Yalta: The Price of Peace by S. M. PlokhyReview by: Vladislav ZubokSlavic Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (SPRING 2011), pp. 203-204Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.70.1.0203 .

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Book Reviews 203

mediately lead to urbanization, with only about 33 percent of returning troops going to cities and towns between 1945– 47. Veterans eventually left the collective farms “in over-whelming numbers” (142– 43), Edele states, but not until 1948 when it became clear to them that the regime was not about to loosen the kolkhoz order.

Part 2 focuses on the many divisions within the vast array of Soviet veterans, which Edele estimates at 25.3 million by war’s end. Women, who made up between 2 and 4 per-cent overall, faced hostility after the war for their alleged frontline affairs. Generational differences divided veterans, with “double veterans” born between 1890–1904, many of whom also fought in World War I and/or the civil war; the largest group born between 1905 and 1922; and “the wartime generation” born between 1923 and 1927. Over time, these differences became less important, of course, and by the mid-1980s they had basi-cally disappeared.

The roughly 10–19 percent of surviving soldiers offi cially recognized as “war invalids” constituted an important subgroup among veterans further divided into three categories depending on the severity of their injuries. Edele reveals that a wide variety of factors shaped their experiences, including gender, age, and the level of integration into a family, all of which pulled war invalids apart during their reintegration into civilian life. Prisoners of war (POWs), another signifi cant subgroup, endured offi cial discrimination and unof-fi cial ridicule for decades. Laws restricting the rights of POWs were loosely enforced after the war, especially following Nikita Khrushchev’s emergence in the 1950s, but their full rehabilitation was not granted until 1995!

Part 3 details the rise of a veterans’ movement during the fi nal decades of the USSR, the result of political action of a mass character and changes among the country’s leader-ship at the same time. Edele traces the beginnings of the Soviet veterans’ movement to the immediate postwar period, when it was not offi cially recognized and thus stayed below the radar. Cautious advances were made with the establishment of assistance committees for veterans under Khrushchev, while the Central Committee’s support for the creation of new veterans’ organizations in 1965 constituted a “quantum leap” (175) that coincided with the emergence of the cult of the war under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership. By the beginning of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s the veterans’ move-ment had become “an institutionalized pillar of the political system” (181), an offi cially acknowledged “entitlement group”—a collection of individuals sharing similar claims to special treatment—that connected the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras. The veterans’ movement had become so politically entrenched, in fact, that it outlived the Soviet Union itself!

There are a few minor typos and the author should clarify his use of the terms authori-tarian, which is in the book’s title, and totalitarian, but these relatively insignifi cant issues do not detract from what is a truly superb and highly recommended account of Soviet veterans of World War II.

Jeffrey W. Jones

University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Yalta: The Price of Peace. By S. M. Plokhy. New York: Viking, 2010. xxviii, 451 pp. Notes. Index. Maps. $29.95, hard bound.

This is a solid, well-sourced, and entirely readable book on this historic encounter, es-sential for all who want to understand the origins of the Cold War. In it S. M. Plokhy lays to rest the myth of the “betrayal of Yalta.” Iosif Stalin, he writes, was successful in his diplomacy because the Red Army was approaching Berlin, but also because both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt needed Soviet cooperation. And they simply were not ready to break with Stalin over Poland and eastern Europe, as long as Germany and Japan remained undefeated. Therefore, long before Henry Kissinger, the Soviet dictator could practice a lucrative trilateral diplomacy. The venue of the meeting also worked in Stalin’s favor: the palaces of Crimea were staffed and bugged by Soviet secret police and intel-ligence. Stalin knew what western partners thought and how they felt. In the diplomatic

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204 Slavic Review

poker game, he could see all the western cards. He knew how to ingratiate himself with Churchill and when to make concessions to Roosevelt to succeed in his trilateral game. Russian alcohol and Stalin’s Georgian hospitality also played a role.

The book is rich in details, many of them coming from new documentation, such as the unexpurgated Soviet version of the talks, the diaries of Ivan Maiskii, and the notes of Churchill’s daughter Sara Oliver, Roosevelt’s daughter Anna Boettiger, and Kathleen Har-riman. Splendid pictures from the now declassifi ed Soviet album are also included. Plokhy analyzes rather than moralizes. The western leaders, he concludes, had to pay the price for dealing with the cunning dictator. That price, of course, was paid by others. Western leaders were troubled by the future of Germany and Poland; the fate of other countries in eastern Europe, above all the lands annexed by the Soviet Union, bothered them much less. Plokhy documents the fate of “the Yalta victims”: thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, and others, who were not even Soviet subjects, yet who were deported by western authori-ties to the USSR (i.e., to the gulag and shooting grounds).

Plokhy defi nes Stalin as “an imperial conqueror that never fully shed his revolution-ary ideology” (403). Yet the ideology can hardly be found in Stalin’s actions at the confer-ence. The Soviet leader comes off as a shrewd autocrat, a master of realpolitik, only just a bit paranoid. The reader is encouraged to compare Stalin’s regime and bureaucracy with imperial Russia and even Muscovy. For instance, Stalin’s attitude toward prisoners of war, Plokhy writes, was the continuation of “the age-old tradition of the tsars of Muscovy. . . . The fact that the revolution had to remove the tsar had changed little in the mentality of the rulers” (306). This is a slippery comparison, unfair to the last Romanovs and the late imperial society. In another slip, the book calls Maksim Litvinov and Maiskii “the primary architects of new Soviet foreign policy” (140). In fact, only Stalin himself deserved that characterization.

Maiskii wrote to another Old Bolshevik, Aleksandra Kollontai: “Seventy-fi ve percent of the conference decisions are our decisions, particularly on the Polish question, Yugosla-via, and reparations” (333). The book demonstrates, however, how quickly triumphalism leads to trouble. The gains at Yalta produced euphoria in Soviet ranks, and even in the Kremlin. This euphoria encouraged Stalin to push Soviet demands further, but to his sur-prise the Yalta framework began to crumble, and the U.S.-British unity began to emerge. In a bipolar world, Stalin’s triangular diplomacy could not last.

Vladislav Zubok

Temple University

China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–Present. Ed. Thomas P. Bernstein and Hua-yu Li. Harvard Cold War Series. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010. xii, 550 pp. Notes. Index. $110.00, hard bound.

As the Sino-Soviet friendship song proclaimed, China and the Soviet Union would be brothers forever. Brotherly relations have proceeded far from simply, however, involving Chinese emulation of the USSR in the 1950s, rejection of Soviet policies in the 1960s and 1970s, mutual support for common reform goals in the 1980s, Chinese feelings of betrayal by Mikhail Gorbachev and suspicion of Boris El�tsin in the early 1990s, and fi nally, over the past decade, gradual acceptance of the other’s strengths and weaknesses. Although this tale of less than brotherly love is a familiar one, this volume provides a wealth of detail, based on extensive fi eld research and archival work, explaining exactly how, what, and why China borrowed from Soviet experience. Resulting from a 2007 international confer-ence involving established scholars and younger researchers, the volume also goes well beyond conventional wisdom in the study of Sino-Soviet alliance relations to address the complex set of circumstances that set limits to Chinese emulation and to the Sino-Soviet relationship itself.

As several of the volume’s authors explain, when we speak of China adopting the “So-viet” model, what we really mean is Stalinism. Although early Chinese communists were acquainted with and infl uenced by the works of Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin,

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