Three generations of historians examine the interplay of revolutionary violence and coercion, state-building, and efforts to incorporate the masses in creating the Soviet person, culture, and society. The collection of sixteen chapters introduces new voices and approaches, and has much to offer to a broad readership (including students), and to specialists and general readers alike.

In the opening section, Lars Lih traces the liberal origins of the ubiquitous Soviet mass campaigns among the nineteenth century European and Russian social democrats, who championed freedom of expression and assembly as essential to political outreach. Under state sponsorship, campaignism mobilized the masses without freedoms. In a subsequent section, Yiannis Kokosalakis argues that the campaign for the Stalin constitution harkened back to the experimentalism of the revolutionary era and to the Marxist-Leninist goal of a classless society. Eric Van Ree locates the kernel of coercion in Lenin's State and Revolution (1917). Inspired by the participatory Paris Commune and by Russia's popular mass movements, the pamphlet envisioned workers engaging in governance, monitoring the running of enterprises, and protecting the revolution through grassroots organizations. But for Vladimir Lenin, the vanguard party would usurp power to establish a coercive, centralized state that would exclude the former ruling classes and supplant the soviets, factory committees, and militias as the locus of power. In a later section on the Stalin era, J. Arch Getty finds the origins of coercion not in ideology, as Van Ree argues, but in Lenin's and the masses’ collective understanding of revolutionary democracy as coercive.

A section on internal democracy narrowly focuses on Lev Trotskii and the 1923 Party struggle. Ian Thatcher takes aim at western scholars’ exalted view of Iosif Stalin's most famous critic. Trotskii's enduring critique of the Party notwithstanding, he was a prisoner of his own acceptance of the ban on dissident groups and factions. James Harris portrays Trotskii as arrogant, out of touch with the Politburo and regional leadership, and yet cognizant that he could not prevail against them. Neither chapter considers the persistence of workerist sentiments. Workers’ economic grievances, their desire for a role in decision making played a major role in the crisis of 1921 and throughout the NEP era. Party leaders recognized that workers resented the weakening of factory committees and trade unions and their incorporation in the party-state. Sheila Fitzpatrick's chapter in a later section adds to this discussion by focusing on Lenin's dismay at the Party's bureaucratization and alienation from the masses and his pessimism concerning the future of the revolution. Lenin shared his critique with all oppositions active since 1919. His concerns led Lenin to temper his views on coercion.

The impact of the civil wars on state-building and society is treated in many of the chapters. The protracted World War and civil wars impoverished the country and inured its population to cruelty and violence. Dakota Irvin offers a glimpse of Ekaterinburg during the Bolsheviks’ short-lived rule. Under the efficient management of Lev Sosnovskii, for a few months in 1917–18, the Bolsheviks provided the city basic services in an atmosphere of moderation and cooperation across political and class lines. The outbreak of civil war crushed the Ekaterinburg experiment. More durable was the reinvention of reception offices as “living links” between the government and the masses. Lara Douds describes how the offices combined the tsarist patrimonial practice of appeals with the leadership's aspiration to provide access to the masses. All too soon, the leadership came to see the institutions as a “check on the accountability of government officials” (11). The bureaucratization of reception offices contributed to the new government's inefficiency.

The chapters on Ukraine and Poland by Olena Palko and Peter Whitewood argue that the civil war and foreign intervention shaped state-building, economic and military priorities, and internal democracy. The exigencies of war and foreign occupation and Lenin's understanding of nationalist aspirations inspired important concessions to Ukraine: autonomy and linguistic, educational, and staffing nativization. They were reversed during the following decade in the interest of centralization and military and national security. Similarly, the incessant fear of renewed foreign aggression defined Soviet-Polish relations during the Interwar years. Real and perceived threats influenced, too, the leadership's intransigence towards factionalism and its insistence on unity. The legacy of the civil war and intervention is implicit in Olga Velikanova's chapter on the sharp zigzags separating repressive and moderate periods. Velikanova interprets the zigzags as a reflection of the conflict between utopian aspirations and the country's stark limitations (and popular discontent with that reality). The conflict was compounded by the leadership's readiness to use extralegal measures during crises

The sixth and final section on culture and society reprises the volume's themes: the interplay of emancipatory goals, violence, coercion, and war, and their impact on policy and everyday life. Fitzpatrick's chapter depicts Lenin's and Nadezhda Krupskaia's close collaboration at the end of the leader's life revolving around education, which they saw as the prerequisite to an actively engaged citizenry. Polly Corrigan looks at the tensions between mass literacy and the repression of works deemed harmful to Soviet society. She juxtaposes Soviet censorship to the socialists’ rejection of tsarist censorship and contextualizes the Soviet experience within the history of European censorship. Andy Willimott conveys the leadership's optimism towards the new generation, one presumably free of the legacy of the capitalist and tsarist past. The participation of young people in voluntary associations allowed them to cultivate the new Soviet person and construct Soviet society. Sports and cultural groups, atheist and literacy leagues fostered initiative and a sense of community. Yet this initiative was tempered by the Party's distrust of spontaneity and by the bureaucratization of activists and associations. For Siobhan Hearne, policies concerning prostitution reflected the clash between the avowed commitment to women's liberation and the survival of stereotypes dividing prostitutes into weak if redeemable victims of socioeconomic conditions and hardened criminals. The stereotypes and the underfunding of health and other services framed increasingly punitive policies towards prostitutes. Francois-Xavier Nérard closes the volume with the omnipresent Soviet cafeterias. The poorly-provisioned canteens clashed with the professed goal of providing workers inexpensive, tasty meals in modern, clean facilities. The resulting oft-inedible fare served by surly staff yielded a toxic mix of mass disgust and of scapegoating and denunciations against managers and cooks. The canteens were emblematic of the many ways that citizens were exposed to and desensitized to everyday violence.