“Socialism without post, telegraph, and machine is an empty word.” This expression, traditionally attributed to Vladimir Lenin, shows how the Bolshevik project was linked to the generalization of modern techniques of exchange and communication. Larissa Zakharova's posthumous book, From Moscow to the Farther Lands, focusing on interpersonal exchanges mediated by techniques, is based on a stimulating enigma: is the development of remote communication networks, which favor a delocalization of social relations and a reorganization of interactions between individuals and groups, compatible with the will of a state to tightly control the territory and the population? In a country like the Soviet Union, which stretched over ten thousand kilometers from west to east, how was this tension managed? Answering these questions, Zakharova examines the processes that bound Soviets together, not those that categorized, divided, and violated them, and shows how access to communications had united and hierarchized Soviet society.

Zakharova's book is striking for its threefold ambition: chronological, geographical, and thematic. The interest of considering the Soviet long-term experience appears when the author demonstrates the dynamics of changes in attitude and mentality, such that they make the modernity of the state more or less operative. By examining in the first chapter the construction of networks and their forms (the emergence of a radial network), the historian highlights both the difficulties of spreading innovative techniques over the vast Soviet territory and the divergent conceptions of public action in the development of communications, centralized or delegated to regional and local authorities. Finally, the author seizes in the same movement, by means of a convincing play of scales, the three types of networks and the various social actors: the Politburo leadership, the intermediaries, and Soviet society.

The second chapter addresses the question of the improvement of techniques in USSR by means of a reflection on the international transfers to the USSR and from the USSR to the socialist states after 1945. The author reveals how the repressive nature of the regime prevented or stopped risk-taking in innovation, constantly forcing the Soviets to use foreign techniques. The third chapter studies how secret documents circulated and what the administrative and technical conditions were. Secrecy appears as the official key principle for the Communist Party, both in everyday life and in times of crisis: civil war, Nazi invasion, dissidence, Chernobyl. Zakharova exposes the sophistication of the procedures (classification according to degrees of confidentiality, criteria of reproduction and destruction, traceability of secret documents) and the development of an administration of secrecy (typists, couriers, encoders) carefully selected.

The second part proposes an analysis of the role of networks in the structuring of social relations. True to her method, the study of the social uses of objects, Zakharova examines those that make it possible to maintain secrecy and the hierarchies of information communication. The author shows that access to communication networks was differentiated according to two principles: the unequal spatial coverage between republics and urban and rural regions; and the social position. The state centralized and placed itself as a redistributor through the lines of the network, which modelled a stratification. The phenomenon described on the social level by Elena Osokina is highlighted here in a particular, rare, and strategic good: information. In the USSR, the very fine construction of the degree of information depended on the degree of secrecy and the information circuits.

The third part of the book focuses on epistolary exchanges considered as a tool for maintaining social ties despite forced displacement and extreme surveillance. Here the study of the Soviet self is not based on diaries, as is, for example, Jochen Hellbeck, but on correspondence:—a heterogeneous source, difficult to locate, and therefore quite difficult to exploit. The stake is less the adhesion to the regime than the impact on personal perception and on personal formation. Letters to the newspapers, petitions, advice to the government, and denunciations form an archive of the self with singular circuits of creation, circulation, and survival, as shown by the letters sent from the front between 1941 and 1944. The forced break-up of families or friendship networks due to deportations, rural exodus, factory transfers during WWII, sending soldiers to fronts, and then the pan-Soviet distribution of jobs, sometimes on distant building sites, pushed parents to develop long-distance sociability, thanks to their growing literacy. If the correspondence shows a “plurality of codes, languages, styles,” starting from the war it became a factor of social homogenization. In the USSR, the state sought to obtain information about the population: increasingly numerous agents of censorship therefore greatly supervised letters. In return, the population adapted to censorship, developing parallel channels of distribution, circumventing censorship, or using Aesop's tongue. Intermediary agents had also micro-power that could obstruct the center's plan, going so far as to misinform the state top: they created micro-territories of autonomy, as Yoram Gorlitzky and Oleg Khlevniuk show in Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union (2020).

For Zakharova, the heart of Soviet society resides in a rurality that is relatively far from a general Soviet modernity, the seat of what she enigmatically calls “epistolary modernity.” This expression is grounded on the opposition between the telephone and the letter, between the instrument of power in the hands of State agents and the instrument of reflexivity and emancipation used by society members. The appropriation of the official discourse evolved after 1945 towards criticism of the regime, when the dominant theme became the family, the individual, and their well-being. This is where the modernization of the country took place, with the citizens becoming aware of their critical membership in the state. For the author, who died prematurely at age 41 in 2019, Soviet modernity is embodied in the solidarity between individuals linked to other individuals and thus forming groups, distinct from the groups assigned by the state. Ideology has not been imposed on society but was produced by individuals and was a vehicle for social inclusion: it is this provocative and fruitful thesis that undoubtedly constitutes the main legacy of Zakharova's book.