Robert Legvold

Smoking may seem a curious route into Bulgarian history, but given the centrality of tobacco to the country’s commerce, examining it allows Neuburger to add depth to many facets of Bulgarian social and political life as the country moved from the tutelage of the Ottoman Empire to autonomy after 1877, through the crosscurrents of World War I and its revolutionary aftermath, and to the genocide of World War II and then the confused heavy hand of communist overlordship.

Tsygankov believes that the Russian sense of honor is the key to understanding the long history of the country’s relations with the West. His exegesis applies well to the Putin era, but for the larger picture, theory’s demand for tidiness forces a certain amount of cutting and splicing of history.

Not many countries have produced an academic-cum-official who could or would write a book like this. Gaidar, a scholar-economist, was the architect of Russian economic reform in the Yeltsin era. He completed this genuine magnum opus in 2005, four years before his death, at age 53. In it, he traces all of economic history back to the late Stone Age and places the long path of Russian economic development in this extraordinary context.

This is a story of heroism nonpareil, a heart-stopping account of the roughly one thousand young Polish Jews who, during the 1940s, organized violent resistance against the German ravaging of the Warsaw ghetto, a walled-off area “roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park” into which the Nazis squeezed nearly all of Warsaw’s 400,000 Jews. The Isaac of the title is Isaac Zuckerman, the young Polish-Lithuanian Zionist who willed into existence the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB).

“Former people” was the official label applied to Russia’s decimated nobility. Smith re-creates what they experienced with an intimacy that brings the whole history of these years vividly and grotesquely alive.

The way capital and coercion intersect constitutes the core of Easter’s explanation for why and how some postcommunist countries emerged with a “contractual” state and others with a “predatory” one. Tracing the complex interplay among politicians, bureaucrats, corporate interests, and labor in the struggle to shape the state’s capacity to finance itself is no simple task, and Easter does it deftly.

By sharing the emotional fervor of her many, often deep personal relationships with eastern Europeans, formed during ten years of travel and research in the region, Shore gets at the agony and guilt felt by some and the sublimation resorted to by others.

This is a rich and fascinating angle on history enhanced by a bounty of beautiful reproductions. Rare is a book this aesthetically pleasing and intellectually original. Seegel should be congratulated for creating it, and the University of Chicago Press, for producing it.

Few have studied the Russian oil and gas industry longer or with a broader political perspective than Gustafson. The result is this superb book, which is not merely a fascinating, subtle history of the industry since the Soviet Union’s collapse but also the single most revealing work on Russian politics and economics published in the last several years.

With good reason, many military historians consider Georgy Zhukov to have been the greatest general of World War II. No other military leader played so central a role in so many battles that determined the war’s outcome, from the defense of Leningrad and Stalingrad to the conquest of Germany. But even more remarkable was Zhukov’s ability to survive in the Soviet system, a tale well told in this compact biography.

Lendvai, a Hungarian-born veteran Austrian journalist, paints a discouraging and alarming picture of Hungary. For those who assume that the country, safely sheltered in the European Union and NATO, is well on the way to democratic stability and western European–style liberalism, this book will come as a bit of a shock.

Having spent years trying to understand the violence in the former Yugoslavia, Petersen insists that those who have no interest in peace skillfully exploit fear, anger over lost status, and the desire for revenge generated by the bloodletting. International peacemakers, operating from conventional rational-choice calculations that rely on material incentives, do not understand the asymmetric disadvantage they are at when the rawness of emotions is used to thwart their efforts.