BOOK REVIEWS

memory, thus enabling it to accuse the Jews of confiscating the memory of the victims
of communism through the Holocaust, the latter perceived by these negators as a Jewish
"monopoly on sufferance" (pp. xxii-xxiv).
Also important to the political scientist is the significance of the figure of Ion
Antonescu in the fate of the Romanian Jewry, which is astutely analyzed in Chapter 10.
A difficult historical ambivalence accompanies the Marshall: while the Jews in Bessara-
bia, Bukovina, and Transnistria can blame their massacre on Antonescu, those from
Wallachia, Moldavia, and southern Transylvania cannot. Again, as Ioanid presents it,
looking into postcommunist Romania through this ambivalence and general lack of
historical knowledge about the Holocaust will disquietedly rejoin the researcher with the
most recently erected statues of Ion Antonescu and even streets named after him, his
symbol as a "great patriot" downplaying his image of "war criminal" (p. 287).
Ioanid's book is important in a third aspect, namely in its consequences for democratic
theory and the acceptance of otherness. Although primarily marked, Jews were not the
only ones targeted by the Romanian fascist regime. So were other ethnocultural and
religious minorities, such as the Roma, Ukrainians, even Greeks (perceived as a
Phanariot residue), Innocentists, and Baptists. Hence, the book dedicates an entire
chapter to the Roma Holocaust (calling the Roma "Gypsy" according to those times'
discursive practices) and their deportation and livelihood in a sinister Transnistria.
Finally, Radu Ioanid succinctly expresses his assessment of the death and survival of
the Romanian Jews, suggesting that on account of the Stalingrad battle, the Jews were
only pawns in a deadly game of "malice, greed, and opportunism" (p. 295) . The issue
of Jews in Romania has been grafted both on a popular and intellectual history of
anti-Semitism and a sort of governmental Kafkaesque infernal bureaucratic machine,
issuing contradictory (dis)orders and a confused Holocaust (p. 175). Thanks to Ioanid's
ability to explain the present through the past, The Holocaust in Romania represents a
beautiful, tragic, and highly academic book for anyone interested in the history of
(in)tolerance in Romania.
Denise Roman
York University

NOTES
I. Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania, trans. Pctcr Heincgg
(New York: East European Monographs, 1990).
2. Mihail Sebastian, Jurnal 1935-1944 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996), p.299.

Jane I. Dawson, Eco-nationalism: Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia,

Lithuania, and Ukraine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, xii, 221 pp. ISBN
0-8223-1831-8 (hbk) U.S.$49.95; 0-8223-1837-7 (pbk) U.S.$16.95.

This well-organized study examines the relationship between two types of social
movements in the waning years of the Soviet Union: protests against nuclear power

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plants in the wake of Chernobyl', and demands for national independence or regional
autonomy.
Dawson surveys developments in several former Soviet republics, and then presents
detailed case studies of anti-nuclear protests against the Ignalina AES (atomic energy
station) in Lithuania. the Khmelnitskii AES in Ukraine, the planned nuclear heating
facility in Gor'kii, and stations in the Crimea, Tatarstan, and (in a brief discussion)
Armenia. She relies on press accounts and in most cases on interviews with many of the
participants in these protests, and on many unpublished documents. These sources allow
Dawson to portray the changing attitudes and intentions behind these movements. She
employs two theoretical approaches: resource-mobilization theory, which focuses on the
practical obstacles social groups have to overcome in order to form and meet, and
identity-expression theory, which highlights the opportunities movements provide for
definition and assertion of individual and group identity.
The study makes two main points. First, anti-nuclear movements usually played a
catalytic role. Nuclear plants often served as the first concern around which people
organized informal groups and began protests in 1987-1988, because this issue was
politically safe. Such efforts broke the ice for later, more politically explosive move-
ments in 1988-1989. Second, the anti-nuclear protests had different meanings in
different regions. On one extreme, in Lithuania and Armenia, which had strong but
suppressed national identities, the environmental movement indirectly reflected underly-
ing aspirations for national independence which were too threatening to be expressed
openly at first. In these cases, Dawson argues, the environmental movement served as a
surrogate for a nationalist movement that ultimately supplanted it in 1989-1991. On the
other extreme, in Gor'kii, the environmental movement was not a pretext for nationalist
desires but expressed wide spread concerns for safety and conservation. In between these
extremes, anti-nuclear protests in Ukraine, the Tatar republic, and the Crimea reflected
both environmental concerns and nationalist attitudes. These cases differed from Lithua-
nia and Armenia in part because nationalism in Ukraine, Tataria and the Crimea was
inclusive and civic much more than exclusive and ethnic. In these regions, both policy
(Russification or Sovietization) and social changes (such as intermarriage) had weakened
and confused the type of ethnic identity that survived in a much stronger form in regions
like Lithuania and Armenia.
The development of these movements corresponded to the theoretical perspectives
Dawson employs. As resource-mobilization theory would predict, the initial movements,
both environmental and nationalist, had extremely limited material resources and access
to meeting sites, and had to rely on non-institutionalized, personal connections. Conse-
quently they resorted to disruptive actions such as picketing, hunger strikes, and mass
protests. After Gorbachev established the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, these
disruptive efforts declined rapidly as movements shifted their attention to elections and
elected soviets, which provided an established forum and opportunity for institutional-
ized organization. Likewise, the anti-nuclear movements provided opportunities for
groups to explore and define their identities, and in that process the movement's
character often changed and its focus shifted from a narrow environmental focus to
broader concerns about national autonomy.
A number of other interesting points come out in Dawson's discussion. While

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scientists in various specialties initiated many of the movements, nuclear scientists and
other specialists working in power stations almost never began them or even became
involved. Governmental authorities instead often sent such specialists to defend nuclear
energy against the protesters. Dawson notes that the protest movements demoralized
these people. In the Gor'kii case, the Soviet government had representatives of the
U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) hold an open meeting, but the
protesters dismissed the IAEA's defense of the planned nuclear heating plants on the
grounds its representatives were biased members of the international atomic "mafia."
Dawson also noted that Russians in Gor'kii found it much easier to organize against the
nuclear plants than for democratic government.
Dawson's study is stimulating, but also disillusioning for those of us with an
environmentalist perspective, because in all of her cases (and apparently in general) the
environmental movement lost out to nationalist or regionalist concerns. In Lithuania, the
initially fierce opposition to the Ignalina AES as a disaster of Soviet imperialism
reversed to support for maintaining the station, once Lithuania became independent and
had to provide for its own energy needs. In Russia and Ukraine, the new parliaments
issued moratoria on further nuclear plant construction in summer 1990, but a few years
after the USSR collapsed both countries eliminated the moratoria and reinitiated plant
operation and construction to meet desperate energy needs. Thus when they became
independent these countries came to see the nuclear plants as a means to achieve energy
self-sufficiency, the same reasons for which the Soviet Union established the plants in
the first place. The anti-nuclear movements were left in conditions of inadequate
resources not so far from where they were in 1987, but now dependent on foreign
support from NGOs such as Greenpeace and with nothing like the kind of following they
developed in 1988-1989.
Dawson's study is concise and theory driven, and some readers might have wanted
more detail on the case studies she examined and on the importance of ethnic
nationalism in Ukraine and Tataria. Such topics would require a more focused and less
comparative study, and would be one direction that research could follow to investigate
further the linkages Dawson discerns. Eco-nationalism is a valuable contribution that
articulates more clearly than, previous studies the relationships between important
movements that combined to bring down the Soviet Union, and provides yet another
sobering perspective on the sad state of the region today. This book could be used in
advanced undergraduate courses on the former Soviet Union or on international or
comparative environmental issues, and would be especially valuable for graduate courses
on related topics as an example of an innovative approach and the application of theory
to data .
Mark B. Tauger
West Virginia University

Gary C. Fouse, The Languages of the Former Soviet Republics: Their History and
Development. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000, 457 pp.

In his introduction, Gary C. Fouse defines this book by what it is not; it is neither

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