Golfo Alexopoulos,Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xi + 243 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Abstract

Golfo Alexopoulos begins her first chapter by analyzing a 1917 Soviet poster titled “Autocratic Structure.” At the top of a stratified pyramid is Russia's tsar, whose fur-trimmed cloak is draped around four layers of oppressors: the priests; the judges and bureaucrats; the police; and the landowning and bourgeois elite. Holding everyone up with their toil at the bottom of the pyramid are the workers and peasants. All but that last stratum were expected to disappear under the proletarian dictatorship because members of the exploiting classes, the former people, would stand outside the embrace of revolutionary society. The 1918 constitution of the Russian Republic codified their outsider status, specifying that they could not vote, receive public assistance, or work in the civil service or military. They also languished on the lowest rung of the Soviet ladder when it came to securing housing, jobs, and ration cards, and, by the decade's end, became candidates for exile and forced labor. Through her examination of Stalin's outcasts, Alexopoulos demonstrates that the meanings of social class and, by extension, citizenship, shifted in response to policies and historical circumstances. In other words, notions of what constituted a Soviet citizen evolved in tandem with the changing definitions of who was to be excluded from the polity.