Ten Years That Shook the World by Valery BoldinReview by: Robert LegvoldForeign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1994), pp. 174-175Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20046792 .

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Recent Books

The University of Notre Dame Press, with the support of the Ford Foundation,

does a great service in making available to

an English-speaking readership the full

text of this exhaustive report on human

rights violations in Chile, in particular the

most serious, which resulted in deaths

and disappearances committed by the

Pinochet dictatorship. In two strikingly sober and comprehensive volumes the

Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, established by Presi

dent Patricio Aylwin following his inau

guration in 1990, documents the tragic facts of those years, names the victims and

provides a detailed history of the institu

tional and historical context within which

these crimes occurred. Despite the con

straints imposed on the commission by

the political transition, the sheer power and transparent honesty of its findings did indeed achieve the catharsis for which

Aylwin hoped. The commission's report thus played a critical role in the successful

democratization of Chile.

Beyond the Chilean setting, this is

also a remarkable document of our

times. The thoughtful comparative introduction by Jos? Zalaquett, in par

ticular, should be required reading for

those who must confront the now

recurrent and difficult problem of how

democratic successor regimes balance

justice, retribution and truth in the

aftermath of massive and systemic vio

lations of human rights by their dicta

torial predecessors.

The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now.

BY ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO. New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 288 pp.

$23.00.

Despite the overblown claims by David

Remnick on the cover of this book, where

he calls Alma Guillermoprieto Latin America's Orwell {The New Yorker writers

should have the good sense not to pro claim each other's brilliance in public), this collection of letters, originally writ

ten for that magazine between 1989 and

1993, offers many fascinating insights.

Guillermoprieto focuses principally on

urban Latin America. Among the best

vignettes here is a marvelously crafted

account of Mexico City garbage pickers and their political links to the pri, Mex

ico's ruling political party; it is a story that

tells more about the Mexican regime than

50 turgid accounts by political scientists.

Equally instructive is an account of the

weird and wonderful world of Brazilian pol itics and telenovelaswhere life and art (or at

least life and popular culture) are sometimes

so interwoven that it is difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. Over

all this book is as good a

place to begin as

anywhere for those who want a better feel for

the vicissitudes, follies and heroic everyday

struggle for survival in Latin America today.

Eastern Europe and The Former Soviet

Republies ROBERT LEGVOLD

Ten Years that Shook the World, by

valery boldin. New York: Basic

Books, 1994, 310 pp. $25.00.

Fascinating as this book is, the reader

would be mistaken to see in it more than a

shadow of the truth. Boldin, once a Pravda

[174] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume73No.4

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Recent Books

Journalist, then for more than a decade a

key assistant to Mikhail Gorbachev, and

finally his chief of staff, writes bitterly about his former boss, and even more so

about Gorbachev's wife. Earlier he proved his bitterness by joining the plotters of the failed August 1991 coup d'?tat, although here he feigns wide-eyed innocence.

One has trouble figuring out why Boldin worked so long for a man he dis

liked so early. Long before Gorbachev succeeded to the top post and began tam

pering with the system, Boldin had dis covered in him a man of petty vanity?

uncharitable, even cruel, toward underlings and unrelentingly demanding. Yet, for all

the bile and accompanying distortion, his

account carries more than a small degree of conviction. One sees another Gorbachev

unlike the heroic, larger-than-life Time

magazine "man of the decade." Not only was he (and Raisa), to judge from numer

ous specific incidents, charmed and pre

occupied with his public image?particu

larly in the West?but he lacked impor tant leadership qualities. Boldin supplies plenty of evidence that Gorbachev found

it easier to let himself be carried along by events than to impose himself on them, that he was often confused and rattled by the forces he had unleashed, and that

ultimately he was defeated by an absence

of deep conviction save for a foggy and

disorienting residual of socialist idealism.

Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse

of the Soviet Union, by ronald

grigor suny. Palo Alto: Stanford

University Press, 1994, 200 pp. $35.00

(paper, $13.95).

Here is the book of choice if one wants a

succinct treatment of nationalism past and present in the former Soviet Union.

Suny, a noted historian of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan and more

broadly of the late Imperial Russian and

early Soviet periods, compresses into a

little more than 150 pages incisive sum

maries of nationalism among all the key

peoples in the Russian empire before

1917. To this he adds an analysis of the

notions?initially rather liberal ones?

that Lenin brought to the problem of

nationalism and self-determination, of

the evolution away from these ideas and

the particular warp that Stalin gave them, and the hidden problems silently swelling as the regime went about its authoritar

ian and repressive objectives while simul

taneously fostering forces and features

guaranteed to undermine them.

Suny brings to the subject a

particu

larly subtle understanding of what nation

alism and nationality are all about, one that

makes these phenomena modern, subject to invention and constantly evolving (not

mystical, eternal, inevitable or primordial). This in turn permits a probing exploration of the relationships between class and

nationalism, the state and nationality. The

stage is then set for an imaginative, pene

trating explanation of the empire's collapse and the emergence of new states, not the

crude, commonplace notion that the Soviet

"national question" was by Gorbachev's day

a time bomb sure to go off when the system was josded. Thus, the concluding chapter

is something of a disappointment when it

delivers the latter;?albeit in sophisticated form?rather than the former.

To order any book reviewed or advertised in Foreign Affairs, call 1-800-255-2665.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS July/August 1994 U75]

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