Former Soviet Republics & Siberia in The Books Store

Five years after having been cut loose by the imploding Soviet Union the Central Asian republics—colloquially known as the Stans—were reeling from an identity crisis precipitated by economic collapse. Citizens of a great superpower woke up to find themselves in Third World anarchy. Closed societies were opening up for the first time. Guards at the Chinese-Kazakh border detained Rall for hours at one checkpoint after another; they still faxed Moscow for advice on how to handle him. They had never seen an American passport.

What began as a lark yielded a stunning series of revelations. Elderly people were starving to death in nations sitting atop the world’s largest untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Looters were cavalierly ambling around in flatbed trucks loaded with disinterred nuclear missiles. Statues of and slogans by crazy dictators were springing up as quickly as their corrupt military policemen could rob a passing motorist. And on the main drag in the capital city of each of these profoundly dysfunctional societies, a gleaming American embassy whose staff was quietly calling the shots in a new campaign to de-Russify access to those staggering energy resources.

CIA agents, oilmen and prostitutes mixed uneasily and awkwardly in ad hoc British-style pubs where beers cost a dollar—a day’s pay and more than enough to keep out the locals. In an extreme case of the "oil curse," wealth was being pillaged by U.S.-backed autocrats while their subjects plunged into poverty. Meanwhile Taliban-trained Islamic radicals were waiting to fill the vacuum.

It was a volatile mix. But did anybody care?

Rall’s magazine account of his 1997 misadventures through Central Asia, "Silk Road to Ruin," was soon followed by a feature he launched on his Los Angeles radio talk show. "Stan Watch: Breaking News from Central Asia," was intended as a send-up of Americans’ disinterest in foreign affairs. Again, the joke turned serious. "Stan Watch"’s obscure news stories about the world’s most remote countries, which many Americans couldn’t even pronounce, became wildly popular. NPR and the BBC simulcast it. A 1999 assassination attempt on Uzbek president Islam Karimov became a subject of intense speculation. Americans, it turned out, were interested in the outside world. They just couldn’t read about it in their local newspaper.

Soon, no one knew more about Central Asia than Rall.

This is a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed.

Brown's study is grounded in the life of the village and shtetl, in the personalities and small histories of everyday life in this area. In impressive detail, she documents how these regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named, and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups.

Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history.

We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of twentieth-century "progress."