Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish, eds. Social Control Under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023

Social Control Under Stalin and Khrushchev aims to expand the ways in which we should see power in the Soviet state. The edited volume approaches the unifying theme of “social control” through a wide range of topics, including the more familiar territory of the secret police and the Gulag along with nonpolitical policing, the legal system, taxation, and welfare provision. The editors of the volume explain its agenda in terms of the need to look beyond the Stalinist regime’s use of “seemingly unregulated mechanisms of terror,” instead widening the perspective to consider “less brazenly violent mechanisms to discipline” the population (p. 3). Text in English