The Affirmative Action Empire

"In the popular imagination, the Soviet Union was always synonymous with Russia, but in the U.S.S.R.'s early days Soviet leaders had a very different idea in mind: they wanted to establish a true multinational, multiethnic empire. . . . Yet, as Martin shows in this fascinating history, simply giving an order was not enough, even in the Stalin years, and the complex relationship between socialism and nationalism in places like Ukraine often frustrated Soviet intentions."—The New Yorker, June 10, 2002

"Martin significantly advances our understanding of the early, formative years of Soviet nationality policy, providing a subtle and lucid reconstruction of its unique conceptual underpinnings and its stormy evolution. . . . Martin's work is more than an important contribution to the field of Soviet history; it is a critical piece in comprehending contemporary Ukrainian and Russian nationality."—Foreign Affairs, May/June 2002

"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, February 12, 2004