HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

Reviews 257of the few real programmatic statements of the Ukrainian dissident movement— Fanner presents the reader with a complete, if brief, overview.Particularly interesting are the statistical analyses of ages, occupations, birthplaces,and places of arrest of known dissidents.Whatever shortcomings may be found in Professor Farmer's work palebeside the consideration that this is the first serious monograph to appear onan issue crucial to understanding the contemporary Soviet Union. It willremain a standard against which further research can be measured, and it hasperformed a great service by defining problems which other scholars must nowinvestigate.JAMES E. MACEHarvard UniversityETHNIC NATIONALITIES IN THE SOVIET UNION: SOCIOLOGICAL PER-SPECTIVES ON A HISTORICAL PROBLEM. By Rocky L. Rockett. NewYork: Praeger Publishers, 1981. xiii + 171 pp.In these days of publish or perish some may find solace in the fact that even amajor publishing house occasionally lets a real howler slip into print. In a workwhich purports to apply sociological analysis to the Soviet Union's "ethnic"nationalities (is there any other kind?), the author of this book managed toignore almost all of the most relevant literature on Soviet nationalities as wellas the most important works on the sociology of nationalism.The author is evidently not burdened with excessive research tools orknowledge of the field in which he has chosen to write. Except for oneRussian-language reference to the 1970 census, he cites only works available inEnglish. Among theoretical works on the sociology of nationalism, few wouldignore Karl Deutsch's Nationalism and Social Communication or AnthonySmith's two books, Theories of Nationalism and Nationalism in the TwentiethCentury: Dr. Rockett is evidently unaware of their existence. Nor does heseem to be aware of the considerable Soviet literature on ethnic processes. It isdifficult to even conceive of a serious study of Soviet nationalities which doesnot make use of V. I. Kozlov's Natsionalnosti SSSR (Ètno-demograficheskiiobzor), as the author would have discovered had he so much as read thefootnotes to those works which he does cite.Dr. Rockett makes no attempt to survey all Soviet nationalities, confininghimself to Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Armenians, Jews, and Uzbeks.Such an approach could have been productive had it been accompanied by aconcise but solid survey of Soviet nationalities policy in general. What theauthor provides in the way of an overview is, unfortunately, quite superficial.