REVIEWS 173 Unfortunately, Meerovich's failure to contextualize his intricate narratives in either thewider history or historiography of the period renders his two books of little interestor use to all but themost specialized of readers. This is an immense pity, as the author isnot shyof posing broad questions which are currently of central concern to historians ? the titles of the two books are evidence enough of this.A range of studies of early Soviet 'everyday life',by both Russian scholars such as Natal'ia Lebina, Katerina Gerasimova and II'ia Utekhin, and Western researchers such as Julia Obertreis, Svetlana Boym, Stephen Kotkin, Steven E. Harris, Monica R?thers, Susan Reid and many others, have engaged carefully and subtlywith the regime's strategy of trans forming consciousness through housing policy and practice, as well as with occupants' lived experience of domestic space. Studies of passportization, population policy, migration and settlement by David Shearer, Nathalie Moine, Gijs Kessler, Peter Holquist, Peter Gatrell and myself, among others, have explored the regime's impulse to 'sedentarize' its population. All these historians would agree with Meerovich's claim that Soviet housing policy was a function both of ideological precepts ? itsambition to create a new type of socialist citizen ? and of its political strategies of control, surveil lance and discipline. Meerovich's glib dismissal of other scholarship and his almost exclusive focus on published laws and decrees, however, mean that his work does little to deepen or extend this rudimentary and limited insight, giving us no new or better understanding of themultiplicity of interests which competed to translate their own priorities and preoccupations into policy, of the extent to which state-decreed housing policy was implemented or effective in creating new forms of everyday life,or of the character of popular negotiation or subversion of normative spatial structures. Not only do the two books fail to take account of or relate their findings to the existing literature, but they present their narratives in an untidy, unstructured and convoluted manner, making ithard to follow the sequence of complex, sometimes microscopic changes in the statutory and administra tive basis of policy. Granting that the objective of the Ibidem book series to specialize in 'narrowly focussed' and 'empirical' scholarship is in itselfvery valuable, the internal organization of these two slim editions makes it difficult even to use them as reference handbooks for the evolving legislative and administrative framework governing housing policy during the interwar period. School of History NickBaron Universityof Nottingham Dubrovskii, A. M. Istorik i vlast': istoricheskaia nauka v SSSR i kontseptsiiaistorii f?odal'noi Rossii v kontekste politiki i ideologii(igjo-igjo-e gg.). Izdatel'stvo Brianskogo gosudarstvennogo universit? ta im. akad. I. G. Petrovskogo, Briansk, 2005. 800 pp. Notes. Index. Price unknown. A. M. Dubrovskii, who in 1992 published a biography of the historian S.V. Bakhrushin (1882-1950), has in thisnew book expanded his scope to examine 174 SEER, 86, I, 2008 the historiography ofmedieval and early modern Russia in the Stalin era, placing it in the context of the development of Bolshevik ideology and the relationship between the Soviet authorities and the historical profession. The broad outlines of thisprocess are of course well known, but Dubrovskii adds valuable new detail, much of itdrawn from archival sources, and provides a more nuanced interpretation than many of his predecessors. In common with others who have written on this theme (most recently, theAmerican historian David Brandenberger), the author identifies a gradual ideological shift in the course of the 1930s away from proletarian internationalism towards Soviet patriotism, Russian nationalism and great-power statism. But Dubrovskii argues that, alongside this new trend, elements of the earlier revolutionary class-based approach persisted. The balance between the two strands changed in response to changing external circumstances: the patriotic line was of course strongest in the early years of the Second World War, but Soviet Marxism began to reassert itselffrom 1943,when themilitary tide turned in favour of the Soviet Union. In contrast tomany critics of Stalinist historiography, the author sees some positive features in this revival of Soviet Marxist ideology ? in particular, the fact that its emphasis on thematerial base and on the class-struggle inspired a new agenda for historians...