Dmitry Gorenburg has written a most useful book on the subject of minority ethnic mobilization within the Russian Federation during the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin periods. Gorenburg sets out clearly the aims underlying his ambitious study. The book, he writes, “seeks to explain how state institutions affect ethnic mobilization,” through a focusing on the upsurge of nationalist sentiment that took place in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s (p. xi). In addition, the book also intends to challenge the widely held perception that “governing elites can kindle latent ethnic grievances virtually at will” and “to shift the study of ethnic mobilization from the whys of its emergence to the hows of its development as a political force” (p. xi). (It is unclear, at least to this reviewer, why the “whys” are not equally as important as the “hows”: Both questions, one would think, need to be carefully addressed by specialists.) In answering the “how” question, Gorenburg argues that “The nature of these processes … is determined by the ethnic and political institutions established by the state” (p. xii).

To test his core hypotheses, Gorenburg focuses upon four ethnic regions (autonomous republics) of the Russian Federation: Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia, and Khakassiya. Why were these four regions chosen? “The four were selected,” he explains, albeit somewhat vaguely, “because they differ along institutional, economic and cultural lines” (p. 19). Presumably, such words could be applied to virtually all of the autonomous republics within the Russian Federation. Since both Chuvashia and Bashkortostan share a border with Tatarstan, one can understand why these three republics might have been selected by Gorenburg. (Tatarstan and Bashkortostan are, of course, considered “Muslim” republics, while the titular people of Chuvashia are deemed to be “Orthodox Christians.”) But “shaminist” Khakassiya, with its small percentage of titular people (11% in 1989), is, by contrast, located a considerable distance away from those three regions, to the southeast. If the author wanted to select a “non-Muslim” region for comparative purposes, why did he not choose, say, either Tyva or North Osetiya, which, in my view, represent more interesting southern republics? The point I am making here is that he should have spent more than one sentence explaining why he chose the republics that he did.

The author describes the extensive fieldwork that he conducted in the four selected regions during the period from April 1995 through March 1998. He spent a total of 12 months in the field. While performing this fieldwork, he conducted interviews with nationalist activists, government officials, and local scholars; utilized archival materials describing the development of ethnic institutions in the regions; and carried out a content analysis of the local press in the four republics. He also analyzed electoral support for nationalist candidates, the size and frequency of public protests, and responses to polls and surveys conducted by social scientists. He did not sponsor any public opinion surveys himself, but he did assemble a newspaper database focusing on one newspaper in each region for the period 1988–93 (pp. 18–19, 121).

Somewhat surprisingly, most of what Gorenburg writes in his book is not directly underpinned by the fieldwork that he conducted, though that work obviously assisted him in arriving at his conclusions. More often than not, he relies on earlier pathbreaking research performed by others, in particular on “data from Western and Russian social science surveys conducted in 1993” (p. 119). In this regard, he makes extensive use of a national database of protest events that was compiled by Mark Beissinger, as well as of a chronology of “ethnic events” compiled by Galina Komarova of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow. He also makes abundant use of an ambitious preelection survey conducted by Timothy Colton and Jerry Hough in 16 autonomous republics of the Russian Federation in November and December of 1993, as well as of a January 1994 survey carried out by the Institute for Socio-Political Research in Moscow. Finally, he utilizes an important survey on language and nationality conducted by David Laitin and Jerry Hough in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan in 1993. Gorenburg summarizes the results of these pioneering surveys as they apply to the four republics he is studying in a number of useful tables provided in his book. It should be noted that all of these 1993 surveys were conducted some two to five years earlier than his own fieldwork.

On one point, Gorenburg appears at times to reflect the widespread optimism and naïveté characterizing the work of a number of U.S. academics during the 1990s. Thus, he contends that the four republics he is studying were undergoing a process of “democratic transition” (p. 2) and maintains rather sweepingly that “the interaction between mass-based nationalist movements and local political elites has important implications for the future of center-periphery relations in the Russian Federation, foreshadowing a time when the forces of civil society will be able to constrain the policy opinions available to the governing elites” (p. 257). Under President Vladimir Putin's program of “strengthening the vertical,” the role of civil society in Russia has, of course, been intentionally and significantly reduced.

It is interesting to note that toward the conclusion of his study, Gorenburg speculates on what the fate of the Russian regions would have been “had the Soviet state followed the Turkish route and refused to admit the existence of ethnic minorities within Russia” (p. 270). It is likely, he concludes, “that its subsequent efforts at Russification would have been even more successful than they were.” This appears to be the conclusion that has also been drawn by the Putin leadership, which may yet seek to inculcate something resembling the “Turkish model” into Russia.

Gorenburg believes that his study “has important implications for explaining ethnic mobilization in other parts of the world,” in addition to the former Soviet Union. There are, for example, he notes, “remarkable parallels between the mobilization process among indigenous ethnic groups in several countries [of Latin America] and ethnic mobilization in the Russian Federation” (pp. 261–62). While perhaps exaggerating the global significance of his research, Gorenburg is nonetheless correct, in my opinion, to highlight the potential value of his book for students of ethnic mobilization on an international scale.