Russia and the former Soviet Union : a bibliographic guide to English language publications, 1986-1991 /

Although both these works are annotated bibliographies, only Russia and the Former Soviet Union (RFSU), the successor to Horak's Russia, the USSR, and Eastern Europe (CH, Feb'88), lists reviews. Both have more or less the same number of entries: Russia/USSR (R/U) covers 1,274 books published in or before 1993 and RFSU has 1,421 entries published between 1986 and 1991. Both titles exclude Eastern Europe. However, the two works differ greatly: R/U covers a longer period and is therefore the more comprehensive work, but it has some curiously dated entries. Svetlana Allilueva's Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), for instance, produced a powerful impression at the time of its publication, but Stalin's personal life is nowadays much less interesting than in 1967. Also, R/U lists The Penguin Russian Course (1961), which has been widely used since its publication and is still an excellent textbook, but not Russian for Everybody (1972- ), which, unlike the Penguin edition, provides tapes and teaches Russian sentence intonation and is therefore preferable. On the whole, R/U, with its wider and less in-depth coverage, is recommended for public and lower-division undergraduate collections. RFSU is more suitable for upper-division academic collections, despite some coverage gaps: for example, RFSU should have listed A.P. Vlasto's A Linguistic History of Russia ... (Oxford, 1986, the successor to W.K. Matthews's Russian Historical Grammar, 1975), which is now the only historical grammar of Russian in English. Clearly, the two bibliographies complement each other in some areas. Both seem weak in their music coverage and omit, for instance, the Biographical Dictionary of Russian/Soviet Composers, ed. by Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov (CH, Apr'90). Both books are excellent pieces of work, each with many strong points: RFSU has fine sections on Ukrainian and Jewish Studies and on the whole on non-Russian nationalities; R/U has a helpful eight-page introduction and an outstanding section on environmental problems. B. Beynen; Des Moines Area Community College