The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin

The Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin

The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms...

Terry Martin's Affirmative Action Empire is an exceptional and unique book, indispensable for any student of ethnic politics in the Soviet Union and its successor states, notably the Russian FederationIt is unique both in its comprehensive, in-depth treatment of the evolution of the Soviet nationalities policy from its inception until the end of the 1930s and in its reliance on Soviet archival sources that have become accessible only recently.... A major contribution to the history of the Soviet Union and to the study of ethnicity.

-- Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, Harvard University * Journal of Ukrainian Studies *

The real virtue of Martin's book—and all of the best new Soviet scholarship—is not in the theoretical model it propounds, but in the power of its details, gleaned from previously unknown documents.... Martin is able, for the first time, to explain what it was that the Soviet Union's leaders actually intended their nationality policy to achieve.... Reading Martin's work,... one is struck, above all, by how much stranger the Soviet Union is beginning to seem, in retrospect, than we thought it was at the time, and how much more perverse.... Reading this history also gives us in the West an insight, however narrow, into the turmoil experienced in the non-Russian lands of the former Soviet Union during the last decade. Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Georgia: these are now 'free' and independent states. Yet how real is this freedom? Might it not be another illusion, foisted upon them by a still powerful, and still much wealthier, Russian republic.

* The New York Review of Books *

Terry Martin is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780801486777
ISBN 10	0801486777
Title	The Affirmative Action Empire
Author	Terry Martin
Series	The Wilder House Series In Politics History And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cornell University Press
Year published	2001-11-01
Number of pages	528
Prizes	Winner of Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (American As.
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.