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“... Yuri Slezkine​ , a master stylist as well as a first-class historian, is the least predictable of scholars. Still, it comes as a surprise to find that the book he has now produced, after long gestation, is a Soviet War and Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War ...”

“... book, should be compulsory reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject. Yuri Slezkine dedicates the book to his grandmother: not the Russian noblewoman who, despite having ‘lost everything she owned in the Revolution’, ‘at the end of her life … was a loyal Soviet citizen at peace with her past and at home in her ...”

“... of a different order from its effect in the 19th. The liberal-bourgeois century turned into what Yuri Slezkine in his book of that title calls ‘the Jewish Century’.1 The American Jewish community became the largest by far in the Western diaspora. Unlike any other diaspora in the developed countries, it was overwhelmingly composed of poor ...”