I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmativ...

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and it's already clear to me that this is one of those basic works of scholarship that everyone dealing with the field has to come to terms with. As Raymond Pearson writes in his detailed review (which, along with Martin's response, I urge anyone interested in the topic to read): "The Affirmative Action Empire is overwhelmingly a product of archive-based research...