The opening sentence in Yuliya Minkova's complex book tantalizes the reader with its reference to four unnamed, heroic martyrs, including a flight attendant and an imprisoned oligarch, each of whom has attained a memorable place in Soviet and post-Soviet culture. As the author quickly notes, there is only one true similarity uniting the figures introduced in her opening sentence: they were victims who became heroes because of their victimhood. Minkova's unique thesis concerns the connection between victimization and canonization in the creation of national heroes and villains, and the role of this discourse in perpetuating nationalist language and ideals, along with the self-fashioning of individuals. That victimization may serve as a role model for the ordinary citizen is perhaps the most novel and intriguing contribution of Minkova's book.

This dense book begins with a lengthy introduction in which the author not only provides an overview of her argument and the sources for her language of victimhood, but lays out the content of each of its five substantive chapters. A heavily referenced book, Minkova acknowledges the place of two books in her theoretical framework: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (1999). Agamben's work on the homo sacer is fundamental to Minkova's text. Recognizing this, Minkova provides an exegesis of the sacred victim's connection to sovereign power in her introduction.

The first chapter is the most abstract. Despite its provocative title about werewolves and vampires, it is not anchored by the story of a key exemplar. The focus here on articles in Pravda in the 1930s and 40s makes it the only chapter without a direct connection to a sacred victim, lacking the more immediate drama of the other chapters. In chronological terms, the characters in this chapter are the earliest in the book and appear to have been chosen as a device for laying out the framework of the sacrificial narrative. In contrast, the second chapter, with its focus on two aerial hijacking incidents, allows the author to demonstrate the penetration of the sacrificial narrative into all areas of popular culture. Here she elides the real hijackings that were widely recounted in the news media with their subsequent treatment in literature and film. This chapter also illustrates her proposed analogy between the creation of victimized heroes and the show trials of the Stalinist era. Minkova then demonstrates how the public media engaged early Soviet language and cultural mythologies in their praise for the flight attendant who lost her life while struggling to protect the lives of the passengers. The detailed discussion of both hijackings and their representation in popular media makes for a compelling chapter that more clearly than the first illuminates the book's thesis. Two of the next three chapters move closer to the present with the focus on the gruesome murder of the Chilean folksinger, Victor Jara, and his appropriation by Soviet narratives and the artistic intelligentsia, and the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Sandwiched between these equally absorbing chapters, Chapter 4 features the return of the wartime hero in post-Soviet literature. Focusing more on literature than in the other chapters, Minkova here ties the wartime narratives of more recent literature to the continued relevance of the sacrificial victim as he appeared in World War II literature.

In the book's conclusion, Minkova effectively pulls together the themes of the earlier chapters with the additional example of the use of sacrificial language in a televised news story from 2014. This last story, about an unconfirmed event concerning the Ukrainian army and a Russian child, fully illuminates the book's thesis. Here, a quotation from Minkova's conclusion seems apt: “ regardless of the context, the language of sacrifice continues to be deployed in Russia on different sides of the political spectrum … promoting partisan views and state propaganda alike, while its predictability appears to increase the comfort factor for consumers” (174). Throughout this unique contribution to cultural history, Minkova's language, wide range of examples, and breadth of analysis suggest that she writes not only for a dedicated reader but an audience of specialists in search of a new way of addressing the continuity of political imagery from Stalin to Putin.