Russia Books

This memoir of Rudolf Nureyev provides a memoir of the fine dancer who defected to the West from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. A fine biographical sketch reveals his dancing career and life for students in the middle school level on up. END

Review by Dr. Irma E. Eichhorn, retired professor of history, San Jose State University, San Jose, California

The opening event in Ida Bender's autobiographical account is the radio announcement of June 22, 1941, about Hitler's invasion of Russia. Bender was nineteen and had returned for the summer to her parents' home in Engels, after completing her first year at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Leningrad. Soon the war and the consequent decree of the Supreme Soviet on August 28, 1941, announcing the mass deportation of the Volga Germans, changed the lives of Bender's family for ever. The Dark Abyss of Exile is the author's well-told story of surviving her Siberian exile but with a changed attitude toward the Soviet state.

The journey of horrors began on September 2, when Bender's family and other Volga Germans left Engels in crowded freight cars and ended several weeks later in a Russian village in the Krasnoyarsk region. In January 1942, however, her father, older brother, and almost all German men were conscripted into a labor army (Trudarmiia) and doomed to hard work in forced labor camps. Then the same cruel fate befell German women. Bender and her mother went to a fishing camp at Verkhne Imbatsk on the Yenisei River. They were fortunate that they could bring along the younger children, two boys and a girl.

Bender's richly detailed narrative impressively creates the daily struggle for survival in the camp against brutal physical, mental, and psychological obstacles. The women fished with nets until late fall, standing barefooted in the icy water because they had no boots. During the Arctic winter months they fished through the ice or felled trees in deep snow, often without a noon break, and then cold, exhausted, and hungry trudged several kilometers back to camp and their wretched lodgings. These were a crowded room with a resentful Russian family or a room in haphazardly constructed barracks, with one small window, bug-infested walls, tree-stump furniture, and a makeshift stove, all visually real for the reader, even without the author's drawings.

Fish were plentiful but were shipped to the military and were forbidden food for the women. Stealing even one fish was severely punished. The daily ration was 600 grams of dark, heavy bread with meager monthly rations of oats, sugar, and margarine. A full ration depended upon the women fulfilling their assigned work quotas. Hunger and scrounging food, whether berries, birds, and even muskrats, were daily preoccupations in an environment where the women were at the mercy of the supervisor and the local inhabitants who called them "fascists" and "traitors."

Conditions varied in the fishing camps along the Yenisei River. A German, Alexander Mueller, efficiently and humanely supervised the camp at Iskup. He enabled Bender and her family to transfer there in August 1944. They still worked hard but without starving. "Iskup was like an oasis" (p.128).

After the war and then the removal of some restrictions on the Germans (but not the vigilance of the police), Bender and her husband eventually moved to Kazakhstan and later Kamyshin on the Volga. From Kamyshin, her father's birthplace, Bender came to Germany and now lives in Hamburg. An American cousin encouraged her to write about her experiences. She did so because she wanted her children and grandchildren to understand the Germans' fate in the Soviet Union. The present work is the English translation of the German manuscript.

In telling her story with a fresh immediacy, Bender reconstructs conversations, especially with her parents. Frequently she also quotes her father's diary, even inserting a long excerpt (pp.97-109) about his labor camp ordeals in the Kirov region. The theme, though, that infuses meaning to her life experiences is survival. This is the author's justification for daily choices and actions in the camps and for her earlier participation in Communist youth organizations. The Communist ideals of equality without poverty appealed to her, but joining Communist youth groups also helped her chances for a college education. During her year in Leningrad she noted the blatant favoritism bestowed upon Party officials, and she "began to lose respect for the Soviet system" (p.55). Yet she writes, even after arriving at the fishing camp, "I still believed in our government" (p.50). The erosion of her faith in the Soviet state (as distinct from the country) is a repetitive motif throughout her chronological treatment of each year in the camps. "Finally in Siberia, I came to understand that the promise of the Soviet state was nothing but empty words" (p.56).

Understandably she also defends her father, the well-known Volga German author, Dominik Hollmann (1899-1990), a former Dean and faculty member at the Pedagogical Institute in Engels. He joined the Communist Party under pressure, but according to his recent critics, he wrote excessively propagandistic works. Bender insists that her father "praised the Soviet system, for no creative person could hope to get a word published unless he included such praise" (p.175). He used his Party membership, moreover, to plead for the restoration of rights to the Germans in the postwar period.

Until 1987-1988, Germans in the Soviet Union could not mention in print their labor camp experiences. Recent autobiographical writings appearing in Russia as well as Germany present an important literature for study from literary, social, cultural, and historical perspectives. Among these works, Ida Bender deserves praise for a thorough, poignant, and thoughtful portrayal of German women's lives in the Soviet Union during the war and postwar years.

I read this book many years ago in Russian, now that I have grown up I am reading it again. It is wonderfuly written. I do not know about the english version, but the Russian verson was just brilliant. Can't put it down, the royal dances to the horrific changes in Russian history, tied in with the roamance. I love this book. Reccomend it to anyone. Enjoy!

Mandelbaum's "The Dawn of Peace in Europe" is a well-researched and articulate piece detailing the future of NATO and of American involvement in Europe. Though short, it is detailed in its analysis and provides the reader with a clear understanding of his position. In it, Mandelbaum attempts to analyse the role of NATO, and critique the directions that other have prescribed for the alliance. Mandelbaum feels that the best course of activity for the alliance is to stay as it is, and redirect its energies into "reassuring" the perpetuation of the common security order that exists in Europe. He feels that NATO is poorly equipped to pursue out-of-area missions, such as the one in Bosnia, and that expansion of NATO is a mistake because it installs victor's justice on Russia, and this justice will be remembered by the Russian people as an insult. It appears as though this analysis regarding the impact NATO expansion will have on Russia is somewhat of a knee-jerk reactions. Opinion has shown consistently that the Russian people do not care if NATo expands and do not feel that it is necessarily a threat to their security. Furthermore, many analysts including Andrei Kortunov have written their opinions on this issue and have shown that only in the most extreme case would there be a nationalist backlash against NATO expansion. Mandelbaum still views Russia as the enemy of NATO, as it was through the Cold War, and thus his view of the alliance may be somewhat dated. Despite this however, he provides the reader with a clear approach to the future of European security. Mandelbaum articulates the idea of a common security order existing in Europe now that ensures the peace without the high costs of balance of power politics and without the unrealistic tenets of world government. Whether or not a security order continues to exist, according to Mandelbaum will depend on whether or not Russia will stay peaceful and if the United States will stay in European defence mechanisms. If things reamain as is, Europe will be the bastion of peace in an all too unpeaceful world. I recommend this book for all analysts interested in European security.

I was writing a report on Tunguska for my ninth grade semester science project, and was low on information. After visiting Gallant's web site, I found he had wrote this book and ordered it. The amount of information in it was incredible! There are accounts that have never been published before, diagrams and photos, a full description of the expeditions to the area; all this added to the report, strengthening every section. I would recommend this to anyone interested in astronomy.

Catherine the Great did much in her life to make Russia into a modern power. Educated, one of Russia's most competent rulers, and successful, she has had the bad luck to become a heroine of romantic fiction who is remember more for her sex life than for what she actually did and did not do. This book by Isabel de Madariaga shows us why Catherine was call "the great" and it wasn't because her life and loves. This was the great era of Russian expansion, cultural development (Catherine's offspring would get the benefit of the seeds she planted in the 18th century) and greater westernization. In all areas except one, the persistent problem of serfdom, which dominates the Imperial period of Russian history, Catherine advanced. I doubt very much if this will alter the image of Catherine that has been crafted in 1,000s of works of popular fiction, but readers wanting to know the whole story should take a look at this book.

This new translation of N Gogol's "Dead Souls", and a book of his short stories, are a major step forward in getting to the heart of Gogol's own writing of that great book. No other translation has been able bring out the humuor which so pervades the whole, in the original; it really is a laughing matter at last. It is also well worth reading the excellent Introduction to this Everyman edition.

I read this book 4 years ago, I finished it passed midnight, and the words touched my heart so deeply that to date I have read it over and over, and any time I read it I cant help myself to cry.

This is the best of a number of books that I have read that discuss the entire region - the writing style is accessible and the amount of information contained is quite comprehensive. Ten of my Hungarian, Slovak and Croatian friends who have borrowed my copy have pronounced it the best book on the region they had read in any language.

Meny and Della Porta have assembled an outstanding collection of political scientists who analyze corruption in European countries that they heidenheknow intimately. They are especially good on e corruption wave that has become publicized in Italy, Spain and other countries of southern Europe. Articles on north European countireds are also valuable