Miniature Empires: A Historical Dictionary of the Newly Independent States

This is a curious book whose baseline is the end of the Cold War, the subsequent collapse of most one‐party totalitarian states which, the argument runs, “brought a collection of nearly unknown countries to the world’s attention”. This might be true in many instances, but had the world really been allowed to forget countries like Yugoslavia, the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, annexed by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Second World War, and Ethiopia? What does the title really mean? On the face of it miniature empires is a contradiction in terms; none of...