Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Social & Behavioral Sciences — History, Geography & Area Studies — Central & Eastern Europe

This remarkable contribution to Soviet and Jewish historiography reveals a largely unknown chapter: the stubbornly courageous attempts by surviving Belarusian Jews to preserve their Jewish religious and cultural identity in the face of the Soviet regimes concerted effort to suppress Jewish identity as well as any explicit references to the annihilation of over 80 percent of Jewish Belarusians during the Holocaust.  Fewer than 200,000 Jews remained after the Soviets drove the Germans out in 1944.  With extensive use of Belarusian archives, including records of the secret police and interviews and correspondence with hundreds of Belarusian émigrés living in Israel and the US, Smilovitsky (Tel Aviv Univ., Israel) has written a carefully detailed study of Belarusian Jews' daily struggles to live as Jews during the final decade of Stalins reign.  The author also makes use of the very large and growing library of research and memoirs recently published in Russian and Belarusian.  This is a great work of creative, careful scholarship that tells a tragic story of stubborn courage in the final years of Stalins reigna sad tale that yet inspires.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.

This fine book focuses on an easily overlooked dimension of Russian Jewish history from the late 1890s to the 1920s: the growing attraction of Russian Jews, especially intellectuals, to the concept of legally guaranteed minority rights.  The largest Jewish community in the world, Russian Jewry was rooted in traditional Jewish culture but rapidly being secularized.  As a result, there emerged a broad continuum of movementsliberal, Zionist, and socialistconcerned with redefining the nature of the Jewish community.  A key figure was the pioneer Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who articulated a conception of diaspora nationalism that influenced a wide range of writers, ideologists, and community leaders.  Rabinovitch (Boston Univ.) skillfully limns this tendency among other nationalities just before and during the Russian revolution of 1905 through the creation of the Imperial Duma, WW I, the revolutions of 1917, the civil war years, and until the communist regime destroyed all other parties.  He notes the carry-over of this approach in the burgeoning Jewish community of Palestine.  The book is comprehensive, thoughtful, meticulous, and well written.  It should be in every university library and of interest to researchers and graduate students in the fields of nationalism as well as Eastern European and Jewish history.Summing Up: Essential. All academic levels/libraries.

Leustean (politics and international relation, Aston Univ., UK) edited and contributed two chapters and a postscript to a fascinating book on the relationship among Orthodox churches, nationalism, and nation-state building in 19th-century southeastern Europe.  Chapters on the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria were expertly written by Paschalis Kitromilides, Dimitris Stamatopoulos, Bojan Aleksov, Lucian Leustean, and Daniela Kalkandjieva, respectively.  The book is based on primary and published sources and presents new information on the nexus between orthodoxy and nationalism in Eastern Europehow religion buttressed nationalism, was inhibited in its universal mission by nationalism, and persevered through the world wars and communism to again provide life and identity to the nations of southeastern Europe.  The book also offers new insight on the experience of the Orthodox Church under the Ottomans and on the Russian Empires effort to use religion to expand its influence and prevent the growth of Western Christianity and Western values throughout southeastern Europe.  An important and valuable contribution to Orthodox and Eastern European history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

In 1994, a school board in a Connecticut town removed the study of Russia from the school curriculum because It no longer mattered.  With the recent souring of relations between Putin and the West and Russian incursions into Crimea and Ukraine, it would seem that Russia really does still matter.  Thus, it is not trite to say that this historical atlas is timely, showing precisely the factors, patterns, and geography that led to present-day tensions with Russia.  The book is richly illustrated and well written and, as with all great atlases, can be described as beautiful.  Its strengths are the quality, number, breadth, and detail of the maps.  Though it covers all historical eras, the book is particularly strong in its coverage of recent (postwar) Russian history.  If there are any weaknesses, it would be in the coverage of Siberian history and the eastern expansion of the Russian Empire.  From a geographer's perspective, maps of the remarkable geographic expeditions of many Russian explorers, such as Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, Vitus Bering, and the like, would appear de rigueur.  Notwithstanding these omissions, this will be a mandatory book for Russian history and geography collections.  The atlas notes the untimely death of author Barnes during publication (d. 2014); what a wonderful legacy he leaves behind.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Khlevniuk, research fellow at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, has written the most definitive biography of Stalin to date.  His tour de force, based upon rich archival sources and other primary material, covers the highlights of the Soviet dictators life with an eye to understanding his motivation, behavior, policies, and method of ruling.  At his core, Stalin was guided by an abiding anti-capitalism.  He was a true believer in Marxist-Leninist ideology and in the Soviet state as the supreme expression of that world view.  He used class warfare, fear, terror, the Gulag, state security, and war to push this view domestically and internationally.  Stalin and his henchmen committed many terrible crimes, and the Russian people and others who lived in the Soviet Union were their chief victims.  The book is filled with new revelations regarding such controversial issues as Stalins role in the execution of 700,000 citizens in 19371938, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Kremlins reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, the Cold War, and the Korean War.  Well written and superbly translated, with full references.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Exuberant and revolutionary, founded on extensive archival scholarship in multiple languages, this book is fundamental for understanding the authentic significance of the predominately Jewish market towns known in Yiddish asshtetls, which once dotted the map of Eastern Europe.  The author (Northwestern) rejects the conventional image of the exhausted, impoverished, depressed shtetl portrayed inFiddler on the Roof, inspired by Sholem Aleichem's popular Teyve stories.  Focused on the historic regions of Podolia, Volhynia, and Kiev, where Hasidism was born and flourished, this book provides a thick description and analysis of the fabric of daily life during the shtetl's heyday, when the dynamic Jewish market towns provided urban commercial services amid the fertile lands of Ukraine.  The book is colorfully written and documented with mordant humor and cynical humanism.  Reading this book reveals the vibrant heart of Eastern European Jewish civilization, whose traces can still be seen among the descendants of millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, compelled to leave by the economic decline resulting from czarist Russian policies.  An outstanding work of scholarship about the fabric of life in a multiethnic region.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.