Familiar Strangers

This book makes an important contribution to the study of nationality in the Soviet Union Recommended. --CHOICE Erik Scott's fascinating and groundbreaking study upends the conventional view that the Soviet Union's multiethnic empire possessed an ethnic Russian core, and reshapes how we understand national minorities in the USSR and the nature of the Soviet empire. The book is meticulously researched and beautifully written, with rich details and surprising material. His analysis calls to mind other cases of prominent minorities in revolution, such as the Alawites in Syria and the Sunni minority in Ba'athist Iraq. The book will be of great interest not only to students of Georgia, the Soviet Union, and Stalinism, but also to those interested in revolution and empire. - Golfo Alexopoulos, University of South Florida Familiar Strangers provocatively explores how internally mobile Soviet Georgians successfully performed their otherness for a pan-Soviet audience, without sacrificing the core of their difference. In a superb study that ranges from politics to cuisine to music to market trade to film, Scott challenges conventional notions of the 'Soviet empire, ' showing how the view from the periphery provides a unique yardstick to measure the rise and fall of the Soviet project of domestic internationalism. -Diane P. Koenker, author of Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream Familiar Strangers tells us that the Soviet Union made modern Georgia in two ways. First, it gave Georgians a mass of resources to promote and protect their language, food, and culture, in ways that few other modern states would have countenanced. Second, it gave them an enormous space in which to project an identity and participate in global geopolitics. From Stalin to the Moscow restaurant table, from the folkloric stage to the black market, and from the heights of Soviet politics to the center of its break-up, Scott gives us revealing snapshots of one of the country's great internal diasporas. Those seeking a thoughtful and accessible history of Georgians and the question of nationality in the USSR will be deeply satisfied. -Yanni Kotsonis, New York University