The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State

Alexandre Bennigsen is probably the West's foremost expert on the Muslims of the U.S.S.R. He and his co-author have distilled years of study into a short book packed with factual material placed in historical perspective. The salient fact is the indestructibility of Islamic culture and its resistance both to traditional Russian imperialism and to Soviet ideology. They show how Soviet power, now dominant, is being weakened by trends within the U.S.S.R. and beyond its borders in the Middle East (especially Afghanistan and Iran since 1978), and find an ultimate violent crisis inescapable.