Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict Book

I enjoyed this book, though I often felt I should be enjoying it more. It has everything from catastrophic adventures on the high seas, to stranded sailors and expeditions floating on ice floes, to lost pilots over the North Pole! The Arctic fever that swept Soviet popular culture in the 1930s is a bit contagious and the chapter on the aftermath and the fate of the Glavsevmorput during the purges and beyond was fascinating and a bleak reminder of the context in which these exploits took place.

I felt like some of the structure of the book made it tricky to follow key figures at times and that some juicy stories were sort of glossed over or mentioned in passing. I suspect there is a longer story to be told here chronicling the adventures of Soviet explorers, pilots, and scientists into the Cold War and beyond, but these legacies of the 1930s arctic exploration are left for another book, perhaps.