Canadian Slavonic Papers

Yalta. The Price of Peace by S. M. PlokhyReview by: Peter KenezCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 53, No. 1 (March 2011), pp.163-164Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25822336 .

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Book Reviews 163

S. M. Plokhy. Yalta. The Price of Peace. Cambridge and New York: Viking, 2010. xxviii, 451 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Index. $29.95, cloth.

There is an enormous literature on the 1945 conference in Yalta. Some observers have

regarded Yalta as the source of the Cold War and others think of it as the place where the

Western powers "betrayed Eastern Europe." There are reasons to doubt whether the

conference deserves the amount of attention that it has received from historians. Evidently some people have trouble accepting that matters are not decided at conference tables, but

on the battlefield. In fact the fate of Poland was not decided at Yalta. Once the Red Army was in possession of that unfortunate country there was absolutely nothing that could have

been done to persuade Stalin to give it up. He was well aware that any democratically elected government would be bitterly anti-Soviet. The Cold War did not start at Yalta. Its

origin was over determined; given the nature of the competing powers it could not have

been otherwise. Stalin was adamant about reimposing discipline on Soviet society and that

necessitated cutting ties with the West. The democratic powers could not but regard Soviet

behaviour at home and in Eastern Europe with dismay and hostility.

Plokhy in his new and very good book probably would not disagree with these

arguments. In his epilogue he makes it clear that the Western powers did not have the

means to restrain Soviet expansion. Simply walking away from the negotiating table would

not have helped the Poles or anyone else. And that was their only alternative.

Instead of claiming great significance for the conference, Plokhy gives us an

enormously detailed description of those eight days when the three great men met in the

Crimea. This rather long book reads like a novel: we get to know the characters. We see

their interplay, we see how they manoeuvred and what they had hoped to achieve. We also

get acquainted not only with the well-known figures, but also with the foreign ministers, the under secretaries, the translators and some of the daughters of the major participants.

We even learn the menus of the lavish lunches and dinners. Plokhy is very good at letting us see how those participants understood the world and what were they thinking at the time.

Plokhy is fair in his characterizations. The three major participants in very different ways were impressive people. Roosevelt in the last weeks of his life was still in full

possession of his faculties. His primary concern was international co-operation and he was

most interested in the establishment of the United Nations. He refused to support Churchill's efforts to retain Britain's colonies. He remained the able politician that he had

always been. Churchill was charming, realistic and had as much foresight as anyone in his

time. He understood that in this company he was the junior partner. But it was Stalin who

was both the most impressive, successful and at the same time elusive. Roosevelt and

Churchill were transparent, but it was difficult to know what was on Stalin's mind. On the

one hand he was a realist. Unlike Hitler, who lived in a world of his own, Stalin had no

grandiose projects; he was always capable of matching goals and means. He could be

charming when he wanted to be. On the other hand, he was obviously paranoid and a

monster. He was determined to have the allies return all those people whom he considered

to be Soviet citizens, i.e., including people from territories that came under his control only as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. He wanted them for no other reason than to

punish them and kill many of them. The Allies were well aware or should have been well aware of what would happen to people who were forcibly returned. However, perhaps

understandably, above all they were keen to regain their own citizens, and the Soviets

implicitly connected these matters.

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes

Vol. LIII,No. 1, March 2011

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164 Book Reviews

At a time when the war obviously was going to end soon, the citizens of the victorious

countries looked to the future with great optimism. The euphoria was not to last long.

Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz

Avril Pyman. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia's Unknown Da Vinci. Foreword by Geoffrey Hosking. New York: Continuum, 2010. xxiii, 304 pp. Chronology. Glossary of names. Appendices. $29.95, cloth.

Drawing upon an array of published primary sources and mostly Russian-language

secondary sources, Avril Pyman has written a fine "creative path" (tvorcheskii put") account of P. A. Florenskii (1882-1937), a central figure in Russia's Silver Age and

religious renaissance. Pyman's study of Florenskii is obviously a labour of love. She

sympathetically conveys the emotional content of her protagonist's life story, paying

special attention to his precocious but delicate nature, the intimacies and vicissitudes of his

few close friendships, his spiritual crisis and subsequent turn to faith, his innocence in

matters of internal church politics, e.g., Florenskii's sincere but naive support of Name

Glorifiers (imiaslavtsy) in the face of official opposition, and his personal struggles under

communist rule to care for his family. Pyman also explicates many of Florenskii's writings to demonstrate how he formulated a "mathematically-based world view illumined by

religious experience" (p. 57), expressed "the revelation of Truth and Beauty he had found

in the Russian Church and [...] the difficulty of committing mind and body to this Institution" (p. 72), and articulated a theonomous perspective on questions of "culture and

science" (p. 110). What Pyman fails to do is connect the life and work of Florenskii to broader themes in

modern Russian history and culture. Born in the Azeri town of Yevlax and raised in Tiflis, Florenskii straddled many of the ethnic, cultural, and sociological divides that both

expressed and taxed the vitality of the Russian empire. His maternal grandfather was a

proud, French- and Russian-speaking member of the Armenian nobility involved in

international commerce and a local advocate of St. Petersburg's imperial project. Florenskii's paternal grandfather belonged to the clerical estate but, like manypopovichi of

his generation, abandoned his hereditary calling for a career in medicine and the Utopian tenets of sexual equality. This secular orientation was partly passed on to Florenskii's

father, who worked as an engineer on the Trans-Caucasian railway and became a high

ranking official at the Ministry of Transportation. Florenskii himself embodied many of the

competing currents of thought in turn-of-the-century Russia. Well-versed in literature and

philosophy, he was a star student in mathematics and physics at Imperial Moscow

University, who went on to enroll in the Moscow Clerical Academy, seek spiritual

guidance from a monastic elder, become a parish priest, and compose an epistolary essay that employed the tools of the Symbolist movement to ground knowledge of church doctrine in "living religious experience." Florenskii's circles of friends, acquaintances, and

mentors, which included Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr El'chaninov, Vladimir Ern, Aleksandr

Blok, Valentin Sventsitskii, Sergei Bulgakov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Vasilii Rozanov, S. S.

Troitskii, S. S. Glagolev, I. V. Popov, A. I. Vvedenskii, and bishops Antonii (Florensov) and Fedor (Pozdeevskii), placed him at the intersection of faith, politics, church reform, and artistic creativity in the late imperial period. After the Civil War, Florenskii was forced to abandon his overt religious pursuits for work as an electrical engineer in support of the

communist regime. The last years of his life were spent in labour camps and research

stations. He was executed by an NKVD troika on 8 December 1937.

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