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."

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Soviet Union around Ford's reporting and personal notes, interviews with Ford after his retirement, and his wife's unpublished memoir.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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