Robert Legvold

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2010
Robert Legvold

This anthology covers a lot of ground -- from traces of proto-Slavic civilization before recorded history to Vladimir Putin's recent innovations.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2010
Robert Legvold

Heimann offers a no-punches-pulled political history of Czechoslovakia's whole trajectory, from its concoction in 1918, through its interwar democratic years, to its partition and acceptance of fascism, its Nazi occupation, its turn to communism, and, ultimately, its partition once again.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2010
Robert Legvold

This is fascinating history, but of what? Engerman's chronicle of Sovietology in the United States focuses on the ties between the government and the academy -- the tension, as he says, between serving "both Mars and Minerva."

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2010
Robert Legvold

Why do different countries make different choices when it comes to international economic institutions? Darden sees the post-Soviet states as an ideal test case, because they began with similar characteristics and histories but nonetheless chose differently.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2010
Robert Legvold

Ruud builds what is essentially a combined political biography of Ford and study of Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union around Ford's reporting and personal notes, interviews with Ford after his retirement, and his wife's unpublished memoir.

Capsule Review
Mar/Apr
2010
Robert Legvold

As the title suggests, Asmus sees enormous stakes in the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war. Whether they were as high as he thinks or for the reasons he ascribes can be disputed, but there is much merit in his argument.

Capsule Review
Jan/Feb
2010
Robert Legvold

How the blood-soaked states that emerged from the horrors that befell the Balkans in the 1990s should go about reconciling victims, punishing victimizers, and coming to terms with their pasts has become a sad challenge in the post-Cold War world. Alas, Subotic argues, the progress made in moving from an-eye-for-an-eye politics to due process in international and national courts and truth commissions is deceptive.

Capsule Review
Jan/Feb
2010
Robert Legvold

The canvas that Pomper so richly fills with the details of Ulyanov's precocious teenage intellectual interests and his path from a preoccupation with zoology to revolution and, ultimately, to terrorism makes for very engaging reading.

Capsule Review
Jan/Feb
2010
Robert Legvold

At every turn, Bobelian argues, from the post-World War I peace to the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass genocide resolutions in the 1990s, the Armenian cause has fallen victim to broken Western promises and been sacrificed to the priorities of others.

Capsule Review
Jan/Feb
2010
Robert Legvold

No living Russian knows more about Soviet and Russian policy in the Middle East than Primakov, and none has known more key figures from the region better.

Capsule Review
Jan/Feb
2010
Robert Legvold

In the recent profusion of books on Stalin's Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky has seemed almost forgotten, but now along come two new biographies -- one a full-life study, the other a detailed tale of his Mexican exile.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Robert Legvold

Adamishin and Schifter were, respectively, the senior Soviet and U.S. negotiators on human rights during the critical years 1987-90. Together, not only did they play instrumental roles in ending Soviet human rights abuses, but in the process they also developed a deep mutual respect.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Robert Legvold

Clunan does something unusual in this book: she both intervenes in an academic debate over international relations theory and produces fresh insight into the wellsprings of contemporary Russian foreign policy.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Robert Legvold

The impulse behind the recent assertiveness of Russia's foreign policy, Mankoff argues, is nothing new -- only its expression and its context are.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Robert Legvold

No one knows the story that the Soviet archives tell of Stalin's rise better than Khlevniuk. He has toiled over these materials longer and more extensively than anyone else.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Robert Legvold

Drawing on return visits to Barnaul, his boyhood city, near the Chinese and Kazakh borders, Oushakine paints a profound psychological tableau of coping.

Capsule Review
Nov/Dec
2009
Robert Legvold

Never, Cohen stresses, was the Soviet Union the historically predetermined tragedy that so many in the West have come to assume.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Robert Legvold

The near torrent of works attempting to reconstruct and rectify the historical record of the Stalin era continues, and this one is a worthy example.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Robert Legvold

Verhoeven argues that the real forerunner was the psychologically unbalanced, self-imagined revolutionary Dmitry Karakozov, who in 1866 committed the until-then-unthinkable public act of attempting to shoot the tsar.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Robert Legvold

This book is a pulsing, full-bodied history of people and trends that were only glimpsed in detached pieces at the time.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Robert Legvold

Cheterian argues that nationalism did not destroy the Soviet Union; the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed national grievances and anxieties to flourish.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Robert Legvold

Among books deeply critical of contemporary Russia, this may be the hardest of the hard -- partly because it finds so little inspiration in all of Russian history.

Capsule Review
Sep/Oct
2009
Robert Legvold

Brent has overseen Yale University Press' exceedingly ambitious project to expose the hidden details of the Stalin period contained in the Soviet archives.

Essay
JUL/AUG
2009
Robert Legvold

As it redesigns U.S. policy toward Russia, the Obama administration needs to set far more ambitious goals than it has so far -- it needs to start a comprehensive strategic dialogue.

Capsule Review
May/June
2009
Robert Legvold

In this book, Feifer adds remarkable and wrenching texture to the account of how the Soviet war in Afghanistan played a pivotal role both in the Cold War's endgame and in the Soviet Union's last gasps of life.