An essential addition to the cultural history of the late Soviet era.
A probing history of dissidence in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.
When Stalin lived, his government paid little attention to the nation’s guarantees of constitutional rights and used terror, imprisonment, and torture to curb dissent. When Stalin died in 1953, the regime was less inclined to kill its opponents. In this deeply researched history, Nathans, author of Beyond the Pale, introduces bohemian intellectual Alexander Volpin, son of the poet Sergei Esenin, who, inspired by Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists, “sought to apply modal logic to two humanistic fields he considered most susceptible to ‘exact methods’: jurisprudence and ethics.” In doing so, he demanded that Soviet officials obey the constitution and not Communist Party dictates. He was also an exasperating opponent: When one interrogator grilled him in the early 1960s about a supposedly secret organization—secret because it was unknown to the KGB—Volpin replied that he had not been aware of the KGB officer’s existence, either, “but that has not led me to conclude that you exist secretly.” Other dissidents resisted the Soviet regime on legalistic grounds. Some were committed Leninists; many, such as Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, argued for freedom of conscience and expression. While the dissidents never coalesced into a movement, many published samizdat literature, books and manifestos painstakingly typed out and circulated secretly, including practical manuals on how to hold up to police interrogation. (One brave dissident, Sergei Kovalev, replied to each of his interrogator’s dozens of questions, “I refuse to answer.”) Nathans closes his authoritative study by suggesting that the post-Stalin Soviet Union was a paradise of free expression compared to Putin’s present-day “feral state, where political opponents and those branded as traitors are as likely to be poisoned or assassinated as tried in a court of law.”
An essential addition to the cultural history of the late Soviet era.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780691117034
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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