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Abstract
This article reconstructs the story of the Soviet Union's medical internationalism amid the early years of destalinization, when it re-engaged more actively in the global health community. How did the USSR attempt to leverage medicine as a tool of soft power in both multilateral and bilateral relations? Based on records of the USSR Ministry of Health and the Medical Workers Union, as well as newspapers and other published sources, it analyzes what destalinization meant for physicians and public health administrators who sought greater exchange with and connection to their colleagues abroad. A widening web of interconnections in this transitional period paved the way to greater integration in a global medical community. Soviet medical and health professionals nurtured international relationships with a range of strategies, expectations, and aspirations. They used these opportunities to learn, and also to speak back to their superiors and to shape the trajectories of domestic research agendas.

This article analyzes the history of psychiatrists' entwined efforts to understand the psychological effect of nuclear war's threat and to disseminate those findings as a contribution to the antinuclear movement. The sub-specialty of 'nuclear psychiatry' sought: (1) to expose how avoidance, denial, and dehumanization set the conditions for the arms race and, potentially, nuclear war; (2) to explain the psychological consequences of nuclear war's threat, particularly on children and adolescents. By enlightening leaders and the public about delusional, distorted thinking on the nuclear question and the rise of nuclear anxiety, psychiatrist-activists hoped to leverage their expertise for political ends. Connecting developments in the United States with those in Great Britain and the Soviet Union, this article draws on previously untapped archival and published materials, including research findings, media coverage, and internal documents from profession-based antinuclear organizations from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the process, it reveals the centrality of psy-disciplines to the history of the antinuclear movement and the Nuclear Age.

As the present collection of articles makes clear, there is no shortage of interpretations of or reactions to Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. While nothing drains the laughter out of a joke faster than academic analysis, these articles succeed in raising differing, thought-provoking perspectives on the meaning and significance of one of the biggest cultural phenomena of 2006. And although their methodological and analytical perspectives diverge, these articles share at least one trait in common. Each author faces grappling with the relationship between the Kazakhstan of Sacha Baron Cohen's imagination and, dare I say, the "real Kazakhstan," a real place inhabited by real people, existing in real time and space. I do not dispute the subjectivity of that reality, but the acceptance of the premise that Kazakhstan and Kazakhstanis in fact exist is essential to my argument, which seeks not to place the country and its people on a level playing field with their hyperreal corollary, but to underscore the power relations that come into play when eroding or rendering insignificant the line between them.

In 1929 a young Communist activist named A. Nurkhat traversed Central Asia gathering information about grassroots-level party social work and propaganda among indigenous women. An Uzbek woman who converted to Bolshevism, Nurkhat accepted the social and political reasons for the regime's push to win the support of local women in its struggle against traditional ways of life. Seeking to document these efforts, she traveled to nomadic regions and followed a "red yurt" expedition. Over one hundred red yurts operated across Kazakstan, providing literacy programs, medical treatment, and legal counseling to remote nomadic areas. When Nurkhat visited one red yurt, a Kazak man from a nearby village rushed in seeking help for his wife, who had endured more than a day in labor. The localbaqsy(shaman) had been unable to induce birth and the family desperately sought help from the red yurt's nurse, an ethnic Russian, who was able successfully to deliver a healthy baby. Afterward, Nurkhat asked the red yurt's nurse, "What is the Kazak women's attitude to [Western] medical treatment?" The nurse responded,

Michaels reviews 'Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System' by David Kotz and Fred Weir.