776 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 Yekelchykamply demonstrateshere that the Partywas not alwaysable to enforce, or even clearly define, its policies. Censorship and control militated against the very goals they sought to achieve: fewer and fewer plays, operas, books and historicalprojects managed to get through the multiple layers of review and those that did were not necessarilypopular or assimilatedas the Partyintended. The author adduces some of his most interestingevidence on the issue of reception. Officiallysanctioned Soviet novels proved less popular than the pre-revolutionary classics; post-war historical works whether operas, novels or films were very popular with the public, but often, it seems, for all the wrong reasons.Painfullyconstructedmythswere understood in unorthodox ways, to judge by readers'and viewers' letters. The subtleties over which dozens of critics,editors,writersand censorslaboured, sometimes for years, appear at times to have passed over the heads of the wider population , who noticed only the broad theme of the glorious Ukrainian past. In short, the public seemed to read these worksin a spiritcloser to unrepentant and unofficialnationalismthan to the Party'sunstable and hybrid ideology. Stalin'shandlingof Ukrainianhistoryand collective memory is thus shown to be a parableof unintended consequences.Ukrainiannationalism,exploited by the regime to mobilize the population during the war and wed it to the victorious post-war state, proved difficult to control. However oppressive it was, there were limits to the Party state's power. It occasionally lacked the means to enforce its will, adopted contradictory, confused and counterproductive policies and could not impose its views wholesale in the specific circumstancesof post-warUkraine. In illustratingthe difficultiesthe Partyhad in fulfillingits ideological ambitions in the Ukraine, Yekelchek has made a valuable contributionto our understandingof the culturalpolitics and Party power under Stalin. School of Histoy andArchives JUDITH DEVI_IN Universi_ College Dublin Dundovich, Elena, Gori, Francescaand Guercetti, Emanuela (eds).Reflections ontheGULag:Witha Documentay Appendix ontheItalianVictims ofRepression in theUSSR.Annali:Anno Trentasettesimo,200I. FeltrinelliEditore,Milan, 2003. xxi + 706 pp. Notes. Tables. Map. Appendices. Bibliographies. Index. ?8o.oo. AN official Itar-Tassreport dated 5 February2006 claims that 'Accordingto the latest research, 52 million political sentences were passed in the I92)S1950S in the formerSoviet Union. Six million people were exiled without trial, and one million people were executed, says the seven-volume history of the Stalin Gulag released last fall'. How many other people died prematurely during their period of 'deprivationof liberty' is impossible to ascertain,as is the number of their relativeswhose lives were also impaired or ruined as a result of the CPSU's class system of justice. What seems certain is that the GULag caused no less human sufferingand miserythan did the much shorter Nazi-Soviet war, about which so much more has been written and so many REVIEWS 777 movies have been made. A Moscow TV adaptation of Solzhenitsyn'sIn the FirstCircle has recentlybeen aired, but there is stillno Russian film version of OneDay of IvanDenisovich. One might ask 'why?' and hope that the volume under review would provide some answers. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and the 'reflections'promised by the title are either missing (as in most of the contributions) or almost embarrassingly superficial,naive and banal (it is only in the Italian part of the book, for instance, that the I95I groundbreakingwork by F. Beck and W. Godin, RussianPurgeandtheExtraction of Confession, is mentioned, albeit very briefly). Perhaps this is because all the chapters are written either by Russians or by Westerners, with very little cross-fertilization.Another problem is that the articles, all based on a huge amount of hard work -in many cases in the archives are written in the driestof styles and translatedinto wooden and constricted English. How right Solzhenitsyn was to adopt an 'artistic' (khudozhestvennyi) approach, and how strangethat he and his work are hardly ever referred to, let alone reflected on or argued with he is not even mentioned in the body of the text until page 145. Despite its weaknesses,this weighty tome should be held in every library with a representativecollection of Rossicaand Sovietica. There are solid, plodding articleson the role of the GULag from I9I7 to I939, on forced labour in the USSR from I939 to I956, on CPSU repressionof foreigners,on the fate of numerous Comintern...