Hornsby’s book is a very well researched, richly detailed and elegantly written synthesis of dissent and popular protest under Khrushchev. The book’s heroes are ordinary people like Yuri Orlov, Revolt Pimenov, Lev Krasnopevtsev, Petro Grigorenko and many other individuals whose acts directed against the Soviet regime came within the purview of the state’s organs of repression. These were first criminalized under Article 58–10 on “counter-revolutionary activity” and from 1960 on, under statutes on “crimes against the state”. From the book’s first pages, these stories of individual resistance and disagreement with the Soviet order draw the reader into the world of everyday Soviet reality where, behind the propagandized façade of consensus, citizens refused to get used to Soviet normality, demanding reform and better living standards.

The author has made every effort to use a wide range of sources and to overcome the tendentious nature of official sources. Consequently, he aims to reconstruct both dissenting behaviour and regime responses. Along with documents from the Soviet Procurator’s office, he analyses materials from the Central Committee’s General Department, the Party Control Commission and the Department of Komsomol Organs. He also makes use of Western versions of Soviet reality (e.g. Radio Liberty materials) and, by drawing on memoirs and interviews with eyewitnesses, shows how individuals experienced everyday life in the USSR. Despite his painstaking archival work, Hornsby does not present a new interpretive framework for understanding the viability of Soviet society and explaining why, after Stalin’s death, millions of Soviet citizens perceived the Soviet system as stable. Basically, the author’s conclusions do not go beyond those presented in works about the culture of protest in the Khrushchev era that were published nearly decade ago and are based on mostly similar sources.1

The book is divided in two parts. The first part begins with an examination of how Soviet society reacted to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and how people used a situation in which the boundaries of permissible rhetoric were blurred to articulate personal/collective experience of the present, the traumas of the past and expectations of the future. The author dwells in detail on responses to the 1956 Hungarian uprising in the USSR, understanding it as a turning point that marked the transition to a gradual policy of “cracking down” with the intention of putting an end to Thaw discourses and practices which cast doubt on the Soviet order.

Alongside analysis of anti-Soviet leaflets and anonymous letters, Hornsby examines secret political organizations that were based on ties of kinship and/or friendship. These groups demanded liberalization of the Soviet system and a return to the ideals of the revolution. Fascinating examples of two underground groups, one from Leningrad and one from Moscow, give us deep insights into the values and motives, the codex of honour and moral attitudes, the rituals of belonging and methods of struggle used by these dissenters, whose activities extended far beyond the boundaries of local networks, connecting cities, republics and the state through ties based on the anti-Soviet attitudes of individuals. The author tells us about the trials and tribulations of defining a new conception of “anti-Soviet acts” with a conclusion that the watershed separating the political from the non-political character of protest behaviour was fairly precisely defined by 1958: If the regime was willing to tolerate criticism about consumption and the organization of daily life, it had no patience for actions carrying anti-state and anti-Soviet connotations, which were criminalized and repressed. The author uses the number of convictions under Article 58–10, which reached 1,964 in 1957, as an indicator of the phasing out of the Thaw (p. 123).

The second part of the book focuses on analyses of the “post-Stalin, post-terror dictatorship”, which was based on a combination of prophylaxis, policing and the use of punitive responses to anti-Soviet behaviour, and the new “rules of the game” that defined both the interrelationship of the state and society up to the beginning of perestroika. The author claims that improvements in living conditions allowed the regime to keep resistance to a minimum and guaranteed the loyalty of the majority for decades after the Stalinist period. Hornsby argues that drawing up a new social contract led to more concentrated acts of political protest. However, this claim about the intensity and vociferousness of dissent activities should be mediated by both recognition of a growing cynicism in Soviet daily life and an intensification of the KGB’s role in monitoring anti-state sentiment and technological improvements in the channels of communication. Taken together, all of these factors play a decisive role in creating an impression of the scale, intensity and inclusiveness of protest behaviour across a significant territory with a broad audience. The author himself presents an impressive example of how a leaflet was distributed across five union republics in the biggest urban centres (p. 144).

This part of the book fits into the paradigm of research on the development of modern states and contemporary technologies for control/oversight based on scientific knowledge, modern policing and punitive methods of managing non-conformist behaviour. Thus, in the Khrushchev era, alongside the GULAG and prisons, punitive psychiatry began to be used more frequently as an instrument in the struggle with dissidents. The practice of forced psychiatric confinement aroused a widespread public response in the West, helped start the human rights movement in the USSR, forged the dissident movement itself and consequently promoted establishment of the “embryonic public sphere” (p. 259) in the Soviet Union. To these developments, the author adds the appearance of samizdat, public poetry readings on Mayakovsky Square in Moscow and a wave of letters ordinary citizens sent to Novyi Mir after the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” as crucial innovations in the country’s public life. They showed the birth of another Soviet society, one that sought out niches and other spaces for the autonomous expression of its experiences, traumas and emotions that would be a counterbalance to the grammar of loyalty and rules of submission that the state thrust on them.

One of the book’s main accomplishments is the clarity with which the author develops one of the key conclusions of his analysis namely, that after Stalin’s death the Soviet Union still applied repression to people who publicly questioned the legitimacy of the Soviet order. Up to the beginning of perestroika the state did not make its peace with dissent. It established precise boundaries for permissible rhetoric and behaviour; people who crossed these boundaries were threatened with penalties of escalating severity. On the one hand, Hornsby’s book warns us against the kind of embellishment of the experience of life in a dictatorship that can be identified in recent historical work about everyday life, practices of consumption and tourism. On the other hand, Hornsby’s research relies on the tradition of the Sovietology of the 1990s when, as the archival revolution proceeded, researchers concentrated on describing the “triumph of the resisting subject”.2 As a result, the book tends to use the “traditional” explanatory binaries of acceptance and rejection, belief and disbelief, loyalty and resistance, which were part of the efforts in Western historiography to find “autonomous”, non-indoctrinated liberal subjects in (post-)Stalinist Russia who could be contrasted with the majority of conformist, cynical – let’s say “normal” – Soviet citizens. Nonetheless, Hornsby’s book offers the reader an insightful overview of the Soviet state and society after Stalin and could be recommended for the general public and scholars with an interest in exploring post-war, post-socialist cultures of protest and dissent in a wider European or global perspective.

Notes:
1 Here I am only citing key work that is available in English: Kozlov V., Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin-Years, London 2002 (the original Russian edition appeared in 1999 with an edited version following in 2006); Kozlov V. / Fitzpatrick S. / Mironenko S. (eds.), Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, New Haven, CT 2011 (the first Russian edition was published in 2005).
2 Anna Krylova, The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies, in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies, 1 (2000), pp. 1–28.