Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

Recent Books

January/February 2020 193

Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free

to Punish

BY CHARLES J. HALPERIN.

University of Pittsburg Press, 2019,

378 pp.

Ivan the Terrible is most commonly

associated with the oprichnina—the

seven years of atrocity and devastation

that he inflicted on his country.

Halperin describes Ivan as “the first

ruler of Muscovy”—it would be

ahistorical, he notes, to use “Russia”

when writing about the sixteenth

century—“to employ mass terror as a

political instrument,” a practice that

vanished until Joseph Stalin revived it

three and a half centuries later. Yet in

his meticulous book, Halperin cautions

historians against reducing Ivan’s

contradictory personality to that of a

mere sadistic tyrant. Halperin does not

share the common view that the

gratuitous savageries of the oprichnina

made it worse than the violence in

western Europe brought about by

religious strife, class warfare, or ethnic

bigotry during the same time period. In

a contrarian spirit, he insists that Ivan’s

actions do not distinguish him from

other monarchs from that era, such as

Henry VIII of England and Philip II of

Spain. To account for the oprichnina,

Halperin focuses on Ivan’s interaction

with a Muscovite society overstrained

by an “unprecedented and intolerable

level of elite and popular social mobility.”

Ivan’s introduction of repressive meas-

ures exacerbated the preexisting social

instability before spiraling into mass

terror and executions.

Washington grew increasingly suspicious
of each other, and by the time the last
air base was closed, in May 1945, the
allies had become rivals.

Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold
War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet
Tajikistan
BY ARTEMY M. KALINOVSKY.
Cornell University Press, 2018, 336 pp.

How did the Soviet Union mobilize for
modernization and industrialization
after Joseph Stalin died, in 1953, and
the communist leadership ceased to rely
on terror and mass forced labor? In
researching grand projects in Soviet
Tajikistan, such as the construction of the
Nurek Dam, Kalinovsky discovered that
leaders grew more careful in order to
avoid the disastrous consequences of
Stalin’s ruthless industrialization. They
repeatedly revised their plans, as well,
when they learned that their presump-
tions were wrong: for instance, when they
realized that Central Asian peasants
were not anxious to move to cities.
Kalinovsky’s illuminating book puts
special emphasis on the ironies, contra-
dictions, and tensions involved in Soviet
modernization. Despite the communist
state’s staunch anticolonialism and
anti-imperialism, its policies in Central
Asia acquired an unmistakable imperial
quality. One example was the attempt
to bring kulturnost to far-flung territo-
ries by introducing “civilized” behav-
ioral norms and European art forms. As
the Soviet Union collapsed, the Soviet-
educated intelligentsia of the newly
independent Central Asian states com-
plained about the loss of their culture: a
classic postcolonial grievance.