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From Union To Commonwealth: Nationalism And Separatism In The Soviet Republics

Gail W. Lapidus and Victor Zaslavsky with Philip Goldman
Reviewed by By Robert Legvold
Winter 1992/93
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Gail W. Lapidus and Victor Zaslavsky with Philip Goldman
Cambridge University Press
1992
127 pp.
$9.95

An excellent and experienced set of authors who, beyond the editors, include Ronald Suny, Leokadia Drobizheva and Galina Starovoiteva, tackle the question of what nationalism was in the fading Soviet system and from where it had come. Much of their answer has to do with the perverse effects of the original Soviet solution, which ultimately created the problem it was intended to master, and with the equally unanticipated and contrary consequences of Gorbachev's efforts to improve on the existing system.

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