cover image Democracy at Dawn: Notes from Poland and Points East

Democracy at Dawn: Notes from Poland and Points East

Frederick Quinn. Texas A&M University Press, $29.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-89096-786-7

This is a very personal memoir by a career foreign-service officer, who has also served as head of the Warsaw-based Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights rule of law programs, which helped set up new constitutions and judicial systems in the region. He has traveled in, and writes about, the entire belt of former Soviet satellites, or provinces, in eastern Europe and the Caucasus. For the most part, though, he concentrates on Poland. Generally, his views are upbeat and optimistic about the future of these new states. However, he does not spare the confusion, corruption, and disorganization in many areas. For example, crime in Warsaw is rampant, and the young police force, purged of communists, barely able to cope. In Ukraine, a potentially rich country, the economy is in a shambles. Farther south, in the Caucasian and central Asian states, some of which are still part of Russia, the situation is even worse, as in Kazakhstan, where the minimum wage is just $7 a month. Justice in some of these new countries has become atavistically brutal if Quinn's examples are anything to go by. Quinn, one of the first noncombatants to enter the Chechen Republic and the editor of The Federalist Papers Reader, is a cogent observer of the area. If the book has any weakness, it is in the tendency to jump around geographically. 15 b&w photographs. (Feb.)