Recent BooksSeptember/October 2019 235rise in right-wing nativism in Europe and
the United States, further undermining
Western liberalism’s claim to moral and
political superiority.Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion,
Politics, and Strategy
BY DMITRY ADAMSKY. Stanford
University Press, 2019, 376 pp.The role o the Russian Orthodox
Church in post-Soviet Russian society
has been much discussed in recent years,
but Adamsky is the ¿rst to examine the
church’s place in the nuclear military-
industrial complex. He details how a
formerly persecuted church made itsel
indispensable to Russia’s nuclear forces
by providing them with ideological
legitimation as they faced a catastrophic
loss o funding and social prestige in the
early 1990s. Three decades later, the
church has become a prominent presence
throughout the entire military, but the
nuclear branch stands out as the most
imbued with clericalism. Priests regu-
larly minister to its service members,
joining their Çock on operational
missions. The church has built houses
o worship on all o Russia’s nuclear
bases, Orthodox icons grace nuclear
weapons platforms, and commanders
have increasingly incorporated religious
ideas into their strategic thinking.
Adamsky convincingly shows that this
began as a grass-roots process, whereby
those o lower military rank recognized
priests as a source o the kind o pastoral
and psychological support they sorely
needed in a high-stress work environ-
ment. Only later did the regime take
notice and seek to systematize the phe-
nomenon from above. The result is an
unprecedented nuclear-religious culture,reporter writing in the 1970s, the banya
was “the closest thing Russian males
[had] to a men’s club.” More recently, a
highly popular ¿lm depicted the banya
as a place for tough men who can stand
up for Russia against the corrupt and
decadent West.
School of Europeanness: Tolerance and
Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in
Latvia.
BY DACE DZENOVSKA. Cornell
University Press, 2018, 276 pp.
What does it take to become European?
For the countries o eastern Europe,
joining the ¤ was just the beginning.
What followed was a process o remaking
people and institutions in the name o
political liberalism. Dzenovska studied
this painstaking eort in Latvia, which
joined the ¤ in 2004. Her book is an
anthropological analysis o government
programs designed to promote tolerance
and to help the “not-yet-European”
Latvians break free o the toxic eects o
two dogmatic systems o thought: Soviet
communism and nationalism. She tells
fascinating stories o her encounters with
“tolerance workers” and their “students,”
as well as government ocials, border
guards and asylum seekers, and reveals
how the reeducation eort overlooked
the essential contradiction o promoting
inclusion in a country that had recently
liberated itsel from the Soviet Union
and embarked on an ethnonationalist
nation-building project. Limits to inclu-
sion are central to Dzenovska’s analysis o
contemporary Europeans polities that are
built on values o openness yet are forced
to keep their borders securely guarded.
Dzenovska’s critique is worth bearing in
mind as increased migration has led to a