' or "confused jumble of present-day Russian 'views'," which are epitomized by the persona of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. It helps explain Russia's self-perception as a major player / power in the international arena. The book is concise, and consists of a lot of direct quotes by Zhirinovsky, plus explanatory text by the authors which put Zhirinovsky and these Russian 'banalities' into a historical context. Although it was written in 1994 when Zhirinovsky was a major political player and rival of Yeltsin, and although Zhirinovsky is a diminished but still potent force in Russian politics; the book's real value is in its insight into the subtexts of the Russian character.

Even for those (unlike myself) who are not particularly interested in the character of this Russian 'demagogue,' the raison d'etre of this book is to elucidate: "... the body of such shared traditions and experience, reduced to the lowest common denominator, that is, 'matters of common knowledge' that thinking people may be ashamed to voice or think unnecessary to mention." (p. x from the preface). This is what Zhirinovsky does for Russians. The real value of this book is bringing Russian 'matters of common knowledge' to light for the Western reader. I have never found a book that could accomplish this so poignantly and in such an entertaining fashion. I have lived in Russia associating with Russians in typical Russian fashion for seven years. During more candid moments I have heard many friends echoing certain of Zhirinovsky's sentiments. Although these are people that call Zhirinovsky a 'clown' and do not support him, most admit that he is a master at reflecting the Russian collective consciousness.

It is a 'must-read' for anyone interested in what is really going on (but not expressed) inside the hearts and minds of many average Russians.

This was a wonderful book! Fresh, fast-paced, fascinating and immensely funny. The author was Maggie Thatcher's man in Moscow, he has an intimate knowledge of the Russian people and a great deal of experience in-country. His English humor (humour?) makes this book not just a chronicle of events, but a real gem. Examples...when visiting Kiev, he is invited to visit the musuem of UFO's which includes an exhibit of foot long iron bar munching rats from outer space, Ambasador Braithwaite dryly comments that although he would love to attend, he just can't seem to fit it into his schedule. When Moscow Radio plays excerpts from Pushkin in the throes of the 1991 aborted coup, he comments--who else but the Russians would air poetry at such a time? About half the length of Jack Matlock's epic "Anatomy on an Empire", (his colleague and apparent twin in the minds of the Russian people) Braithwaite's book is more accesible, and given in a lively style. While I do not agree 100% with all of his analysis, I do find this a supberb book and a must have for anyone who wants a Westerner's guide to understanding Russia.

This is a difficult book, but everyone must make the effort to read it. It is based on dozen of archives and several pages (in tiny print) of contemporary Soviet sources. It details a very important question. In recent years the "totalitarian" paradigm has returned, with a vengeance, to the study of Soviet history. And what could be a greater symbol of the "equivalence" of Stalinism and Nazism, than their mass use of ethnic cleansing? German atrocities need no introduction. But one can still be stunned by the brutalities involved in the acquistion of the other fourteen Soviet republics, the savage famine of 1932-33 that ravaged Ukraine and Kazhakstan, the mass deportations from the Baltic countries, and the manifold ethnic cleansing of Germans, Poles, Koreans and Chechyeans, among many others. The vital importance of this book is that whatever one might say about these cruelties, they emerged in a context radically different from that of Nazism, they had a different logic, and in the end radically different consequences.

The Soviet Union was always dominated by the Soviet Communist Party. The nominal independence of the 15 republics was an illusion until just before the end. But the desire to encourage the national consciousness of every group within the Union, that was not an illusion, that was not a lie. Indeed, far from being destroyed by the primordial nationality that it so viciously repressed, the Soviet Union did much to foster nationalities in the first place. Not only did it create the 15 republics, but it created dozens upon dozens of autonomous republics and national soviets all throughout the Soviet Union. For dozens of tribes and languages it created written scripts and then set about translating each others books into each others languages. In every corner of the Soviet Union it sought to increase the representation of the dominant nationality in the local branch of the party. It is often forgotten that in much of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the now dominant nationality was a minority in the cities. Prague was once a German city. Kiev and Minsk were dominated by Jews and Russians. Tiblisi, the capital of Georgia, once had an Armenian majority, while many times during its history Armenia's capital had a Muslim majority. Ensuring the demographic triumph of the dominant nationality was another Soviet policy.

The origins of this eccentric and vigorously pursued policy came from Stalin and Lenin who believed that encouraging national consciousness would limit local opposition to any "Russian" movement. Martin details the development of this policy from 1923 to 1939 where it modified in several important ways. In 1939 the Soviet Union no longer castigated Russian chauvinism as the most pernicious of evils. The other nationalities were expected to have some basic knowledge of Russia and its culture, and no longer would the tiniest of nationalities would be given its own soviet. The active opposition to allowing members of other nationalities to becoming Russian was dropped. However, the affirmative action programs would be continued, and indeed the beneficiaries would be the core of many post-Soviet regimes.

Martin writes important chapters on the especially complicated situation in the Far east, where the Soviet government had to deal with 99 separate nationalities. He discusses the efforts to encourage Ukrainization in Ukraine. Much to their disappointment, and contrary to what one might expect from Ukrainian nationalist historigoraphy, their support for a unilingual Ukrainian culture in the cities met with very limited success. The people there actually preferred a bilingual Russian-Ukrainian culture. Martin also provides a subtle account of the 1932-33 famine. This was not a famine designed against the Ukraine, but against grain "surplus" regions. However, a deadly "national interpretation" of the famine developed in Soviet ideology as the famine progressed. Martin is also useful on the Great purges later in the decades. Contrary to what one might think, nationalities like Ukrainians and Jews were not overrepresented. The one that were consisted of the "diasopora" ones, such as Poles, Germans, Koreans and other bordering countries that might be potential threats.

Finally there is the chapter on ethnic cleansing. Martin reminds us of the ideological and security origins of the cleansing. In certain situations even Russians could find themselves ethnically cleansed (such as former Russian workers on the Manchurian railroads). He reminds us of the broader context of ethnic cleansing, such as the extermination of the Armenians, the mass deportations following the Balkan Wars and the Greek-Turkish war, and the wartime deporation of 800,000 Jews from the Russian Front. He also reminds us of the local ethnic and popular hatreds that would have existed regardless of the Soviet Union's existence, such as in Kazhakstan and the North Caucasus. He also reminds us that the Soviet leadership understandly wanted to encourage ethnic concentration in order to form more viable national units. In the end most nationalities have claimed to be specially victimized by the former Soviet Union. And while this is true for some groups, like the Chechens, it should be remembered that for the Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Georgians, Kazhaks, and many other groups, the Soviet Union was not the prisonhouse of nations. It did not kill countries, only people.

There are a number of reference guides to African-American newspapers and peridocials. From the first known publication, _Freedom's Journal_, published in New York City starting in 1827 to the present, there have been more than 3,500 African-American newspapers and peridocials. Preserving the record of these presses is crucial. Not only did these presses serve as a protest organ, but also documented normal black life, especially as it existed under segregation and Jim Crow laws. In many cases, these papers provide the only extant record of African American life in forgotten and remote towns. Unfortunately, only a small percentage are preserved on microfilm or in other formats. The record of these periodicals is the next most important level of information. _African-American Newspapers and Periodicals_ does an excellent job of documenting these newsapers and magazines. Given the dominance of majority points of view in mainstream publications and the low number of black journalists, the African American press is an essential voice for the black community. If African Americans do not tell their story, no one will. This reference work is the best starting point for learning more about these publications.