“…In many respects this movie touches on key aspects of our discipline and expertise, and it also marks the distance that “Eurasia” has traveled in the American mentality since the appearance of other epoch-defining films (From Russia With Love, Doctor Zhivago, The Manchurian Candidate). Slavic Review invites its readers to submit contributions for a cluster of scholarly essays on Borat… Contributions will be peer reviewed and must be received by the end of March 2007. If you have questions, please contact the editor, Mark Steinberg, at slavrev[at]uiuc.edu.

I haven’t come across this practice in my travels, but I stuck mainly to Voronezh Oblast, in the Black Earth region. Usually they used ‘rodstvenik’, or ‘dvoyurodnyi brat/dvoyurodnaya sestra.’

Don’t know if they’re online anywhere, but when I was doing my master’s thesis, I got a good set of maps about the Caucasus from the US Dept of Defense. They were great for showing why the ceasefire line around Karabakh was where it was (mountain ridgelines, mostly), and might be similarly helpful on Ossetia. If memory serves, Pankisi Gorge is more a valley than a gorge, which is an interesting thing to note.

All of which is to say, yes, fine-grained knowledge from reasonably disinterested observers is probably very useful for sorting such things out. (Tempted to add “obviously” to that sentence, too.)

“My own first cousin” does not sound at all peculiar to me. I grew up deep in the South, knew all of my first cousins, and had relations who could tell you all about the degrees and removes, if you were interested in that sort of thing. (Back then, I just wanted to go out and play.)

Daily Kos is a liberal blog about American politics, but it allows users to develop their own diaries which serve as “miniblogs” if you will.

A model like that could work for Russian political blogs, with one main portal rather than the system we have now, which is just linking from a personal blog or group blog to many other blogs.

Kos has been very helpful in allowing Democrats in the US to correspond with one another and talk about policy. Couldn’t the same model work for Russia?

BTW Maria I can’t recall ‘chiding’ you at all in my post! Ahh the vagaries of cyber-space and how tone-distorting it can be…

On the Georgia situation RFE/RL newsline is a great place to start if predictably anti-Moscow (not without cause mind you.) You might also try http://www.balkanalysis.com which has an article from a colleague of mine on the situation in the Caucasus generally. Eastview, the Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, and Itar-Tass are also all good sources. These are all generally ‘news’ rather than ‘analysis’ good examples of which are currently rather thin on the ground. In general a good knowledge of the history of South Ossetian and Abkhazian secessionist movements (of which I am not in possession of) is probably a pre-requisite for any balanced understanding of the conflict.

For Estonian history, the best book I have is History of Estonia, by Tõnu Tannberg, Ain Mäesalu, Tõnis Lukas, Mati Laur, and Ago Pajur. However, the only place I’ve seen it (in several languages, including English) is Estonia.

Mart Laar, the historian who was Estonia’s Prime Minister, has written a couple of books based on oral history. War in the Woods, about Estonian partisans from 1944 through 1956, is available in English.

There is no really good book about the Estonian role in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Rein Taagepera’s Estonia: Return to Independence is probably the best, but it is largely a memoir. Estonia and the Estonians, by Toivo U. Raun and The Baltic Revolution, by Anatol Lieven, have some useful information about that period, but Raun’s book needs to be updated, and Lieven’s tends toward incoherence by trying to include events in all three Baltic countries and not connecting them very well. I should say that that fault comes largely from its journalistic approach and closeness in time to the events.

Sources on Georgia – analysis (though not up to date reporting) is available at OpenDemocracy.org. That’s the only source I use regularly. They’ve had a few good articles/essays over the past couple of years that let you see the build up to the current crisis.

Shadows of the past in Russia and the Baltic Countries

(But I haven’t been able to find any other online information about the book).

Now, this one must have some long footnotes.

I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of the Revolution is Lenin. This is a major weakness of A People’s Tragedy, which overall is a great and well-written book (certainly better than the other two ‘big picture’ books about the Revolution I’ve read—by Pipes and Trotsky). What is basically misunderstood about Lenin, I think, is his fidelity to Marxist though.

Generally it is averred—even by people with no sympathy whatsoever to Marxism (like Pipes, as well as Figes)—that Lenin was, nonetheless, a bad Marxist. What needs to be understood first is that, for most of his career as underground revolutionary Lenin did not expect a socialist revolution in Russia. It was only the shock of the first world war that convinced Lenin that capitalism as a worldwide system was on its last legs and had spent all its progressive potential. He and the other Bolsheviks were at first confident that the revolution would spread and made it clear that they regarded this as necessary for its survival in Russia.

The best books about Lenin, in my opinion, are by those by Neil Harding. Both the two volume Lenin’s Political Thought and the later, much shorter, Leninism. Harding makes clear that the problem with Lenin was not that he was a bad Marxist but that he was a Marxist (in some senses closer to Marx’s own views than most of the Second International). It was only after the revolution that Lenin was forced to depart significantly from Marxism.

The section on Lenin in the second volume of Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism is also very good. Kolakowski points out that in some regards Lenin in his fanatical, logical, single-mindedness was more consistent than Marx and Engels on certain matters!

There’s also a good article in the Winter 2003 issue of Kritika by Lar T. Lih called “How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin’s What is to Be Done?” (available from Project Muse) that is very good, and shows how orthodox WiTBD? is (contrary to the common opinion that it shows Lenin’s growing unorthodoxy or borrowings from earlier non-Marxist Russian revolutionaries). Lih expanded this article into a 900 page book (including a new translation of WiTBD?) all about WiTBD? which is exhaustive and exhausting, and generally only marginally more informative than the article.