As Yuri Slezkine adroitly once argued in “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” perennial descriptions of the Soviet Union as workers' paradise or prison house of nations never did justice to the variety of ethnic policies and outcomes under socialist rule. Some peoples suffered dramatically, others were promoted, some even thrived. The rest is left to the historians. Erik Scott's excellent book, Familiar Strangers, takes up this national paradox with a finely tuned study of Georgians in the Soviet landscape. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel and others, Scott makes the case for how Georgians became “familiar strangers,” the most legible among non-Russian peoples across the spectrum of Soviet life given their prominent place in politics, market stalls, on the theater stage, and perhaps most enduringly, at restaurant tables. Not entirely unlike Italians in the United States, Scott argues, familiar strangers could be “ethnically distinctive but accessible to the masses” (25).

Two premises guide this work: first, that the Soviet Union was never as clearly dominated by Russians as today's rapidly nationalizing republics like to recall; and second, that far from being a closed space, the USSR was a flexible mesh of internal diasporas. “The Soviet Union was a state where the periphery may have been defined ethnically,” Scott writes, “but the national core was ambiguous and poorly articulated. At its center was not a single nation, but rather a mixture of diasporas” (12). One result was a spirit of what Scott calls “domestic internationalism” (29), with variously configured communities leaning on each other less through the bonds of kinship than through the now classically demonstrated circuits and networks that socialism cultivated so widely.

Scott builds his argument from the early days of Russian conquest of the Caucasus at the outset of the nineteenth century when elite Georgians were accorded a relatively ready acceptance into St. Petersburg circles given their longstanding aristocratic codes and shared Orthodox faith. We then meet many of the figures that dominated early Soviet life, from Sergo Ordzhonikidze to Lavrentii Beriia to, most prominently, Iosif Stalin. Reading at times like a detective novel, Familiar Strangers offers us a world of Kremlin intrigue through perilously fine dining: from the lading of Stalin's table with staples of the south, to the work of private food tasters, to the struggles of non-Caucasians to keep up with the marathon flow of food and drink around the Great Leader. Later chapters track the significant profile of Georgians in the performing arts, as well as high drama criminal trials that showcased the ties that dominated trade networks across the later years of the USSR. Scott's case is all the more persuasive when he reminds us how disproportionately Georgians figured on the Soviet scene relative to the small size of their population.

Throughout the book, and especially in the conclusion, Scott is careful not to overplay the smooth passage of Georgians through Soviet worlds, conceding the fundamental unease with which all internal diasporas were regarded by others and even among themselves. Given the thoroughness by which he builds his case, perhaps what we miss in rounding out this account is only a recognition of the equally stubborn persistence of the kinds of open ethnic competition that Scott is writing against: the widespread everyday resentment of others in positions of economic advantage, such as at fruit and vegetable stalls; garden-variety racism towards Caucasians (so paradoxical given their storied standing in the hierarchies of physical anthropology); or in the regular resentment of regional networks that shut out newcomers. To this end, some non-Georgian voices in this mix might have added to the textures of familiarity, contempt, intimacy, and estrangement that Scott already maps so well, and with such a writer's pen. Khachapuri, the legendary Georgian cheese bread, with its magical mix of carbs, fat, and salt, may have won over millions, but the rapid decline of interethnic relations after the end of the USSR returns us to Simmel, and reminds us that some strangers, no matter how familiar they might have become, would be kept at arm's length both in good times and in bad.