Russia Books

This volume is a compilation of papers that highlight the transformation of Western leftist parties from romantic revolutionaries to pragmatic realists. This meant that these parties shifted on the political spectrum from the left to the left-center.
The chapters are thorough, descriptive and insightful and even though the different authors offer different writing styles, some studies in this book are attractive and entertaining while other chapters are dull and boring.
Readers will particularly enjoy the story of leftist failure in the US, where post World War II prosperity hindered the evolution of the concept of society. This individualism was emulated in England under Conservative premier Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. Magi became famous for her statement: "There is no society, only individuals," in reference to her rightist party's stance against the social welfare state.
The rightist leadership of England extended for most of the 1980s and 90s until the Conservative Party's several mistakes, coupled with the leftist Labor Party's "reconsideration" of itself leading to its transformation into the New Labor, brought Labor to power. When in power, the leftist English party moved away from leftism and the welfare state toward what it depicted as a "Third Way" style of governorship, which included more liberal economic policies.
But such a shift was not easy in France, where despite the Socialist Party's implementation of rightist economic policies starting the mid 1980s, the socialists could not express out loud their adoption of more center-leftist policies for the fear that their strong communist allies might abandon them.
Meanwhile, in Germany the social democrats endorsed "Third Way" policies and came to power.
In Poland, the disbanded Communist Party transformed itself into a Social Democratic Party and won over the Solidarity Movement, known for its freedom fighting under the communists before 1989. The reason for this leftist victory, the book argues, was the virtual inexistence of the middle-class which traditionally supports rightist parties and their market economy theses.
In Russia, the underdeveloped political culture has been unable to sustain majoritarian politics. Therefore, social democracy failed facing a dominant popular political culture based on a clientele network and favoritism penetrating the state bureaucracy.
The volume ends with a concise conclusion by the book's editor Erwin Hargrove. The book is both entertaining and enlightening for all those interested in political studies and political philosophy.

ALEXANDER PUMPIANSKI, Editor in Chief, THE NEW TIMES, MOSCOW: Literature is always humanitarianism, brotherhood, an all-human odyssey, a reincarnation in other people's lives. In this case the author tries to reconstruct what a private life could have been, had it taken a slightly different course. The instructive device of split personality is, in fact, used to present a united personality, torn in two by the century of the greates schism; they are put into extremely different social positions, and pushed through numerous battles and dramas, apart or together. The Russian American is an idealist, dreamer, fighter - an eternally restless heart.

YEVGENIA NIKOLAEVNA MAYOROVA, Herzen Pedagogical Institute, ST. PETERSBURG

Your book makes one think of a huge documentary photograph taken with a long exposure for many years, almost two human lifetimes. It is not a family chronicle or a history of a single part of a family's life; it is simply a story, a story that appears through two human souls, a story that is reflected in letters, where letters are mixed with tears, words with pain, facts with tragedy, where people are not considered as representatives of two different political systems, where the search for similarities is more important than the search for differences, because the main characters of this story are brothers.

SVETLANA ROZOVSKY, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Hartford:

Thank you very much for the wonderful book. I enjoyed it a lot! The genre of the book is perfect and very up-to-date. Every line sounds so realistic to me. It is impossible to express myself and all my feelings the book aroused in me. I would be very happy to invite you to speak to my Russian Studies class.......

BRIAN JOHNSON, Asst. Prof. Doctoral Candidate Russian Studies, Boston College:

I finally had a chance to read your manuscript The Genes of Gregoria. This is not meant to flatter you, but the work is brilliant. It covers so much ground, yet it claims it's humanity and stimulates the intellect at the same time. When I picked it up I figured that I would read two letters and finish the book over the next couple of days, however, I was hooked after the first twenty pages. The book would be of immense value as a teaching aid in a variety of uses on the college level.

The Atlantic February, 1991

We think of them as relatively new situations: Russia shaken from autocratic isolation by new forms of communications; the spread of concern for human rights and constitutional rule from West to East; America's efforts to maintain good relations with autocratic rulers while helping democratic protesters. Yet these are precisely the issues that defined the career of the first American Russia expert, George Kennan, a century ago. M ore than any other single American, this first cousin twice removed of our own era's George F. Kennan "discovered" and described Russia for America during the more than half a century between the American and Russian civil wars.

Kennan was a child of the new communications revolution, first visiting Siberia as part of an ill-fated telegraphic expedition, then making Russia the subject of one of the great lecturing careers of the late nineteenth century and one of the great journalistic careers of the early twentieth. Having discovered Siberia as an adventuresome frontiersman trying to forge a European-American cable connection the long way, across the Bering Strait, Kennan returned to expose the czarist prisons of Siberia and to become perhaps the leading champion in the Western world of democratic revolutionary resistance to the czarist authorities. As such, he struggled against a well-established official American policy of friendship for that particular autocracy. He mobilized American popular opinion in behalf of Russia's suppressed political opposition, and eventually helped change U.S. government policy as well.

IT IS A GREAT strength of this extensively researched new biography by Frederick Travis that we discover how little Kennan really studied Russia, how many mistakes (including deliberate ones) he introduced into his journalism, and yet how little challenged his authority remained within the United States. This was an age when America was absorbed in its own interests and inclined to read foreign countries, if at all, in terms of its own institutions and aspirations. Until the early twentieth century the study of Russia was almost totally absent from universities, and serious literature on Russia almost totally absent from libraries. Dilettantism could triumph if accompanied by the kind of arrogant tenacity and rhetorical panache that Kennan possessed. He presented a picture of Russia that was more a projection of characteristic American hopes, fears, and fantasies in an era of exuberant self-confidence than the product of had-earned knowledge.

His authority was, however, based on firsthand observations, though they were largely focused on the exotic. Kennan first arrived in Russia in 1865, and only after spending two winters in hitherto largely unknown parts of Siberia (later described in his first major book, Tent Life in Siberia) did Kennan visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. On his second trip he passed rapidly through Petersburg in order to reach the Caucasus, describing himself as "a vagabond ... who travels without any definite utilitarian aim ... the vagabond is never a spcialist ... he is ready to become all things with all men and to make himself equally at home in all places." His early travels in Russia were thus a kind of romantic Wanderjahre for a young midwestern Calvinist who was losing both his boyhood religious faith and his adolescent enthusiasm for scientific and technical expeditions. But he developed what grew into a lifelong fascination with the Russian people. There was, initially, no political or social content to his interest, although he generally shared the vague Russophilia in some circles that followed Russian support for the Union in the Civil War and the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Kennan defended Russian policy even when it proved expansionist, first in the Balkans and then in Central Asia, and he also tried to propagate the glories of Russian literature.

His ten-month-long trip to Siberia in 1885 and 1886 turned him from a defender of official Russia into a self-appointed spokesman for the political exiles and prisoners that he discovered there. Romantic infatuation was part of it all, as Kennan himself acknowledged: "With many of them I simply fall dead in love as if I were a girl of eighteen." But he was also moved by the moral purity of the exiles--their continued intellectual earnestness under difficult conditions and their combination of inner dignity and outward affection for this mysterious visitor from distant America. Kennan was particularly impressed by Catherine Breshkovsky, the populist "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution." She bade him farewell in the small Transbaikal village to which she was confined by saying, "We may die in exile, and our grand children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." One of the Russians explained that until they had met Kennan, "we had been talking either to acknowledged friends or to prejudiced enemies, but never to an impartial observer, who would take on himself to bring the case before the tribunal of universal conscience." Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to pressing their cause, mainly from the lecture platform.

He lectured before about a million people in the course of the 1890s, inspiring in one of them a "curious craving to see this gaunt land of Siberia and let my own eyes gaze on the starved wretches sent to a living death." Victorians loved to feel both superior to and shocked by distant outrages like those Kennan recounted. A taunt thrown at Victorian liberals--they "cross equinoxial lines in search of objects of charity"--brings to mind the "radical chic" of more recent times: North Americans incensed by events in Southeast Asia, South America, or South Africa.

Travis astutely observes that Kennan "saw in the political exiles the same heroic spirit that had attracted him to Caucasian mountaineers, wandering Koriaks in northeastern Siberia, and reforming drunkards on New York's Water Street." It was something like the spirit that another great journalist, John Reed, later sought first in the Wobblies, then in Mexican revolutionaries, and finally in the Bolsheviks about whom he fantasized so appealingly in Ten Days That Shook the World.

BUT KENNAN'S infatuation with Russia was informed by a sterner moral purpose, which Travis describes as a sense that Kennan was always on the side of civilization against barbarism. His long campaign in behalf of political prisoners was expanded to include persecuted minorities in the Russian empire--particularly the Jews--and the Japanese, who warred with the Russians in 1904-1905. He helped in a fascinating, little-known campaign to educate and politically mobilize Russian prisoners of war in Japan. And he attached great hopes to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and even greater to the democratic revolution of February, 1917.

Kennan was a perceptive analyst of the practical need for democratic and constitutional reform. He was particularly distressed by the czarist repression of student activity after the upheavals of 1905. "A university is a barometer which shows the state of the public mind," Kennan quoted a Russian surgeon as saying. "A wise man does not break the instrument, but learns from it what the weather is likely to be." He accused the czars of breaking the barometers rather than read them. He saw that all russian involvement in modern wars concluded with a period of reform or revolution--in effect, "a recompense for their sacrifices and losses."

All the more bitter, then, was the Bolshevik betrayal of a revolution that Kennan had encouraged in its democratic phase. Unlike John Reed, Kennan vehemently rejected the October Revolution, both because of the Bolsheviks' renunciation of the Allied cause in the war and because the Soviet government lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." Kennan criticized Woodrow Wilson for being much too timid in intervening against Bolshevik power, and persisted longer than most Americans in the belief that the Siberians would hold out against the Bolsheviks, because they were a "bolder and more independent people than the Muzhiks of European Russia." Travis tends to be rather condemnatory both of Kennan's extreme opposition to the Bolshevik takeover and of his insistence on the moral obligation to defend the provisional government. Kennan's last epitaph on the Bolshevik Revolution was written in a small-town newspaper, the Medina Tribune, in July of 1923:

The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.

He died not long after Lenin did, having just finished an article on Japanese education--finding more hope for the future in Japan than in Russia.

ONE IS RELIEVED that Travis's biography does not include the kind of psychological probing or moralistic preaching that has too often been directed at Victorian figures, though his tendency to make this account an exhaustive inventory of Kennan's acquaintances and views results in a certain blandness. Kennan's larger-than-life and even heroic qualities--his physical endurance on Siberian trips and on lecture tours, the majesty of his moralism--never quite come across. But Travis perceptively identifies Kennan's flaws. There was more than a little blindness in the man. He was sympathetic chiefly to political prisoners, who represented a minute fraction of those in Russia's vast penal and exile system. As far as we know, he never visited any prison outside Russia for comparative purposes. He confused political exiles in East Siberia with administrative exiles in West Siberia, and at times he misled his audiences in other ways to dramatize his cause. Kennan never probed deeply into the views of Russians working within the system, whom he could have helped and learned from. Nikolai Yadrintsev, for instance, one of the most interesting and sophisticated publicists in behalf of a semi-independent Siberia, urged a different, more open style of development there. Kennan met him early but seems never to have talked seriously with him or with a number of others who saw then--as many do today--that Siberia itself might ultimately become an example of the kind of liberal democratic development that its prisoners advocated.

The fact remains, however, that Kennan created American public interest in the internal conditions of a remote country, and the story of how he did so supplies an impressive first chapter for a history, yet to be written, on the effects of American journalism on foreign policy. Kennan catalyzed a range of things that eventually helped to change policy: the first English-language opposition journal, Free Russia; the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (involving such luminaries as Julia Ward Howe and Mark Twain); and a public campaign against a Senate-approved treaty that would have exposed Jewish emigres to America to possible arrest if they re-entered Russia. State Department officials in the late nineteenth century were as annoyed by Kennan's attempts to affect intergovernmental relations as their successors were many years later by the outcries over immigration and human rights which led to the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974. It is easy to forget now, in the wake of the victory of the human-rights agenda in Eastern Europe, how doggedly most of the American foreign-policy establishment resisted the intrusion of such concerns into its realpolitik agenda of security, political, and economic questions. It was Western Europeans, rather than Americans, who took the lead in assuring that human rights were included in "basket three," which became part of the international obligations of all signatories of the Helsinki Final Act. Leaders in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe today express more admiration for moralistic journalists than for realistic diplomats. They are likely, too, to feel greater sympathy for Kennan's buccaneering spirit and his fierce denunciation of autocracy and Bolshevism than for the more cautious and moderate positions taken both by his opponents then and by his biographer now.

This is a collection of hundreds of rare photgraphs of German fighters in Russia during World War II all with very interesting captions. The reader gets the impression that he walks among the great aces with triple digit scores of victories and in the primitive airfields set in the Russian steppe. The youthfull faces of countless German pilots with the Knight's Cross around their neck fill this book, as well photos of the famous Bf-109s and Fw-190s, some of them showing the interesting artwork on their rudders depicting very impressive victory scores. The book is highly recommended to anyone interested in the Luftwaffe aces!! One wonders how the Red Air Force survived after the merciless slaughter it suffered at the hands of those terrific aces.

Review by Ingeborg W. Smith, Western Springs, Illinois

I have a whole bookcase full of cookbooks, some of them in German, but no cookbook quite like this one. It is not just a compendium of recipes, but it is historical, emphasizing the food traditions of the Germans who were invited to Russia by Catherine the Great. Many of these people re-emigrated from Russia to the Great Plains of the New World but kept their old folkways.

Some people use cookbooks as bedtime reading and this one lends itself to this use, perhaps because it has fewer recipes than the standard book of this kind, and contains more background information. It is probably one of very few such volumes that contains a bibliography. There are also a glossary and a list of "Sources and Resources."

"German Food & Folkways" is the result of four years of research and data-gathering and one year of writing by Rose Marie H. Gueldner, an educator, historian, writer and businesswoman, and a descendant of Germans from Russia. It is not your standard cookbook, but a history of the Germans from Russia, where they came from, how they got to Russia, and how the German food traditions were changed by conditions in Russia, especially the climate and the short growing season, which produced an emphasis on root vegetables and cabbage.

We learn that Frederick II was instrumental in adding the potato to the German diet during the food shortages in the 1700's, that peanut butter was introduced as a health food at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, plus a host of other interesting facts.

As a descendant of both North and South Germans, I expected to find a few more familiar dishes. My mother made her egg noodles from scratch and I was familiar with brains, heart and tongue, all found in this book, but strudel as a main dish stuffed with cabbage and cooked on top of meat and potatoes did not remind me of Apfelstrudel I grew up with. Happily, desserts, bread and Kuchen will each be the subject of other books by Ms. Gueldner.

The beginning of each chapter repeats the cover design, a collection of items used in the kitchen, a butter churn, a pail, a meat grinder, rolling pin, foaming beer stein, eggs, beets, etc. Drawings of individual foods grace various pages. Several maps are included. There is even a chapter on mealtime prayers. Ms. Gueldner promotes good organic ingredients and healthful eating.

Each chapter starts with a general discussion and then proceeds to the recipes, which may include further discussion. Ms. Gueldner's recipe for Farmyard Roast Goose reminded me of the Christmas goose I roasted four years ago. This goose, the smallest one I could order at my local market, weighed 10 pounds, and cost $40.00, and served three, with no leftovers at all. Geese had more meat on them when I was young. Ms. Gueldner's recipe uses an 8 to 12 lb. goose and expects it to produce 4 to 18 servings. She suggests serving this fowl with potato dumplings, applesauce or red cabbage, for which no recipes are forthcoming.

The section on beverages includes a page on water and the former necessary chore of hauling it to the fields as well as pumping it for the house. In Jimmy Carter's memoir of his boyhood, "An Hour Before Daylight", he comments that the easiest way to bring water to the fields was in the form of watermelon. That's the spirit, Jimmy!

I enjoyed reading this book and got a few tips on how to improve my own cooking. I also learned a little German dialect--that anyone would call a potato (Kartoffel) Grumbeere or Grumbara, some sort of berry is certainly new to me.

While I find that the quotation on the back cover attributed to Brother Placid Gross, OSB, Folklorist: "This book is the crowning achievement of all cookbooks", to be an exaggeration, I believe that more to the point is Dr. Timothy F. Kloberdanz's conclusion: "Although there are German-Russian cookbooks currently on the market, this one is quite unusual because of the way it interweaves background history, ethnic heritage, and so many mouth-watering Old Country recipes." I concur.

A treasure-trove for serious study of crimes by either Hitler (obviously) or Stalin (for perspective). A carefully-documented scholarly work, it is also readable for the general public. Dallin relied mainly on German sources, because Soviet records were closed to most Westerners at that time.

As "perestroika" revealed new details about Stalin's crimes, the question arose -- was Stalin as bad as Hitler, or perhaps even worse? Mr. Dallin shows why the (dis)honor belongs to Hitler.

Among numerous Nazi crimes: the death by deliberate mistreatment and neglect of 3-4 million Soviet PoWs; the appointment of the vile Erich Koch as military governor of Ukraine; the massacre of Soviet Jews; the closing of all schools above the fourth grade (and even primary schools were closed in Koch's Ukraine); deportation of 2.7 million slave laborers to Germany; chronic malnutrition as all accessible food was shipped to Germany; institutionalized brutality, eg floggings. Other bad policies perhaps did not quite amount to crimes: the shut-down of Soviet industry, apart from railroads and a handful of mines directly needed by the German war-effort; the continuation of the oppressive collective farm system, made worse by rapacious German tax-collecting; continued suppression of religion, except at the local level. Defeat aborted Nazi schemes for massive ethnic cleansing and colonization.

By the time Stalin's armies returned in 1943-44, the Soviet people (apart from some Balts and western Ukrainians who had never been Soviet in the first place) were ready to welcome them.

--Hugo S. Cunningham

Book review by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota

Drawing on his first hand experiences and knowledge, Landau native John Philipps begins with a once-over-lightly history of the area above the Black Sea in which the German colonists settled. He recounts this history from memory, mixing major historical movements with lesser details. He includes the full text of "The Memorandum of the Secretary of the Interior Ratified by Alexander I," the February 20, 1804 document under which the Black Sea Germans entered Russia. It is interesting to see how this differs from Catherine the Great's manifesto which set the guidelines for the first Germans who settled along the Volga. (Catherine's manifesto does not appear in this book but will be known to many readers and is readily available elsewhere.)

About the first half of the book is made up of thumbnail histories of individual mother colonies. A difference from brief histories that one might find in other books is that Philipps brings the story of their development into the time of the Bolshevik revolution. He tells of the deterioration of the villages and what became of the village and/or villagers. Brief essays in the book bear titles such as "Expansion and Founding of Daughter Colonies," "The Barges of Ulm (Ulmer Schachtel)," "The 100th anniversary of the Beresan colonists in Landau," "The College for Girls, During the Soviet Period `Agrotechnikum," "The Educational system," "The St. Raphael Church Built in 1863," "The Immigration of the Beresan Colonies," and "The Development of Agriculture."

On page 110, about the middle of the book, essays titled "Phases of the Deprivation of Rights," and "World War I and Its Results," move the reader into the era when things begin to deteriorate for the German colonists. A law passed on July 4, 1871, "revoked the privileges given upon settlement to the German colonies." The administration of the villages was put under Russian provincial governors, keepers of records had to do their work in the Russian language, and Russian patriotism was given primacy. Many colonists voted with their feet. They migrated to farms in Siberia (where laws were more loosely enforced), Canada, the U.S., and South America. Philipps then guides the reader through the sequence of accelerating degradation and destruction--the Civil War of 1917-1921, the famine of 1921-1922, the New Economic Policy of 1021-1929, the collectivization of agriculture, 1928-1933, and the terrible famine of 1932-1933. Of this period he says, "There was no end to this brutality, mass arrests, and deportations."

His accounts, though told in straightforward narrative, are powerful because Philipps, as a young man, became an agronomist at the Machine Tractor Station in Speyer. The MTS units provided
machines to collective farms in the area and served as political centers. He tells of one chilling incident when army officers stopped at the station. "One of the officers asked ironically, `Can you tell me the name of this place?' The accountant, Rafael Bleile, gave the answer, `This is Speyer.' The officer, `O, yes, Speyerburg.' the accountant, `No, just Speyer." The officer asked, `Why are you still here? Waiting for your friend Gitter (Hitler)? But don't rejoice too soon; we will return again and settle with you fascists.' And we asked ourselves, `What will become of us when the Germans really come into our villages and the Soviets come back again.'" He had the opportunity to find out.

Philipps suffered deeply in the years that followed his departure from Russia but before he was able to emigrate to the United States. His mother and son died on the train back into the Soviet
Union.

Philipps includes black and white photographs of major buildings and of a few homes. Many of the photographs were taken in recent years by visitors to the Ukraine; others, which show steeples missing from churches and ruined homes, reflect the earlier communist period. He adds
maps and the dorfplans which also appear in the books by Joseph S. Height (Paradise on the Steppe and Homesteaders on the Steppe). The book ends with the German occupation of the
Ukraine, the dissolution of the colonies, the trek to the Warthegau in Poland with the German army, and a brief mention of the enforced repatriation of many ethnic Germans from Russia after the war. Philipps reviews the scope of the Gulag, gives present-day population figures in the former Soviet Union, and closes with 36 pages of names of men executed during the time the communists consolidated their power, 1932-1938. The list, he says, is not nearly complete. Subject and name indexes are so useful for researchers. His work does not have the precision a scholar would bring to a history, but he was a keen observer who felt the era in his bones, and that has great value too.

When I first saw this book I was reminded of the Frenchman who, back in the days when Germany was split, said: 'I love Germany. I love Germany so much I'm really glad that there are two of them.'

Of course there are not two Germanys any more. And this book studies the question that since Germany is now the great power in Europe how will it use its power. Will it go back to its past aim and attempt to dominate Europe, Or has it renounced its imperial ambitions following the trauma of division during the Cold War?

In an attempt to answer this question, Dr. Readman has looked at the situation in the Baltic states, caught between the countries of Russia and Germany, both of which are in a period of turbulent confusion.

This book is based on numerous confidential interviews with key political actors and access to still classified material. Profusely referenced, this is a breadthrough book for those interested in the German question.

The author utterly hits the nail on the head with his analysis of modern Russia. The current administration's Russia policy was to treat the country as a failing democracy as opposed to a emerging one. Russia will likely never be a pro-U.S. country in the sense of an Australia or Japan, it sees itself as a great power that should at least be on equal terms with the most advanced nations on Earth. Putin's frustration & anger & that of many Russian's is understandable. Bush Sr promised not to enlarge NATO and Clinton moved Nato to their doorstep. The current government feels encircled by hostile American interests. High oil and gas prices have allowed the Putin camp to restore a measure of economic stability to the country when compared the chaos of the Yeltsin years. Yet the minimum wage was just raised to $88 a month. At least half the population lives in poverty. The author is correct in that the West needs to look at Russia in new terms of a re-emerging capitalist society not in the old Soviet term. The biggest threat to Russian stability is economic. So much of the GDP of the country is related to Oil & Gas, as was seen during the late Breznhev and Andropov years, prices for both can suddenly become depressed without warning. The West needs to do more to help Russia diversify it's economy. As in Soviet times Russian manufacturing is at least 70 years behind other G8 nations, the country's infastructure is falling apart. Hillary will have to formulate a realistic policy to Russia one that is based on a solid working relationship based on mutual respect for the other's interests. I doubt Russia & America will be allies in the sense America & Europe are but the relations need not be so hostile either.

This book is comprised of journal entries written by Carl Bushby during his incredible adventure. He is a remarkable man, but then I'm biased since he stayed with me while in Arizona. Still, this is an incredible story that everyone who has borrowed found hard to put down! You'll find it an easy read and maybe even inspirational. Can't wait for the second half of the expedition to be put into print!