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  • Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers by Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted
  • Paul Josephson (bio)
Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers. By Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Pp. xiii+ 189. $95.

In this well-written, thoughtful, and engaging study, Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted writes about the symbolic, cultural, political, and other meanings of two rivers, the Mississippi in the United States and the Volga in Russia (the USSR). Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, she discusses how these rivers have served a variety of purposes; have been the source of local pride and of myth-making, folk tales, imagery, and rich collective memories; and how they have played crucial economic and political roles in nation-building. Zeisler-Vralsted’s book is an important contribution to a growing body of historical and journalistic work on rivers and their historical and transnational significance. This work’s novelty is its comparative approach in its examination of diverse narratives and in its use of the sources of collective memory—prose, poetry, art, and song, as well as engineering studies, and public pamphlets and documents.

Through her analysis, Zeisler-Vralsted sheds light on race and class, folk meaning, notions of modernization, and ideologies of economic health, national power, and control over nature. She identifies surprising similarities in the histories of the Mississippi and Volga given their different geographical, economic, and cultural histories. In five chapters Rivers, [End Page 682] Memory and Nation-Building considers empires, trade, workers and their travails, the advent of modernization—steamships, canals, hydropower, and the rise of modern geoengineering and its impacts—and the displacement of minorities (to a lesser extent than other topics). Also covered are the poverty of locals versus the power of the distant planners and state builders; the role of various conquerors, explorers, and missionaries; and the role of rivers as corridors of communication, including the communication of disease (cholera, plague, smallpox).

In chapter 1, Zeisler-Vralstead examines the early history of the Volga and Mississippi and their representations and meanings in various mythologies and in contacts between peoples—indigenes, locals, explorers, traders, hunters, and others. Chapter 2 considers these rivers’ roles in emerging national narratives. Russia and the United States drew on European vistas for comparisons, yet found exceptionalism in their own landscapes. For Russia this was crucial as the internal question of whether Russia was unique, had a single identity, and was somehow inferior played out. Here Zeisler-Vralstead considers art, poetry, and music and the interplay between pastoral images of the rivers and those that reflected increasingly built-up river basins that served pragmatic, economic, and other purposes.

In chapter 3 she explores rivers and modernization, including discourses related to nature and modernity. She notes the confidence of leaders and engineers in the ability of science and technology to transform nature and tap unrealized economic potential, a confidence that was manifested in the grandiose river construction projects of the nineteenth and especially twentieth century: dams, canals, hydropower stations, whether under Lenin and Stalin or under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. People were mesmerized by the potential of technology to reshape the natural world, around Moscow (in chapter 4) in a series of canals and waterworks that grew out of Stalin’s slave labor camps, and on the upper Mississippi in the Fort Peck Dam and 9-Foot Channel Project (chapter 5). Of course, the murderous slave labor system employed by Stalin had no counterpart on the modern Mississippi. Zeisler-Vralstead addresses briefly the stated role of the Stalinist projects in re-educating laborers as good Soviet citizens (though these projects were far more focused on punishment than re-education). Yet in their monumental scale, their importance for putting people to work, and their propaganda purposes, these grandiose works were similar across the socialist USSR and the capitalist United States.

Rivers, Memory and Nation-Building is well-written, easy to read, and enjoyable to consider a chapter at a time. The author provides maps and basic information (flow, river basin, geographic area) to frame her narrative in space and geography. Even without Russian language, there is no question...

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