RUSSIA IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The author is a senior researcher for the USSR Academy of Science's History Institute, and the book is billed as ""An Official Soviet History."" Unfortunately for any reviewer primed to eruditely expose particular twists, the distortions and omissions are glaring. Nenarkarov describes the disintegration of imperial Russia and the socialists' struggles; the two revolutions and the civil war; these sections mention by name scarcely anyone but Lenin, while the next ones manage to recount socio-economic transformations and World War II without discussing Stalin. The last part, a prose summary of the Expo pavilion's messages, continues to tally material achievements with an equal absence of political content, except for a few squibs on Peace. There are a great many statistics, and a few outright falsehoods (""The title of member of the Communist Party has never accorded any advantages. . . ""). It is hard to know with what to compare the history; indeed, it is scarcely a history. Students of Soviet accomplishments and the Soviet point of view can do better elsewhere.