Violence has been
inseparable from the human condition, so why pick on Russia? The
editors of this collection of scholarly essays fail to make their case,
but that doesn’t mean that many of the book’s articles aren’t worth
reading. Violence is a broad theme and the contributors to Times of Trouble explore
the subject along many avenues. Among the most interesting topics are
women writers who survived the Gulag, psychological violence in
Dostoyevsky, the curmudgeonly and skeptical late-Soviet novelist Viktor
Astaf’ev and an astute psychological examination of Stalinism whose
conclusion is that Stalin and his henchmen feared the Russian people as
much as the people feared them.
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