736 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 confusion by stating in a speech to the Congress of Soviets that 'as iswell known, there are about sixty nations, national groups and narodnosti in the Soviet Union', thus provoking the ethnographers to hastily cut down their figures: 1937was not a time to contradict theGeneral Secretary! The rise of Nazism provoked a reaction in the USSR against naked national determinism. During thewar years, however, the distinction between Soviet citizenswho were ofRussian or other native origin and those of foreign origin, such as Poles, Germans and Koreans, assumed critical importance, triggering wholesale deportations from sensitive border regions. Following the war several peoples deemed to have collaborated with the Germans were deprived of their territorial identity. In a brisk epilogue Hirsch outlines official and scholarly positions on the national question from Stalin's post-war years through to the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991. She has much of interest to say on the ideas of Julian Bromlei, Sergei Rudenko and others active during theBrezhnev years. Meanwhile both the listof nationalities and nationality borders continued to invite dispute. Stalin's prediction that themerger of Soviet nations was nigh was now thrown into doubt, as both Brezhnev and Khrushchev warned against the 'forced' merger of nations. Hirsch resists the temptation to credit nationalism or national tensionswith precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union, but notes thatparadoxically the success of the regime's nation- and institution-building efforts in the Soviet republics now made their emergence as sovereign states the natural if not inevitable outcome. This book is a major scholarly achievement, bringing together all themain strands of ethno-national studies and related regime policies. If therewere any heroes, theywere Russia's littleband of ethnographers, who sadly ? as Hirsch noted in a recent Kennan Institute address ? 'ended up giving scientific rationales to regime policies that persecuted certain nationalities', li Empire of Nations inevitablymakes heavy going at times, this is eased by the author's clear and direct writing style. Australian National University T. H. Rigby Kiaer, Christina and Naiman, Eric (eds). EverydayLife inEarly SovietRussia: Taking theRevolution Inside. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2006. 310 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95 (paperback). As the subtitle suggests, this isnot a book which deals with everyday life in the usual sense of the term.As the editors explain, what ismeant by 'taking the revolution inside' is that throughout the early Soviet period, private experi ences of everyday lifewere understood to be in potential conflict with the ideally collective and public nature of Soviet experience. The contributors to thisvolume examine how Soviet Russia and itscitizens sought to resolve this conflict by taking theRevolution inside, into the 'interior spaces of the home, the family, the body, and the self (p. 1). There are eleven essays in all in the collection. The first is by Sheila Fitzpatrick and is entitied 'The Two Faces of Anastasia: Narratives and reviews 737 Counter-Narratives of Identity in Stalinist Everyday Life'. This recounts the predicament of a woman in Stalin's Russia whose life could be presented in two differentways, one in keeping with a proletarian background and one suggesting kulak associations. The outwardly simple story of an individual woman is shown to have ramificationswhich illuminate social conditions both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Russia of the Stalin era. Three essays approach the question of everyday life through the produc tions of the Soviet theatre or cinema. In her contribution to the collection Lilya Kaganovsky discusses the 1936 Soviet filmThe Party Card directed by Ivan Pyr'ev and relates the political and psychological messages itcontains to the contemporary demands of the Stalinist regime, particularly the need for extreme vigilance in the face of potential enemies of the state. BorisWolfson examines the production ofAleksandr Afinogenov's play Fear (1931),which is remarkable for itsportrayal of an interrogation of a suspect at theGPU offices on stage. Christina Kiaer analyses Sergei Tret'iakov's 1926 play /Want a Child to reveal the emergence of a new sexual ethic and the dilemmas it presented. Sexual questions are also discussed in Evgenii Bershtein's essay on Walter Benjamin's visit to Soviet Russia from 1926 to 1927. Apparently, foreign observers...