The book Soviet Postcolonial Studies is an important contribution to continuing debates on Soviet colonialism and post-colonialism. Epp Annus, one of the leading scholars of Baltic post-colonialism studies, engages in her new book with important theoretical questions about colonialism, internal colonization, modernity, civilization, occupation, nationalism, and the nation-state in the context of, primarily, the occupation and incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. The book explores why colonialism was not an acceptable paradigm among Soviet Union scholars after WWII when anti-colonial liberation movements emerged in Africa and revisits Marxists critique of western colonialism as capitalism. Epp Annus asserts that colonization of the modern nation-state is possible. Postwar Soviet colonialism is regarded as a product of the era of late colonialism, which differed significantly from the classical era of colonialism.

The chapters of the book provide justification and framework for conceptualizing Soviet postcolonial studies. Soviet postcolonial studies should focus on “Soviet borderlands,” the areas inside the Soviet Union, as well as east central Europe and Mongolia (5). The empirical data in the book include personal narratives and recollections from various fictional and non-fictional (mostly Estonian) sources. Chapter 1 analyses the notion of an “empire,” suggesting that the USSR gradually developed into an empire. Chapter 2 introduces Soviet post-colonial area studies by incorporating a variety of approaches from “postcolonial research into the Tsarist era” (62) to postcolonial studies of post-communist societies. Chapter 3 explores the colonization of modern nation states and suggests that in the Baltics occupation developed into the colonial situation. Chapter 4 explores interconnections of Soviet modernity and Soviet coloniality and argues that Soviet modernity is both an imperial and subaltern modernity. Chapter 5 analyzes the continuities between tsarist and Soviet politics of the borderlands. Chapter 6 explores the juxtaposition of the colonizer and the colonized by focusing on Soviet–era Jewish intellectuals and retired military or security officers in Estonia. Chapter 7 inquires into everyday life and shaping colonial subjectivities through Soviet housing projects. The final Consequences section argues that summer homesteads were places of dissensus, which reshaped the sensible and “fed into the continual fracturing of consent to the regime” (22).

In the book Soviet colonialism is primarily studied as a discursive formation. Unlike the Soviet/post-Soviet distinction, colonialism/post-colonialism do not mark distinct historical eras. The author claims that coloniality, decolonization, and postcoloniality coexisted at the same time since “Soviet colonial rule in the Baltics, as well as in East Central Europe, was thus never fully established, anticolonial discourses were always present in the Soviet borderlands” (103). In this context, Annus argues that there was a post-colonial phase in the 1960s in some countries in east central Europe (196) and finishes the book by stating that “the end of the Soviet postcolonial is nowhere to be seen” (242). The author suggests using the concepts “colonial situation” (101) and “colonial matrix of power” to define the region. Annus argues that “the forced reorganization of all levels of social existence, imposed by an ethnically dissimilar legal entity and exerting its influence from outside the state's traditional territory, is understood there as an establishment of a colonial matrix of power” (14).

The book impresses in its scope and provides important arguments for global postcolonial studies (David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 [Jan. 2001]:111–28) by including the Baltic case. Nevertheless, like earlier works before (see, Violeta Kelertas Baltic Postcolonialism, Rodopi, 2006), it exposes the limits of post-colonial approach in the case of the Baltic countries. The book's subtitle suggests that this is A View from the Western Borderlands, but whose “view” and “voice” does it represent? Other scholars outside predominantly literary and cultural studies have not engaged postcolonial approaches in their works (see also Chapter 2). Could postcolonialism become a new way to claim recognition and give the Baltic nations voice and global credibility in the twenty-first century? Beyond a scholarly gaze at local people as colonial or postcolonial subjects, it is unlikely that the Balts would claim this position for themselves. While for African nations, the voice of postcolonial thinkers like Franz Fanon was liberating, for the Balts it may remind them of their historical predicament, which they have always tried to escape. In this context, Soviet postcolonial studies reinscribe the localized and ethnicized national continuity as well as the subaltern position, ignoring how multiethnic and multicultural, as well as globalized this region has been.