Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation

Abstract

Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation. By Dmitry P. Gorenburg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 312p. $75.00.Dmitry Gorenburg has written a most useful book on the subject of minority ethnic mobilization within the Russian Federation during the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin periods. Gorenburg sets out clearly the aims underlying his ambitious study. The book, he writes, “seeks to explain how state institutions affect ethnic mobilization,” through a focusing on the upsurge of nationalist sentiment that took place in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s (p. xi). In addition, the book also intends to challenge the widely held perception that “governing elites can kindle latent ethnic grievances virtually at will” and “to shift the study of ethnic mobilization from the whys of its emergence to the hows of its development as a political force” (p. xi). (It is unclear, at least to this reviewer, why the “whys” are not equally as important as the “hows”: Both questions, one would think, need to be carefully addressed by specialists.) In answering the “how” question, Gorenburg argues that “The nature of these processes … is determined by the ethnic and political institutions established by the state” (p. xii).