Russia's Bitter Path to Modernity: A History of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras

Alexander Chubarov. Russia's Bitter Path to Modernity: A History of Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras. New York: Continuum, 2001. x, 318 pp. Notes. Selected Bibliography of English-Language Sources. Selected Bibliography of Russian-Language Sources. Index. $29.95, cloth. This book is in some ways a sequel to author's A Fragile Empire: A HistorY of Imperial Russia. In present work, Alexander Chubarov (a Senior Lecturer at Coventry University) is primarily concerned with modernization and goes so far as to say that the true essence of Soviet period of Russian history was modernization in broad sense of word, including industrialization, urbanization, and secularization of popular mentality (9). book is divided into three parts, titled The Background, The Socialist Experiment (from 1917 to 1985), and From Reform Socialism to Deformed Capitalism ( 1985 to mid 2001). last part makes up more than one third of book and is especially valuable. Although much of material here will be familiar to scholars, some sections such as Marxism versus Human Nature (45-49) and The 'Survival' Economy (214-218) offer less common perspectives. This work is a broadly conceived scholarly work. It is a history of policies and institutions, coupled with an extended analysis, rather than a history of Russian people. It is well organized, clearly written, and at times insightful, but there are no pictures or maps and little treatment of personalities. Along way, Chubarov devotes major attention to political and economic issues, including among his twenty-one chapters ones on political culture, Soviet ideology, Soviet political system, and Soviet nationalities. Besides endnotes and a useful index, there are twenty-five pages of bibliographic entries, both in English and Russian, and Chubarov seems equally familiar with valuable works in both languages. This reviewer found only a few minor factual or spelling errors. book's cover states that Chubarov aims to other... 'a balanced view, abstaining from narrow, ideologically biased assessments,' and to understand triumphs (yes) and failures of Russia's Soviet development `within Russia's own cultural and historical context.' Such an aim can hardly be faulted, but at times Chubarov seems to go too far in normalizing Soviet behaviour. Although, for example, he does not ignore Stalin's many crimes and goes further than most contemporary Western historians in writing of Stalin's totalitarian regime and his wielding of absolute political power, some of author's statements suggest Stalinist Russia was not all that unusual. …

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