From Library Journal
The director of Russian studies at Princeton and a published scholar in the field of Soviet studies, Kotkin has written a lively and provocative work on a subject that has already attracted much scholarly attention. His central question is, however, his own: why didn't Soviet elites defend their Union, using their vast military arsenal to bring about a cataclysmic super-Yugoslavia in the dying USSR? How could such a massive police state have died so quietly? He points in response to those same elites who, for over 30 years, constituted themselves as vast "loot chains," preferring to plunder their country of its wealth than risk losing everything in large-scale war. Through the medium of the Union republics, local elites led the charge for their own aggrandizement, thus "cashier[ing] the Union." As he delivers telling jabs, Kotkin spares no one neither Soviet politician-gangsters nor arrogant U.S. administrators and academics. This is a much more readable and lively monograph on the Soviet collapse than others, such as Michael McFaul's Russia's Unfinished Revolution (Cornell Univ., 2001), which has a more purely academic appeal. Kotkin's book should attract both the academic and the informed general reader. Robert Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont. The director of Russian studies at Princeton and a published scholar in the field of Soviet studies, Kotkin has written a lively and provocative work on a subject that has already attracted much scholarly attention. His central question is, however, his own: why didn't Soviet elites defend their Union, using their vast military arsenal to bring about a cataclysmic super-Yugoslavia in the dying U.S.S.R.? How could such a massive police state have died so quietly? He points in response to those same elites who, for over 30 years, constituted themselves as vast "loot chains," preferring to plunder their country of its wealth than risk losing everything in large-scale war. Through the medium of the Union republics, local elites led the charge for their own aggrandizement, thus "cashier[ing] the Union." As he delivers telling jabs, Kotkin spares no one neither Soviet politician-gangsters nor arrogant U.S. administrators and academics. This is a much more readable and lively monograph on the Soviet collapse than others, such as Michael McFaul's Russia's Unfinished Revolution (Cornell Univ., 2001), which has a more purely academic appeal. Kotkin's book should attract both the academic and the informed general reader. Robert Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
In 1995, Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton, published "Magnetic Mountain," a groundbreaking study of Stalinist socialism as it developed in the gargantuan steel town of Magnitogorsk, in central Russia. In his portrayal of that perverse utopia, the author displayed the skills of a dogged reporter and a meticulous archivist. The same strengths are evident in this brief, lucid study, which draws upon dozens of obscure Kremlin memoirs, provincial records, and interviews with top-level officials and oligarchs to provide us with the clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape. Kotkin effectively describes how what was called "reform" was actually a continuing freefall collapse; he also expertly depicts the lingering networks and habits of the Soviet era, and how they have formed a post-imperial world in all its corrupt splendor.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
