The Kritika Review Demystified

Book reviews in Kritika are a peculiar genre. Typically, more than one book is examined, and the titles originate in different countries, reflecting the aim with which the journal was established: to bring scholars across the world into dialogue with one another. As the founding editors explained in Kritika's first issue, they wanted to create a bridge between historians in the United States and those in Russia. Over the years, its authors and editors, together with the books reviewed, have only become more international.

Yet there is another sense in which Kritika reviews have always departed from the standard scholarly 700-word book review. Not only do our associate editors solicit longer reviews, but they actively encourage authors to think beyond the confines of the books under review. From the journal's earliest days, its editors self-consciously worked against the grain of the academic "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" review in the name of a more "collaborative culture" of interpretation, explanation, verification, and historiographic contextualization.¹ Footnotes are expected in Kritika reviews. The formats can vary from shorter pieces simply titled "review," ranging between 1,500 and 4,000 words and usually covering between one and three titles, to longer "review essays," ranging between 4,000 and 8,000 words, which may cover larger numbers of works and treat the topic in greater depth. Kritika's editors readily admit that the boundaries dividing them are porous; we ourselves look for the same qualities in both. An ideal review is one that situates its titles in their broader, disciplinary framework, providing a brief overview of the field from which they have emerged. Every Kritika review is thus a brief historiographic essay, complete with footnotes that direct the reader to the relevant literature.

This approach serves a vital scholarly purpose: to inform readers of the most recent developments in other fields and in other countries. Bringing the environmental historian of the late Soviet Union up to date on developments in Muscovite administrative history, and vice versa, is no easy task. Yet as the number of publications within each field grows ever larger, the task of informing oneself of developments outside one's immediate field becomes ever more daunting, just as the danger of our scholarly community's disintegration into segregated subfields becomes ever greater. The vitality and coherence of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian historiography depends on the willingness of reviewers to bridge the gap. Kritika's editors and associate editors fully realize the burden they place on their authors, since many submissions—whether reviews or review essays—pass through multiple drafts before they see their way into print. The aim is to elicit a thoughtful, historiographically saturated piece of work, even in single-work book reviews. To reflect the importance we ascribe to the interpretive framework, we have decided as of the present issue that every review should be supplied with a title. One feature will continue to separate review essays from reviews: the former may contain a title and subtitle, the latter only a title.

Alongside reviews and review essays, a third category exists in our journal—the elusive review article, which can run as long as 10,000 words (including notes). Such a work is equivalent to a research article in that it typically presents a fresh argument of the author's own, advancing the state of the field. It engages with a broad range of secondary sources but usually includes little or no component of archival research and makes historiography itself the primary object of analysis. Examples include Dominic Lieven's "Russia and the Defeat of Napoleon" (7, 2 [2006]: 283-308) and Dietrich Beyrau's "Eastern Europe as a 'Sub-Germanic Space': Scholarship on Eastern Europe under National Socialism" (13, 3 [2012]: 685-723).

Whether we are working with a review, a review essay, or a review article, we editors strive to ensure that every piece is marked by the same kritikal features. The text should shed light on the place of a monograph or set of monographs in its/their subfield. It should also be accessible to historians who work in very different areas, thus permitting readers to inform...