Ethnicity and Nationalism in Russia, the Cis and the Baltic States

by Christopher Williams, Thanassis D. Sfikas, Thanasis D. Sfikas

Release Date: February, 1999

Edition: Hardcover

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Ignorance as scholarship

I did not like the book. It is poorly written and even more poorly proofread. For a person knowing something about the area, it might be painful to read numerous inaccuracies and misrepresentations of the facts. It is a real shame that there are a couple of really good articles (e.g., Yemelyanova or Donskis) mixed together with nationalistic pieces like that of Stepanenko/Sorokopud or pseudo-scholar gibberish like that of Chuprov/Zubok. The editors' lack of understanding of the subject is betrayed by phrases like "Russia's" (not "Soviet," as it should be) "successor states", Ukraine's "rapid economic reform" and by nonsensical assertions about the "stable economic and political situation" in Russia in 1998. Steve Carter apparently does not know that George Vernadsky could borrow the ideas of noosphere from his father Vladimir Vernadsky, who actually authored the term, rather than from Teilhard de Chardin who in his own turn borrowed it from Vernadsky. A condescending and often arrogant attitude of the authors toward what they call the Russian question is unfortunately becoming a rather typical sign of British scholarship on Russia and Eastern Europe. Were it offset by a brilliant scholarship, we might have excused it. A truly sad part of the story is that this kind of an attitude is often exhibited in direct proportion to the degree of one's own personal ignorance in the matters that are supposedly made a subject of expert analysis. Too bad Gellner is no longer around.