This is a pathbreaking new study on the Sino-Soviet relationship, based on new evidence from the former East-bloc archives and written by a team of younger scholars affiliated with the Cold War International History Project. It should serve as a model for future scholarship on the history of the Cold War.

This book was endorsed by the late Admiral Elmo "Bud" Zumwalt, USN Chief of Naval Operations (1970-1974). He considered it "essential reading for professional naval officers." It covers the entire psot-war era, and documents how the rivalry between surface warriors, aviators and submariners have undermined the biggest navy in the world. It features a very extensive bibliography, and has been endorsed by Charles Moskos, Rear Admial James Forrest, USN (Ret) and many others. This book was originally published by the US Naval College in 1995.

In Building a Bigger Europe: EU and NATO Enlargement in Comparative Perspective, Martin A. Smith and Graham Timmins adopt a refreshingly neutral (not pro-American) tone. Both authors teach at British institutions--Smith at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, and Timmins at the University of Huddersfield. They explain that the book developed from the realization that a gap exists in the comparative literature on the EU and NATO enlargement processes, which is surprising, given the number of countries that belong to both organizations. No single state, except perhaps Germany, has tried to forge policy or to try to link the EU and NATO policies, they explain (p. 21). Although both the EU and NATO are under the rubric of European Studies, few scholars have an equal depth of knowledge about both the EU and NATO" (pg. viii).
The authors stress the need for a broader definition of security than the one that prevailed during the Cold War bipolar military division of Europe. Military security alone will not suffice. Citing Barry Buzan's five-dimensional definition (military, political, economic, societal, and environmental), they stress that more diffuse security challenges will emerge in the twenty-first century, within which economic issues will play a more vital role (p. 14). In 1989 the Cold War security order was suddenly transformed. It altered the structure of the European state system, intensified the relationship between military and economic security and possibly inverted their relative importance, they explain. Overcoming the continuing division of Europe and assuring the future stability of the European security order are contingent, they claim, upon the successful transition of the central and eastern European states to the market economy and multi-party democracy (p. 11).
Some aspects of the formal democratization process can be externally supported and directed, such as the constitution, party-system, elections, and marketization. However, establishing a civil society as a whole is a different story. The authors claim that the creation of a "public participatory and supportive political culture depends upon the political legitimacy that Central and Eastern European electorates afford to the post-communist regimes." (p. 5). Smith and Timmins aver that the EU can foster political legitimacy and economic stability-i.e. "comprehensive security"---better than NATO can. They believe that a security community in Western Europe was developed within the common military structure of NATO, but "is politically and societally distinct from it" (p. 16). It is much easier to earn membership in NATO than in the EU, since the former insists only upon civilian control of the military. According to the authors, NATO does not actually restrict its membership to countries with democratic regimes; member countries such as Portugal and Turkey both had dictatorial regimes, for example.
From the EU's perspective, the end of the Cold War represented a great opportunity to continue the process of trading and building pan-European unity as envisaged by its founding fathers in the 1940s and 1950s (p. 1). NATO, on the other hand, was established in 1949 out of European division. Western states viewed it as a necessary means of resisting the Soviet military threat. Unlike the EU, NATO was compelled to justify its continued existence after the collapse of the USSR amidst expectations of a "New World Order" and the anticipated peace dividend it would yield (p. 1).
Efforts after the Cold War to broaden NATO's functions beyond the military arena have met with no significant success, according to the authors. They write:
Since the deployment of NATO-led international forces to police and supervise the implementation of the Dayton peace accords in Bosnia at the beginning of 1996, and the deployment of a similar force to Kosovo in June 1999, it has become clear that NATO's future utility lies mainly in a revised, but still essentially military, role of deploying and commanding peace enforcement operations in conjunction with the UN in Europe, and perhaps elsewhere (p. 16).

Hence, as a fundamentally military-based institution, NATO cannot address the full range of security needs, either of its existing members or of prospective new ones, the authors claim. NATO thus falls shy as the sole institutional foundation of a European security community (p. 15).
Smith and Timmins adopt the controversial view that both NATO and the EU need to expand to the east if a wider European security community can be developed (p. 14). That is, a pan-European security order will be based on both NATO's "hard security" or military role, and the EU's "soft security" or economic and diplomatic roles (pp. 11, 14). Neither of these two institutions, however, can provide the other two types of security Buzan listed, societal or environmental security.
The authors ominously warn of a so-called "expectations gap" among the electorates of the CEE states. Just as in 1989 the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe collapsed because the command economic system imploded and the political elites failed to satisfy the material aspirations of the masses, so also in the early 21st century, the masses could become disillusioned if their countries are not admitted into the EU and/or NATO soon enough, or if membership in either of these institutions does not benefit the given country as much as previously imagined. According to Smith and Timmins, "The danger is that an expectations gap will develop that cannot be satisfied by pro-western post-communist political elites and that disenchantment will foster the creation of less amenable and undemocratic political systems (pp. 5-6)." ---Johanna Granville, Ph.D.

This book was written about the Hannibal-St. Joseph/ CB&Q Rail Road. Most of the happenings happened between Hannibal, MO, and Brookfield, MO and Brookfield and St. Joseph, MO. The book relates to how badly labor was oppressed by the Robber Barron Rail Roads until such time as they were able to organize their labor movement.

While few fictional books stand the weather of time (in this case, the Cold War, its thawing before then warming into something entirely new), Vasily Aksyonov's "The Burn" has manaaged to, and I expect will always, endure. The author, whose mother was the famous and very courageous Elena Ginsburg who wrote of her prison experiences ("Journey into the Whirlwind"), was trained as a medical doctor and had merged into literary circles, encountering virtually everyone from Steinbeck to the Metropol before being personally exiled by Brehznev. In short, he is a Giant, a prospective for the Nobel. This book long considered his magnus opus, chronicles a group of friends, their experiences in the former Soviet Union and combines jazz, science, politics and very large questions. Astonishingly, it has most often been compared to Pynchon's "V" and, as such, the author writes in a very western and post-modern manner; if Gogol had endured the Cold War and completed his "Dead Souls" series this might be something of what it would appear. This book soared as a bombshell upon its release (its own screaming across the sky heard far), and should be immediately acquired by anyone interested in Russian literature.

This book is comprised of 12 brief, well-written essays by distinguished researchers, put together by the SUNY Stony Brook professor Nicolas Rzhevsky. The volume is divided into two parts: Cultural Identity and Literature and the Arts. If the first part of the book deals with Russian roots, the second is devoted to the flowers of this civilization.

On the crossroads of these narratives we see a vast land, stretching from East to West emerging from the union of Slavs and Vikings somewhere around the middle of the eighth century as a number of relatively small cities and tribes. Locked in the never-ending war with nomads prince Vladimir tries to unite them around Kiev. In his first attempt he tried to use paganism. He builds up a gallery of local pagan gods, trying to achieve some kind of union and establish certain hierarchy on the symbolic level. Seeing the futility of these attempts, however, he drops pagan faith altogether and adopts Byzantine ('Orthodox') Christianity, which is not dependent on local gods.

As we learn from the essay on Religion by the leading Russian Academician Dmitry Lihachev, having a choice among Islam and other versions of Christianity Vladimir chooses Christianity for the beauty of Byzantine rites and rituals. It is by the beauty of religious acts that God was introduced to the Russian land and the remaining ancient churches testify that because of the beauty God stayed. Church became the place where artists could realize themselves as architects and painters. Christianity also brings a new alphabet. It to this epoch that the first known texts date back.

The ensuing unity enables Kiev to achieve a number of important victories in the wars with nomads. However, Kievan Russia was not strong enough to withstand the Mongol invasion from 1237 to 1240, when Kiev was burned. It became a part of the Golden Horde on a par with Greeks, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, Mordvinians and other peoples. In fact, churches were among the few institutions that withstood the invasion and secured the identity of the Russian land, because pagan Mongols respected all kinds of gods 'just in case'.

It is by the boundaries with the West and the East (which included all the Southern people, pagans and Christians alike). While West equated civilization, East was considered a territory for conquest and expansion. It is tempting to see eastward Russian expansion as a mirror of the westward colonization of the North American continent. Indeed in California and Alaska American and Russian settlers meet. It is also important to note that some of the colonizers were fuelled by religious passions over the conflict of starovery (old-believers) with the official reform of the Church by Peter the Emperor. Starovery did not accept the reform of religious rites and were prosecuted heavily by the state and church alike. They found their freedom on the frontier of Russian colonization. By the conquest of 'East' Russia eventually established itself as a Western power, and in the East it was the cultural baggage of the West. The unavoidable mix of East and West inside Russia explains well enough the repercussions of identity crisis that Russia slips into from time to time. These boundaries thus limit both the territories of the Russian state and, to a large extent mark the field of intellectual debate.

It is not these grand narratives, however, that make this book so exciting, but the amount of details and 'small stories' packed into the 372 pages of this volume. It is impossible to do them justice in the newspaper article. We still need books for that.

There is a wonderful essay on Russian popular culture by Catriona Kelly of Oxford University. In the Soviet-era textbooks, the lower classes were roughly defined by their dvoeverie ("double-faith"), the prominent retention of pagan beliefs alongside their commitment to Christian faith. Instead of dvoeverie, argues Kelly, we should use the term mnogoverie because pagan beliefs do not form a coherent system and thus, combined with Christianity, they produce plural belief systems. Going to the roots of the local obychai (customs), she uncovers an underworld of traditions, habits and superstitions that somehow influence the attitudes of Russian people up to this day. They may be charming and unique like domovoj (house spirit) or leshij (forest spirit), or frightening and commonplace like the fear of the 'Other' and criminal counter-culture. Some of the genres and themes of the oral culture prospered during the Soviet era like chastushka - a four-line ditty of humorous or scabrous nature, but its triumph was short-lived compared to anecdote that conquered the Internet. Actually anecdote is the strongest genre of the Russian oral culture that helped to communicate the most important means of resistance against the enormous power of the Soviet state: laugh. The anecdotes are not limited to political topics, though - they actually deal with every field of human existence.

The part of the book devoted to art is as thorough, interesting and profound as the part dealing with the roots of Russian cultural identity. For example, in Russian society the written word was carefully scrutinized by the church and state, Bethea asserts that the writer in general and the poet in particular became secular saints and, very often, a martyr or suffering "holy fool". Other essays of the second part of "Modern Russian Culture" deal with Russian art, music, theater, and film.

If culture and arts provide the antidote to the shallow political language, then "Modern Russian Culture" is certainly one of the best means to overcome stereotypes and misconceptions constructed by the modern political spectacle.

it's great! never use another reference book!

This book fills a void to those of us who have been interested in modern Soviet/Russian military gear. Until this book was published most of the details of the history, development and pictorial record of Soviet/Russion camouflage uniforms was clouded in secrecy. The first half of the book covers the chronology of the development and use of camouflage within the Red Army in general and especially within special forces units(airborne and spetsnaz). The second half of the book is the "good stuff"...for the next 70 or so pages are photos and detailed descriptions of every camouflage pattern used by the Russian/Soviet armed forces. The descriptions begin with pre-WWII "amoeba" pattern and finish up with the plethora of patterns worn by present day Russian armed forces. It is THE definitive text on this subject. The book is also printed on heavy gloss paper and robustly bound(I know, I'm picky). I highly recommend it.

Arthur Seldon, when Editorial Director for the free market Institute of Economic Affairs, forecast long before the event that Russia (the Soviet Union as then was) would go capitalist before the end of the century. As often is the case with one of Britain's unsung intellectuals, his prediction came true albeit a few years earlier than even he expected.

In this short but excellent text, Philip Vander Elst begins from the starting point of Ludwig von Mises position in the socialist calculation debate of the 1930s. He demonstrates that the opponents of Mises and also Hayek did not prove their case and explains why their position, mistakenly accepted as the winning arguement, was false.

From there Vander Elst moves to examine the planning processes of the Soviet Union and shows how the planning of such a gargantuan empire is technically impossible given the number of products involved, the number of producers involved and without even taking into account the changes that invariably take place.

This precedes a consideration of the historical record of the USSR and an exposition of how technological transfer between the industrialised west and the USSR has taken place over the years and of how that transfer was diverted by the USSR authorities to be used to try to keep up with western economic progress.

The author concludes that even with the transfer of technolgy to the Soviet Union and the updating of workers skills is insufficient to maintain the technological and economic standards of the Soviet Union, He argues that the planning process is fatally flawed in that it contains an inherent contradiction. Technology transfer can only work if it is set in an environment which allows it to adapt quickly to change ie in a free market or capitalist environment. Ultimately he sees the collapse of the system and the emergence of some form of capitalism.

This is a well written, easily read, closely argued book which was originally published in 1981. A very prescient Research Monograph indeed.