Customer Reviews

BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: Across the Borderlands of Europe

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My daughter raved about Applebaum's Gulag so in preparation for an upcoming trip to the Baltics I checked this book out of the library. I can't believe there are only 2 reviews of this book - I could not put it down. Every detail was so intriguing that I am going to track down the other books listed in her "note about sources" to learn more about the fascinating countries she wrote about.

If you have Eastern European roots, this is a fascinating book. Ms. Applebaum has done a brilliant job of describing life in a region where half a dozen cultures have lived side by side

Anne Applebaum, who also wrote Gulag: A History, writes another great work. This one, we agreewas hard to put down. Bookclubs out there... get this book!

Other books on this topic and graet! are:Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939-1947, pricy, but worth it. Also, The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture + Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth + World War II: Behind Closed Doors, works on American systems too.

Vi ses

As I knew they wouldn't when I bought this book 11 years ago. For brevity I'll confine my criticism to the introduction, which summarized Applebaum's motivating perspective.

How she can say, after WW II, that "the most threatening" invaders "always came from the East" escapes me, and is not again repeated throughout the book. Wisely, as this disconnect is refuted by the very history she outlines after page ix. One borderland empire collapsing after the first world war, which she neglected to list on page xii, was the Ottoman, though she does repeatedly allude elsewhere to lingering Turkish/Muslim influence. The lands "acquired by invasion and collusion - according to the secret [sic] Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany" - had been acquired by Poland in 1920, also through invasion and collusion, by Pilsudski's Army, claiming peoples who were not Polish and had no desire to be ruled as such.

When she writes, on page xiv, that "[d]uring the years that followed, that Russian became the language of administration in those territories, and Russian Orthodoxy became the only, barely tolerated religion," this is outright falsification. Local administration in the USSR was always bilingual, in the majority, titular republican language as well as Russian, the latter most especially in the "power" ministries run directly from Moscow. Other religions were as "protected" under Soviet law as Russian Orthodoxy: Lutheranism in Estonia and Latvia, Catholicism in Latvia and Lithuania, Judaism (where it still existed) and Ukrainian Orthodoxy - not to be confused with Uniat Catholicism, which was repressed in the 1940s.

Stalin had no intention of making the borderlands "disappear into Soviet Russia," but of homogenizing the national territories. Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire" very clearly details this process and the mentality behind it - "cultural genocide" *not* being a part of it. (Those who so easily whip this word out of their back pocket need to be fined for libel, IMO.) I'm unaware of anyone who knew anything about this region who thought of it as merely "Russia," or who thought Kiev was a "Russian city" (page xv.)

How disingenuous is her claim, on page xviii, that Ukraine and other FSRs became independent "against the wishes of the American State Department, the British Foreign Office, and almost everyone else in Western Europe," when these leaders and governments were running a two-track policy of courting both Gorbachev and "emerging national leaders" (like Yeltsin), strengthening the latter at the expense of the former. George Bush I did nothing to prevent Gorby's fall, so Ukraine's independence and the dissolving of the USSR was obviously acceptable.

Nationalism and democracy may be reinforcing - after all, in a parliamentiary system the language of discussion and of the law becomes of primary importance when a "universal tongue" like Latin is discarded. But it is no more necessary in the FSU than it is in the UK. Using English rather than Welsh or Gaelic does not mean Scots and Welsh are oppressed, and the FSU did more, in its limited way, to foster national language than the UK ever has. Nationalism is necessary, however, for ambitious leaders who wish to rule the lands and people around them at their own discretion without outside interference, good or bad.

The peace of the USSR was no more a "fiction" than racial peace in the US, and enforced by no more terror and lies than throughout American history. Resurrecting past grievances does not have to lead to national disolution, however, unless one wants to go there. Russians needed little investment to set these ethno-nationalist chauvinists against each other. How "liberated" do ethnic Russians feel in the Baltic States, for instance, as their common citizenship is stripped away, along with voting and property rights? The whole course of history points undeviatingly to the end result of resurgent nationalism.

That invaders of the past brought those "things of beauty" she searched for, beginning on page xxi, through war eludes her; as does the implicit nonsense that "Russification" was universally destructive. As for the remainder of the book, as an impressionistic period piece it's interesting, sometimes informative, but again a blinkered look by an American whose early '90's rationale has not withstood the march of history any more than the "collapsed empires" of the borderlands.