Primary sources are certainly essential to good history writing, but so is an effort to place one's work in the context of expert debates, rather than reinventing the wheel. Haslam claims that "no consecutive narrative yet exists that uses Russian-language archives throughout from 1945 to 1989...
Eugene M. Avrutin's new book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the complexity of "defining the Jew" in late imperial Russia. Avrutin's primary focus is on the Russian government's attempts to document and administrate its Jewish population. Drawing on a wealth of ...