Khrushchev Years Research Articles

The Study of Jadidism in Soviet and Russian Historiography

The article provides an overview of the history of the study of Muslim reformism, known in the scientific literature as Jadidism, in the works of Soviet and Russian researchers. At first, it included only the reform of Islamic education, and later it began to be understood as a broader movement of “Muslim enlightenment” aimed at reforming the entire Muslim society. The study of the history of Jadidism in Russia began in the 1920s. Soviet scientists through the prism of the Marxist theory of the development of socio- economic formations. In the post-war years, Soviet historians and social scientists wrote critically about Jadidism. During the years of Khrushchev’s “thaw”, scholars tried to reconsider the essence of Jadidism in the socialist context of historical research through the reinterpretation of Islam as a specific Tatar national cultural heritage, called “mirasism”. A new stage of Russian historiography in matters of Jadidism began in the post- Soviet period, when Jadidism began to be seen as a social movement of Russian Muslims aimed at forming a nation of the European type. In general, it can be said that studies in Russian and Soviet historiography on the history of Jadidism in the Crimea, the Volga-Ural region, Central Asia and the Caucasus are distinguished by different methodologies and conceptual approaches, while works on the history of the Jadid movement in the Volga-Ural region are more complete. Despite the fact that there is no common understanding of the phenomenon of Jadidism in the Volga-Ural region, nevertheless, scientists of different directions (historians, philologists, Islamic scholars) have done a lot of work in studying this issue. In this regard, the history of Muslim reformism in the North Caucasus, in particular in Dagestan, is practically not studied. As well as there is no special work on this region.

The position of historical science of the Ukrainian SSR in the conditions of communist ideology in the years of Khrushchev’s «thaw» and the unfolding of Brezhnev’s «stagnation»

The article shows the complete subordination of historical science in the Ukrainian SSR to the ideology of the Soviet state. The concept of the historical development of the Ukrainian people during the 60s and 70s of the 20th century was determined not by scientists, but by party-communist ideologues. The concept of the rapprochement of nations, the creation of a «new historical community of Soviet people» and the condemnation of the ideology of «bourgeois nationalism» came to the fore. When researching the history of the Ukrainian SSR, scientists were tasked with not focusing on national differences and promoting the «exceptional» role of the Russian people in the life of Ukrainians in every possible way.

History's Happy Ending: Bare Theory and the Novel

Abstract Reading British writer Francis Spufford's 2008 novel Red Plenty, a fictionalized account of life in the Soviet Union during the early Khrushchev years, this essay defends a bare theory of race against what it calls a novelistic theory of race. Whereas the latter—powerfully dramatized in novels like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953)—stresses the (long-denied) depth and complexity of black subjectivity, the former eschews considerations of black particularity for a punitive, state-sponsored approach to racial injustice.

Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years, written by Christine Varga-Harris

Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years, written by Christine Varga-Harris

Stories Of House And Home: Soviet Apartment Life During The Khrushchev Years, by Christine Varga-HarrisAmnesiopolis: Modernity, Space And Memory In East Germany, by Eli Rubin

Stories Of House And Home: Soviet Apartment Life During The Khrushchev Years, by Christine Varga-HarrisAmnesiopolis: Modernity, Space And Memory In East Germany, by Eli Rubin

Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years by Christine Varga-Harris

<i>Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years</i> by Christine Varga-Harris

Christine Varga-Harris. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years.

From 1917 to 1991, one constant in Soviet life was the shortage of adequate housing. Immediately after the revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to solve the housing problem by expropriating and subdividing bourgeois apartments, thus creating the quintessentially Soviet institution of the communal apartment (kommunalka), in which perhaps twenty or thirty tenants shared a single kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. The problem only got worse in the 1930s, as Stalinist industrialization brought millions of new workers into already overcrowded cities. Wartime damage to housing stock exacerbated already acute shortages in cities such as Leningrad, the focus of Christine Varga-Harris’s Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Residents returning from evacuation or service in the Red Army whose former homes had been destroyed or were occupied by others sheltered in basements, hallways, and dugouts. Ten years after the end of World War II, housing remained a pressing practical problem. In the context of the Cold War and de-Stalinization, Varga-Harris argues, housing also constituted an ideological opportunity. When, in 1957, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, launched the drive to house every Soviet family in a “separate” (single-family) apartment, he aimed “not only to provide living space, but also to regenerate society and create model individuals” (9). With so many waiting for housing, new construction often fell short of state and popular expectations. Nonetheless, Varga-Harris concludes that the regime’s efforts to rejuvenate the revolutionary project often succeeded because, at least in the realm of housing, “individual interests in many ways corresponded with state objectives” (213).

Coercion, Reeducation, and the Prophylactic Chat: Profilaktika and the KGB's Struggle with Political Unrest in Lithuania, 1953–64

This article analyzes the Khrushchev‐era KGB's use of a tactic known as profilaktika in its struggle with political unrest in Lithuania, one of the few former Soviet republics with an accessible secret police archive. In many cases involving low‐level anti‐Soviet activity, KGB officials chose not to prosecute citizens accused of minor political crimes, but to “invite” them to a “prophylactic chat” where they would be intimidated or manipulated into confessing and warned that they would be arrested if they broke the law again; in other cases, known as “profilaktika with the public's help,” the KGB organized humiliating public hearings at which the behavior of low‐level offenders was denounced by other Soviet citizens. I argue that profilaktika should not be seen as a straightforward example of post‐Stalin liberalization, but as a tactic that combined traditional secret police coercion and surveillance with ideologically inspired efforts at reeducation and moral reform. In the end, profilaktika suited the interests of both Khrushchev‐era officials and KGB operatives, allowing it to survive as a secret police tactic long after the ideological enthusiasm of the Khrushchev years had faded away.

Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. By Christine Varga-Harris . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xx, 289 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $49.95, hard bound.

Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. By Christine Varga-Harris . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xx, 289 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $49.95, hard bound. - Volume 76 Issue 3

Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years

Christine Varga-Harris, <i>Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years</i>

Varga-Harris, Christine Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 570 arts too; in the process it includes reference to a wide variety of interesting cultural figures who have helped make the region what it is today. The final section of the book, ‘Prospects’, in some ways is, however, a little sad. The book in fact starts with a discussion of Toomas Hendrik Ilves’s contention of some years ago that the very idea of a unifying ‘Baltic’ identity is flawed. Since, he argued, there is no common Baltic language or culture, this single identity has been externally imposed and, in fact, only reflects common experiences of annexation, Sovietization and Russification. So the last page of Purs’s text picks up this contention and looks to the possible creation of a ‘Nordic’ Estonia, a more ‘Central European’ Lithuania and a Latvia that might lose interest in preserving a shared sense of being ‘Baltic’ (p. 184). In this light, Purs also observes that if the Baltic States succeed in fashioning themselves in completely independent ways (as, at times, they appear to want to do), then this very success will spell the end of the idea of a common ‘Baltic’ identity. So here we have a useful, provocative text which deserves an interested readership. Certainly travellers and students should appreciate it, but researchers working on the region might also enjoy the zest with which the text has been written. University of Bradford Martyn Housden Varga-Harris, Christine. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2015. xvi + 289 pp. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. The Khrushchev government’s ambitious housing construction plan, launched in 1957, became one of the defining policies of its era. In this book, Christine Varga-Harris argues that in addition to providing millions of families with their own apartments, the mass housing programme was also intended to shape Soviet individuals, revitalize socialist society and realise the goals of Communism. Moreover, Soviet people were not mere passive recipients of homesorpropaganda;throughtheirattemptstoacquireandmaintainhousing, they asserted their rights as citizens and claimed their place in the polity. This study focuses on the city of Leningrad, which provides an illustrative example because it had the highest concentration of communal apartments in the USSR and thus faced a particularly acute housing crisis. Varga-Harris synthesizes a wide range of published and archival sources in support of her arguments and situates her work in the historiography on the thaw era in general, and on housing and domesticity specifically, citing recent works by Lynn Attwood, Steven Harris, Susan Reid and Mark Smith, among others. REVIEWS 571 The book covers several related topics that Varga-Harris groups together under the rubric of ‘house and home’. She begins with a discussion of the design and construction of new neighbourhoods and apartment complexes. These resembled the buildings going up across Europe, where mass-produced components and simple designs allowed countries devastated by war to rebuild as quickly and cheaply as possible. But Soviet architects, planners and designers strove to make such buildings distinctly socialist by emphasizing the public spaces and resources surrounding them and by asserting the educative value of decorating interiors in what they deemed good taste. Varga-Harris then explores ‘housewarming’ narratives, prevalent in a variety of media, which recounted deserving citizens moving out of crowded and dilapidated housing into new apartments. Astutely evoking the Cold War context, she argues that these stories were used to represent the success of Communism in providing every citizen with a comfortable life, in contrast to the capitalist West, where landlords grew rich on the rent of exploited workers. Subsequent chapters analyse advice about homemaking and interior design and describe the mobilization of volunteers to improve and maintain the courtyards, corridors and stairwells of apartment buildings. These chapters amplify Varga-Harris’s contention that officials and professionals countered the endorsement of privacy implied by the construction of individual apartments by emphasizing the social importance of good taste and the civic obligations of tenants to their neighbours and the larger community. In the final two chapters of the book, Varga-Harris focuses on the correspondence written by those hoping to receive new apartments, in...

Un pacifista nel cinema staliniano: Okraina di Boris Barnet (1933)

In the Soviet Union, the switch from silent to sound cinema was not just a technological revolution, but also a chance, for the Communist Party leadership, to get rid of the ideologically suspicious avant-garde cinema of the twenties. The years of the transition to sound, from 1930 to 1934, are sort of a long dissolve, where the old poetic montage cinema coexists with the new prose of Socialist Realism. Boris Barnet’s Okraina is right in the middle of this complex phenomenon. On the one hand, the film tells a story typical of propaganda Soviet cinema: the origins (in World War One) and the outbreak of the October Revolution. But the style and the point of view chosen by Barnet are totally uncommon. Barnet tells a story of “little people, lost somewhere in the immense Russian countryside, far from Saint Petersburg and the Winter Palace (Okraina means province). Moreover, Okraina tells this story in a light, almost comic style. It is precisely this Chekhov approach that made Party critics very distrustful toward this film. The essay analyzes Okraina, and traces the history of its reception, from the coldness of the thirties, to the late rediscovery during the Khrushchev years, and then during the Perestroika.

Understanding the History of Soviet Criminal Justice: The Contribution of Archives and Other Sources

On the basis of the author's research (and to a lesser extent that of other scholars), this paper argues that for constructing the history of Soviet criminal justice archives served mainly as a supplement to rather than substitute for printed sources and oral history. Archives were more important for the postwar decade, 1946–55, when the quality of printed sources reached a low point. Overall, archival sources provided special insights into decision‐making in criminal policy and the role of Stalin; statistics on the work of the justice agencies (including campaigns and the implementation of new laws); secret laws and decrees; and documents on the management of the penal system. Major findings to which archival sources contributed include the difficulties implementing extreme measures initiated by Stalin (extensions of the law and severe punishments) because of resistance of officials to them; the abandonment in the mid‐1930s of the practice of running legal institutions with uneducated trustees in favor of trained legal officials making careers and the way their work came to be evaluated; the extent of dysfunctions in the administration of justice before Stalin's death; and the seriousness of attempts at reform in the first years of Khrushchev's rule.

Entre Rideau de Fer et Dégel : panorama des opéras soviétiques 1945-1970

The immediate post-war “Iron Curtain” years in the USSR were a time of artistic and cultural stagnation due to Stalin’s and Jdanov’s diktats denouncing musical formalism and exalting the method of socialist realism, with such victims as Prokofiev and Shostakovich among others, leading to stereotyped libretti subjects set to an impoverished standardized musical idiom. Opera was reborn during the brief Thaw of the early Khrushchev years as works that had been forbidden or forgotten were staged anew and musical languages that had been banned were adopted and adapted. A new genre was then born, mono-opera, which set out to depict the intense inner life of its characters.

Ware, Robert Bruce (ed.). The Fire Below: How the Caucasus Shaped Russia (review)

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 788 less. These chapters are also enlivened by snippets from memoirs, letters of complaints, letters to the editor and trade journals. The analysis, overall, suffers from a few tendencies. Though Chernyshova seekstorevealthehabitsandattitudesoftheSovietconsumer,sheofteneschews a close reading of texts, leaving the reader to tease out deeper meanings. She notes, for example, that in the 1970s some workplaces and universities banned women from wearing trousers, but does not venture beyond the surface to explore such policies or their gender implications. Likewise, the intriguing characterization of the peculiarities of Soviet aesthetics as ‘an unmonitored, eclectic, often flashy and socially emulative medley of foreign things combined with Soviet-made items’ (p. 161) is not satisfactorily explored in the text. Also, most chapters first rehearse the historiography of the Stalinist era and Khrushchev years, delineating the continuities and departures in rhetoric and policies from the Brezhnev decades. This scheme, which, incidentally, ignores most of the literature on consumer culture in the tsarist and NEP eras, reminds readers that Brezhnev and his cohort finally delivered on the promises of their predecessors; however, it also sets up each chapter to confirm or debunk previous findings, rather than to take a new direction. Finally, an overlap and repetition of information and evidence occurs throughout the book. Yet Chernyshova admirably synthesizes various strands of political, economic, social and cultural trends to boldly reinterpret ‘developed socialism’ as ‘developed consumerism’. Her clear demonstration of the link between state policiesandconsumerbehavioursandofparallelswithdevelopmentsinEastern and Western Europe, and the United States provides a fresh perspective on the importance of material goods in the state’s failure to reform Communism. The book is well-researched and makes a significant contribution to the growing field of studies on Soviet consumer culture and the Brezhnev years, and is enthusiastically recommended. Department of History Marjorie L. Hilton Murray State University Ware, Robert Bruce (ed.). The Fire Below: How the Caucasus Shaped Russia. Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2013. xii + 337 pp. Notes. Tables. Bibliography. Index. Appendix. £23.99 (paperback). The Caucausus has played a major role in Russian political history over the past twenty-five years. This volume, put together by Robert Bruce Ware, a leading specialist on Dagestan and the North Caucasus, contributes new perspectives. It deals with both the North and South Caucasus, though the latter is represented almost exclusively by Georgia. REVIEWS 789 The best chapters describe in some detail the complexities of the region and Russia’s often-incoherent attempts to deal with the most pressing problems. Walter Richmond writes on preparations for the Sochi Olympics and finds that federal and local organizers rode roughshod over residents’ rights, environmental objections and the sensitivities of ethnic minorities to such an extent that it set new precedents for government policy in other regions. Richard Sakwa’s chapter on Chechnya recapitulates an argument he has made elsewhere, that Russia constitutes a ‘dual state’ of constitutional and informal mechanisms and that Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov challenges the model by pursuing policies that are clearly unconstitutional and authoritarian. A wellsourced chapter by military analysts Robert Schaefer and Andrei Doohovskoy assesses the impact of the Chechen wars on the Russian military. Problems with force mobility and command and control led to reforms that streamlined the structure of the Russian army. Andrew Foxall looks at Stavropol´ krai, the Russian-majority region that adjoins the North Caucasus and which hosts the headquarters for the North Caucasus Federal District in Pyatigorsk. Positioned on the frontline, Stavropol´ experienced earlier than most Russian regions the problems of kavkazofobiya (Russian antipathy toward peoples from the Caucausus who move to their regions), yet the krai benefits from serving as a regional transport and energy hub, as well as a financial centre. Most controversial, and to this reader most misleading, is Patrick Armstrong’s chapter on the impact of Georgian events on Russia. He contends that ‘memes’ — widely accepted conclusions based on unexamined premises and weak evidence — have dominated Western discourse about Russia’s relations with its neighbours. Armstrong rejects the view that Russia is seeking to re-establish control over the new states on its periphery. Georgia’s problems with breakaway territories are, in his view, self-inflicted, the result of national chauvinism. A...

The Process of Transition in the Musical Politics of the USSR in the Khrushchev Years

The Process of Transition in the Musical Politics of the USSR in the Khrushchev Years

The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Andrew L Jenks (review)

REVIEWS 927 improve state-sponsored entertainment options throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as my research has found, and considered how this improvement impacted convictions for hooligan behaviour. LaPierre’s refusal to consider hooliganism as age related seems incongruous, since his own findings indicate that those in their twenties and thirties committed most hooligan acts: an analysis of age and life stage as related to hooligan behaviour would have strengthened LaPierre’s analysis. Moreover, when terming hooliganism an adult crime and not a youth crime, LaPierre problematically applies Western definitions of youthhood instead of Soviet ones, which ascribed youthhood to all citizens eligible to join the Komsomol, the mass Soviet youth organization, an age range that spanned 15 to 28 and sometimes even older by the late Khrushchev years. Using this Soviet definition of youthhood, the statistics on age breakdown provided by LaPierre indicate that young people aged 14 to 29 committed most hooligan acts in the early and mid 1960s: no wonder, then, that the Soviet state expressed such concern over youth hooliganism (p. 47). My criticisms should not detract from reader attention to this thoughtprovoking and high-quality book. LaPierre deserves praise for helping enrich our understanding of Khrushchev-era hooliganism. This well-written and affordably-priced book makes it highly suitable for class assignments, and constitutes required reading for anyone interested in post-Stalin Soviet history and in crime studies. Department of History Gleb Tsipursky Ohio State University Jenks, Andrew L. The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2012. viii + 316 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $35.00. In this biography of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, Andrew Jenks takes the reader through Gagarin’s life and through Soviet history, indicating the importance of Gagarin for post-war Soviet social and cultural myths and realities about heroes. Jenks writes that Gagarin left the earth’s atmosphere a human being and returned to earth a national icon. Over the next years he became a motivational speaker, Communist Youth League activist, and son of the motherland. Yet he also enjoyed the fast and privileged life of a Soviet hero: he loved to dress up in costumes for masquerade balls, he was a great charmer and storyteller, and enjoyed driving fast cars. He preached sobriety, yet relished drink, presented himself as an ideal family man, yet his home life was far from ideal, and he may have been a womanizer. Gagarin was important as a new kind of hero — a hero of the potentialities of Soviet society under SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 928 Khrushchev and of reborn faith in the Communist future. Under President Putin, Gagarin’s heroism has been reborn to serve the state. As a provincial Russian of working class background, Gagarin arrived in space by good fortune and hard work. He joined the Pioneers, studied hard, played sports equally hard and did well in school and work. He was good at buttering up teachers and classmates. Having finished trade school, Gagarin enrolledinafour-yeartechnicaluniversityinSaratov.Hedistinguishedhimself as a leader. He developed a close relationship with the secret police and the political officers of his university. He joined DOSAAF (Voluntary Society for Aid to Army, Airforce and Navy) which enabled him to begin flight training — although with unsafe airplanes at crowded fields. He pursued a military career in office/pilot training at the Chkalov Military Academy. His determination and personal qualities led to his selection as the first cosmonaut. Gagarin’s life raises the issue of technological failure in Soviet society, something never covered in public. To celebrate Gagarin’s flight was to celebrate the technological glories of the Soviet space programme, but to hide the failures from view. A large number of personnel including cosmonauts died in accidents — as did many of the dogs used in space flight. Gagarin himself landed 500 km from the target and was not located by officials until thirty minutes later. He died in a jet training accident in 1968 — whose miserly two-page accident report was released only in 2011. Gagarin was the focus of a personality cult. His cult was born amidst deStalinization and joined the cults...

Conformism and Agency: Model Young Communists and the Komsomol Press in the Later Khrushchev Years, 1961–1964

This essay examines newspaper narratives depicting model youth in Komsomol'skaya Pravda in the early 1960s in order to cast light on the Party-state's efforts in the Khrushchev years to use the press as a means of re-energising the drive to forge model communist citizens. In contrast to most studies of Soviet media, this study offers a glimpse of the reception of official signals, by drawing on sociological studies that Komsomol'skaya Pravda conducted of its readers in the early 1960s. Throughout, the paper explores recent scholarly discussions of resistance, conformism and agency in the Soviet context.

RESPONSES OF THE ESTONIAN LUTHERAN CHURCH TO THE ANTI-RELIGIOUS CAMPAIGN, CHANGES IN THE WORLD VIEW AND VALUES 1958–1964

From 1958 to 1964, the Lutheran Church in Estonia, as other churches in the Soviet Union that time had to face a strong anti-religious campaign. Even though religion was deprecated, for ideological reasons, all through the existence of the Soviet Union, the intensity of the campaign peaked during the Khrushchev years. It could be claimed that a decisive blow to the social status of the churches was struck in the 1960s. Admittedly, the same period was a time of active secularisation in free Western societies as well, but this was a voluntary trend, driven by the thought schools and changing behaviour patterns of the era. This article discusses the responses of Lutheran clergy in Estonia of that time to thesurrounding social processes, particularly to the anti-church campaign and the associated attacks against persons, as well as the changes in general thought patterns, which affected public mentality. Documents in the archives of the Consistory of the Lutheran Church were used as the primary sources. From the research, Archbishop Jaan Kiivit sen. (1906.1971, Archbishop 1949.1967) generally emerges as a balancing influence between defiant clergy members and state power. The Archbishop tried to control the activities of the church, making sure that expressions of protest, if any, would move between himself and the commissioner for religious affairs, as required by the relevant regulations. In that, he was not particularly active. Speaking at various meetings of clergy members, he communicated a message of difficult times, which are not insurmountable and have to be survived with God.s help. He could draw on good examples from the history of the Christian church: early Christianity, the period after the Great Northern War in Estonia, the Moravian church movement. Local theologians, in their discussions, offered solutions trying to interpret the situation of the church on the basis of modern thought schools. For them, the development of science and technology in the 1960s was not something directly in opposition with the ideas of the church. The church was not to deny its own identity admitting the conflict of science and religion but, rather, had to start proclaiming the Christian message in new ways. The external downfall offered a chance for internal cleansing. Some theologians recognised the antichurch effect of modern thought schools and the growing fear of being associated with a church, caused by anti-religious attacks. However, they also saw two potential benefits of the anti-church propaganda: it was helping the church to see its own shortcomings and it drew public attention to the existence of the church as such, which would otherwise have been kept silent in public. Alongside these thoughts, there was also resignation under particularly strong anti-religious attacks, an understanding that any resistance could cause even fiercer assaults. Working harder and better was seen as a classic solution to overcome the difficulties, both by clergy members in churches and by churchgoers working in lay institutions. Sermons also had to address any atheists in the audience, with the quality of sermons being an important consideration. Direct expressions of opposition or protests were quite rare, with only a few spontaneous protest actions by clergy members (mostly in the form of protest letters). A notable larger initiative was the protest against the rise of insurance payments for churches in 1963, which many perceived as unfair and which has remained in the memory as an indication of the anti-religious policy of the 1960s. .Work and be watchful. could be a concise summary of the position of the Lutheran Church with regard to its task during the atheism campaign.

Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

86 Book Reviews / Th e Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38 (2011) 73–94 Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 280 pp. $45.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-8014- 4757-0. Th e vast majority of older scholarship on the Khrushchev years presents this period as one largely defi ned by liberalism, in which the reformist wing of the Communist Party largely succeeded in instituting de-Stalinization, whose gains were largely undone by the triumph of conservatives in the Brezhnev years. In recent years, however, a number of scholars – such as