PositiveThe New York Times...the biography by William Taubman, a Russian specialist at Amherst College, is the first scholarly study of this Soviet leader based on a thorough examination of all the existing literature as well as the available archival sources and interviews with those who knew him. More than 10 years in the making, this lively narrative is likely to remain for a considerable time the standard study of the man who in 1956 started the de-Stalinization that 35 years later ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its empire.
Masha Gessen
PanThe New York Review of BooksTo a large extent, Gessen focuses her account of Birobidzhan on the Yiddish writer David Bergelson ... It is not quite clear why Gessen has chosen Bergelson as the protagonist of her narrative unless perhaps to show, in the case of a single writer, the ups and downs of Soviet treatment of the Jewish population ... Gessen’s book is otherwise something of a rambling account, partly drawn from historic documents, partly from personal experience, of one of the Communist regime’s many failures.
