Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
Brent has overseen Yale University Press' exceedingly ambitious project to expose the hidden details of the Stalin period contained in the Soviet archives.
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.
Cheterian argues that nationalism did not destroy the Soviet Union; the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed national grievances and anxieties to flourish.
This book is a pulsing, full-bodied history of people and trends that were only glimpsed in detached pieces at the time.
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.
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.
