Book Reviews 357

collaboration between political anthropology and political science. Social scientists working on
Central Asia have sometimes shown the blurring of boundaries between state and society and how
the state and its elites are far from a unitary, strategic, or cohesive actor (Jones Luong, 2002; Cummings
and Nørgaard, 2004; Radnitz, 2010; Cummings, Juraev, Pugachev, Temirkulov, Tiulegenov and
Tursunkulova, 2013). Writers have also been aware of the symbolic and performative nature of
statehood (Adams, 2010; Marat, Reeves, Raysanagam, and Beyer, 2013). This book is a call to
push further the work done independently by both disciplines, and it suggests useful collaborative
ventures for the future.
Border Work tells the story of one area of Kyrgyzstan where land and history are often contested.
But this contestation, as Reeves clearly writes, is not primordial or inexorable but born of very
specific contexts and actors that speak to the role of contingency and the possibilities for collaboration
and change. The conflicts that arise, Reeves argues, are not resource-driven but call for “the need to
recognize the immensely political nature of conflicts” (p. 239). Batken, in southwestern Kyrgyzstan,
and the two river valleys of Isfara and Sokh, contain enclaves and border disputes that arose after
the collapse of communism. Where previously borders were domestic to the Soviet Union and
therefore crossable without matters of citizenship arising, these have now become national borders
between independent republics. As a result, Tajiks and Uzbeks, for example, find themselves within
a new national sovereign Kyrgyz Republic. The book throughout is peppered with detailed and
engaging narratives provided by the everyday border lives of the region’s inhabitants, and these
vignettes blend seamlessly into the broader narrative of how individuals make sense of and enact
externally imposed conceptions of sovereignty.
The experience of sovereignty and new nationhood are experienced most acutely at the borders.
It is in these places of liminality and otherness that difference can be enacted and are institutionalized.
Reeves shows how this institutionalization can lead paradoxically to a weakening of the sense of
security, since new barriers to previously existing communal living are now erected, forestalling
attempts by local actors to delineate their cross-border interaction. Borders are not fixed, however:
they can (dis)appear or (de)materialize quite unexpectedly. “What comes into focus from this
perspective is the work of categorical production,” Reeves writes. “The practices of classification
and exclusion, infrastructures of provisioning, and technologies facilitating or limiting flow through
which bordering is practically done” (p. 140).
The concepts of strength and weakness are felt by Reeves to be unhelpful in capturing the
overall dynamics of state creation. Strength and weakness, she argues, convey an erroneous
delimitation of state and society, with the state through these terms wrongly portrayed as being
strong vis-à-vis society or a state grappling with its inability to implement policies in society. Instead,
she suggests that “where the state is conceived as a work-in-progress, and [we] therefore recognize
the “positional character of legality and illegality” (Heyman and Smart, 1999, p. 14), we can better
grasp when and why certain law-breaking activities come to be seen as corruptions of systems that
ought to function differently” (p. 15). This is demonstrated by the experience of one demobilized
border guard, Kuba, who shows the challenges of “enacting a law that is external to him” (p. 178).
The micro-stories Reeves tells, it is suggested in conclusion, contain macro implications for
development and securitization policies.

Sally Nikoline Cummings, University of St. Andrews

Billingsley, Dodge. Fangs of the Lone Wolf: Chechen Tactics in the Russian-Chechen Wars 1994–
2009. West Midlands, UK: Helion & Company, 2013. xviii + 181 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-
909384-77-4.

Until the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013, few Americans had heard of Chechnya, much
less of its twenty-year history of war with post-Soviet Russia. The revelation that two Chechen
brothers were behind those attacks briefly raised the profile of the small nation in the Northern
Caucasus into the public consciousness of the Western press and media. Yet the greater context of
358 The Russian Review

Chechnya’s modern history remains largely absent in the discourse on contemporary Russian
geopolitics. Since the declared ceasefire in 2009, Chechen insurgents have continued to engage in
border skirmishes and exchanges of terrorist acts with Russian forces. In spite of the continuing
military and political activity in the region, few publications have appeared in the 2010s that contribute
to the existing literature on the history of the region. Dodge Billingsley’s unique volume addresses
this void and makes a distinctive and unique contribution to the literature on the conflict.
Billingsley’s current work is unique in its contribution to the literature on Chechnya in two
crucial ways: it focuses on the guerilla war tactics frequently employed in this conflict from the
perspective and narratives of actual Chechen combatants; and it records and presents these narratives
from Billingsley’s situation as an embedded reporter, a participant-observer witnessing first hand
the unfolding war. The author’s experiences in reporting from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan
adds a particular salience to the volume, as well. His familiarity with other regions of conflict,
separatist movements, and guerilla warfare add both credibility and objectivity to the current volume,
and to each of the individual stories from ordinary combatants in extraordinary circumstances.
Fangs of the Lone Wolf presents thirty individual narratives as vignettes, each revealing both a
portrait of a particular technique or execution of guerilla warfare, and a portrait of an individual
Chechen combatant engaged in the war. These vignettes are the product of interviews Billingsley
conducted with Chechen combatants now living in exile. These extensive interviews, often lasting
days, are copiously illustrated in the volume by maps based on the individual accounts of battles,
both successful and not. The resulting volume of interviews presents, in the words of Les Grau in
his foreword, “not so much a history as an exploration into numerous fights, large and small” (p. xi).
This “exploration” ultimately reveals a great deal about the individual conflicts and the veterans
relating the stories of their success and defeats.
The volume opens with a seven-page overview chapter ambitiously entitled “A Brief History
of the Chechen Conflict.” While far from providing much detail or analysis, this introduction to the
region’s troubled past does provide the reader with a basic timeline, short backgrounds of the principal
players, and concise discussion of some of the fundamental issues of politics, geography, economics,
and religion that played into the genesis and continuation of the wars. This introduction also
establishes the voice and tone of the remainder of the volume; though Billingsley repeatedly insists
on his objectivity in reporting the details of his subjects, stating in the Preface that “his book does
not take sides in the conflict,” the lack of presentation of the Russian perspective in the first chapter
is exemplary on a present, though not overwhelming, bias toward the Chechen side of the war
(p. xv). For example, while the bulk of the brief introduction is spent on elucidating the positions
and tactics of the numerous Chechen leaders during the two wars, there is scant mention of the
Russian leadership, most notably of Sergei Lebed, who negotiated the end of the first Chechen War
with Aslan Maskhadov, and who receives only a footnote in the chapter. Fortunately, the bias
toward the Chechens is neither militant nor strident and, once noted, does not lessen or demean the
importance of the volume overall.
The following nine chapters are dedicated to the individual accounts of the Chechen veterans
relating their personal stories of guerilla war in the region. Each chapter comprises two to five
individual accounts, and the chapters themselves can be divided into three thematic groups: Defense
(chaps. 2, 6, and 7), Attacks (chaps. 4, 9 and 10), and Strategy (chaps. 3, 5, and 8). There is also a
brief eleventh chapter—Conclusions—that summarizes the roles of technology, military professionals,
tactics, and logistics in the two wars. It also makes an explicit statement about the 2009 Russian end
to the counterinsurgency movement, “The was not over—it was just much lower key and had spread
across the region into Dagestan and Ingushetia” (p. 169).
The success of Billingsley’s volume is unquestionably in the individual vignette of the Chechen
veterans. Each account is presented with a heading, the soldiers’ names, and the “Background,” or
narration, with selected quotations from the soldiers’ stories. Finally, there is a “Commentary”
section for each vignette, which combines details and quotations from the soldiers’ interviews with
editorial analysis provided by Billingsley. For example, following the story of a Chechen soldier
breaking out of an encirclement, the author comments: “Breaking out, or, more accurately, slipping
 Book Reviews 359

through their own lines, was a chronic problem for the Russians. In one instance or another, Chechen
groups were able to find a way out of Russian encirclements (p.53). The overall effect of this
structure to the vignettes is that of a strongly opinionated documentary: the presentation of well
selected illustrative accounts, followed by persuasive analysis of the author/director. Billingsley’s
own background as a documentary filmmaker, in this respect, serves him and his volume well.
Fangs of the Lone Wolf presents a unique and effective study of the soldiers, terrain, and tactics
of the complex and largely undocumented Chechen wars. Billingsley has carefully constructed an
ethnographic portrait of the guerilla fighters and their individual experiences in the conflict that
present the reader with a palpable perspective on the events of the last two decades in the Northern
Caucasus. The volume is essential reading for scholars of the region seeking deeper understanding
of the combatants and their tactics, or for any interested reader trying to make sense of the seemingly
endless conflict in Chechnya.

Thomas Garza, University of Texas

Josephson, Paul R. The Conquest of the Russian Arctic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2014. x + 441 pp. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-674-72890-5.

A warming climate—along with improvements in technologies of transportation, oil-and-gas sensing,

and extraction—has spurred new interest in the natural (especially petrochemical and metallurgical)
resources of the Arctic, at least among those nations whose territories extend into these forbidding
realms. Russia, with one-quarter of the world’s total Arctic landmass, is currently playing a leading
role here, its government seeing the potential wealth of the region as central to the country’s efforts
to regain its status as an economic and military superpower. This Arctic focus, however, is not new
to Russia. Nearly a century ago, following sporadic and lackluster efforts in the preRevolutionary
period, the Bolsheviks undertook a determined assault on the far north, seeing it—with its withering
climate and impenetrable geography—as among the primary “fortresses” that communism would
successfully “storm.” The Stalinist state, in particular, made assimilating the area a top priority,
constructing and operating huge new factories, plants, mines, and whole cities with scant regard for
human or environmental costs. Millions of Soviet citizens were moved, often as political prisoners,
and compelled to live, work, and die in these high latitudes. The commodities they produced—
chemicals, minerals, metals, timber—underpinned the Soviet economy for decades. Even indigenous
peoples and their ways of life, such as reindeer-herding, were reshaped to fit Soviet priorities. Arctic
enthusiasm eventually petered out, however. The waning Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev and
the struggling Russia of Boris Yeltsin lacked the funds and had other concerns. In the past few
years, however, Vladimir Putin and DmitriiMedvedev have returned Russia to the region with renewed
vigor.
This is the basic story told here by Paul R. Josephson, a specialist in the History of Science and
Technology with a formidable scholarly record in Russian Environmental History. Much of the
basic narrative—personalities, peoples, institutions, events—can be found in earlier studies by John
McCannon, Yuri Slezkine, and others, but Josephson also gives us much that is new and valuable.
His choice to deal only with a small section of the Russian Arctic (west of Novaia Zemlia) allows
greater depth of analysis and facilitates a satisfyingly exhaustive treatment of a welter of social,
environmental, and cultural issues; and many of these are illustrated with examples or details from
new archival sources.
Perhaps most importantly, Josephson keeps a constant eye on the present. Space precludes
adequate treatment of his excellent and lengthy last chapter, which treats the “paradoxes” of Putin-
era Arctic policy—characterized by strong political support and generous funding for key large-
scale projects against a backdrop of continuing decline in population, overall infrastructure, and
public and environmental health in the far north more generally. As Josephson makes clear, Putin’s
government, despite some nods to environmental management, still does not see the Arctic holistically,
as a rich but fragile environment needing careful management and long-term strategies for sustainable