Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace by DOMINICLIEVENReview by: ROBERT LEGVOLDForeign Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 3 (May/June 2010), p. 147Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25680954 .

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Recent Books

dealing with not only places where nation alism is ascendant but also places where it

has fizzled and addressing not just collec

tive violence on a grand scale, such as the

Balkan wars, but also mass mobilizations

short of war, such as the periodic violence

in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. His treatment of the fall of com

munism in Eastern Europe and the disin

tegration of the Soviet Union is thoughtful but somewhat tenuously linked to the books core themes. Each step of the way, he reflects on the state of the study of na

tionalism, beginning with the early, mostly British thinkers who carved out the field. If their ideas endure largely unimproved, it is, he suggests, because their rich, his

torically grounded approach and readiness to borrow across disciplines have given

way to studies more concerned with the

rigorous manipulation of data than an

expansive notion of evidence, and more

concerned with the application of formal

theory than unfettered imagination.

Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the

Campaigns of Warand'Peace, by dominic

lieven. Viking, 2010, 656 pp. $35.95. This is a large, booming riposte to all those histories and novels that downplay Russia's

role in Napoleons ultimate defeat, leaving the credit mostly to "General Winter"

or, according to Tolstoyan myth, to the

patriotism of the Russian people. No,

says Lieven, the Russian government itself defeated Napoleon, and it did so because Tsar Alexander I and his war

minister had anticipated the war, knew

the enemy and his weaknesses, and had

designed a superior strategy. "From the

start," Lieven writes, "their plan was to wear

down Napoleon by a defensive campaign in Russia, and then to pursue the defeated

enemy back over the frontier and raise a

European insurrection against him." Hence, the importance of the years 1813-14. This

was the decisive phase of the Napoleonic Wars, but it has been neglected thanks to self-serving retellings found in British, French, and Prussian histories and in later

Russian novels and musical overtures.

Lieven not only makes his case in rich,

probing detail; he also encases it in a fluent reading of Russia's larger political and social dynamics during this period.

The Road to Independence for Kosovo: A Chronicle of theAhtisaari Plan, by

henry h. perritt, jr. Cambridge

University Press, 2009,328 pp. $85.00. Kosovo's declaration of independence, in

2008, was the last?or, alas, possibly only the latest?chapter in the painful and com

plex demise of Yugoslavia. Perritt comes as

close as an outsider can to opening doors

into the chambers where the political forces of Belgrade and Pristina tangled and diplomats from Russia, the eu, and the

United States struggled to craft the least

destabilizing disposition of Kosovo nearly ten years after the nato-led war broke

Serbia's hold over it. His account makes

plain that independence (and not just some

form of autonomy or partition) was in

the cards from the start. But to get there

without running over the Russians and, if

possible, while reconciling the Serbs and

holding the eu constituency together was

no mean diplomatic feat. In the end, only the last of these objectives was achieved.

Sympathetic as Perritt is to the Kosovars'

cause, he notes how much uncertainty

persists about future Russian behavior, the prospects of an independent Kosovo, and the ability of the un Security Council to deal with the next comparable crisis.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS - May/June 2010 [147]

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