The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 3, the Twentieth Century by Ronald Grigor SunyReview by: Robert LegvoldForeign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 2007), pp. 177-178Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20032324 .

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does-far from the flourishes of the political entrepreneurs operating over people's heads. They are not trying to undo the day's ascendant macrotheories, seen not so much as wrong as incomplete, but rather attempting to connect the over arching with the underpinning. In this important and conceptually innovative book, Brubaker's name is in larger lights, because he did most of the writing, but it is a genuinely collaborative effort in

which the others added anthropology and sociolinguistics to his sociology.

Stalins Wars: From World War to Cold War,

1939-1953. BY GEOFFREY ROBERTS. Yale

University Press, 2007, 496 pp. $35.00. Stalin's brutality-as great as that of any Russian autocrat (no mean comparison set)-is well known. But was there also greatness in the man? Roberts answers yes, at least in terms of his leadership during World War II. Without Stalin, he argues, the Soviet Union might well not have prevailed. Using new archival material, Roberts carves a figure who grew with the war, got the most from his people and his generals, and held the country together as a lesser force could not have.

Moreover, he says, Stalin wanted to preserve cooperation and peace with his

wartime allies after 1945, admittedly on his terms. Had Winston Churchill and others understood this, the Cold War

might have been averted. Roberts makes a serious historical argument. This is not Cold War revisionist history that whitewashes the pathologies and extreme cruelty of Stalin's leadership. On the contrary. Still, in the end, it glosses over the question of whether, if largely on Stalin's terms, peace-that is, no Cold

War-really had much chance.

How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics andBusiness. BY ALENA V. LEDENEVA.

Cornell University Press, 2006, 288 pp. $22.95.

Any society applies grease, some of it less than pure, to make its institutional gears

mesh efficiently. But when the gears do not match up-when institutions, including laws, are discrepant, dysfunctional, or fragile, and superabundant grease serves to compensate-efficiency comes at a cost. "Informal practices" are the grease that interests Ledeneva, and in Russia they are the material that fills the gap between formal legal institutions and informal extralegal norms. They operate in politics (through illicit electoral manipulation),

where business and politics meet (in insider mutual-protection societies), and in the economy at large (through barter, double bookkeeping, and "privatized" government agencies and services). Each has roots in Russian and Soviet history but with the important difference, as Ledeneva notes in her thoughtful explo ration of both their nature and their effect, that informal practices in today's Russia are of, by, and for the few, not something accessible to the uninitiated.

The Cambridge History ofRussia. Vol. 3, The Twentieth Century. EDITED BY RONALD GRIGOR SUNY. Cambridge

University Press, 2006, 866 pp. $185.00. With 27 authors, writing on 25 different

topics, this muscle-toning volume of over 8oo pages covers every subject from Russia on the eve of the 1917 revolution to, albeit briefly, the early Putin era. The wars (the First, the civil, and the Second) and the eras (Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gor bachev, and Yeltsin) each receive separate

FOREIGN AFFAIRS March/April 2007 [177]

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treatment. In between, so do Russia's twentieth-century economic and demo graphic changes, as well as the fate of peasants, workers, women, non-Russians, and key republics. And there are chapters on science and technology, culture, and foreign policy. The heavily laden table is introduced by a reflective essay written by Suny, the impresario for this feast, on the

way Westerners have read Russian and Soviet history from one era to the next. This book is a fitting finale to a distin guished set of volumes that starts with From Early Rus' to 1689.

Putin's Russia and the Enlarged Europe. BY ROY ALLISON, MARGOT LIGHT, AND

STEPHEN WHITE. Blackwell, 2006,

240 pp. $89.95 (paper, $39.95). Perhaps the most complex and, in many ways, most revealing dimension of Russian foreign policy is Russia's relations with Europe, once the country's leaders try to think beyond former Soviet borders.

Here, ever since Peter the Great, Russia's tormented quest for identity reaches its climax. Here Russia deals most directly

with the flight of former dominions. And, here, in particular, it faces exclusion from two of the external world's most formidable institutions-NATO and the

European Union. The conundrum of how Russia might be included in Europe when it cannot be integrated into its institutions "Russia in Europe versus Russia and Europe"-forms the core of this book. The authors center their very informed and levelheaded analysis on Russia's evolving attitude toward these two institutions, among both the public and the political elite. They embed this analysis in a lean, effective discussion of the domestic politics behind Russian foreign policy.

Middle East L. CARL BROWN

Democracy in Iran: History and the Questfor Liberty. BY ALI GHEISSARI AND VALI

NAS R. Oxford University Press, 2006, 232 pp. $25.00.

This book treats the last century of Iranian history, organized around the theme of how the country "has responded to the challenge of balancing state-building

with democracy-building." The point of departure is the era that brought into being the 1906 constitution and ended five years later with the Russian occupation and the reversal of reforms. This period of promise followed by setback serves to illustrate that Iran has long wrestled with issues of representation and constitution alism, and it continues to do so today.

At the same time, Iran has been caught up in the task of putting in place a modern and strong state. There were many more ups and downs in that search for a balance between strength and democracy through the time of the Pahlavis, ending in 1979, and thereafter during the Islamic Republic.

This thematic framework for making sense of the complex interplay of rulers and ruled, ideologies and material inter ests, provides a perceptive interpretation of Iran's past century.

Palestine: Peace NotApartheid. BY JIMMY CARTER. Simon & Schuster, 2006, 288 pp. $27.00.

Soon after taking office in 1977, Jimmy Carter declared that the Palestinians must have a "homeland." Later in his presidency, Carter led the tortuous negotiations culminating in Israel's first treaty with an

[178] FOREIGN AFFAIRS- Volume86No.2

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