This book can be seen as a sequel to the previous book of the author twenty years ago. However, if at the center of Making History for Stalin: Story of the Belomor Canal (1998) was the cultural history of building the White Sea-Baltic canal as the first attempt to institutionalize the philosophy of re-forging (perekovka) and to materialize the idea that a new Soviet man could be created through forced labor and political re-education, then in this book the author turns to another important aspect related to gigantic Stalinist projects—the movement from the concept of time to the concept of space. The collective writing of the infamous Stalin's White Sea-Baltic Canal: History of Construction, 1931–1934—a unique literary enterprise to which all major Soviet writers contributed, was the first such case. The construction of the Moscow-Volga canal was no less lavishly aesthetically adorned, although it lacked such centerpiece as the latter book. It turned out, however, to be a blessing in disguise since it allowed the author to turn to many other artifacts—books and paintings, architectural structures and sculptures, memoirs, and even postage stamps—to raise more general issues of the cultural history of Stalinism and the production of the Soviet cultural space.

The book documents an important and unexplored episode of Soviet history—the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal—and opens with the theme of water. The canal played a key role not only as a transport artery, but also as a source of drinking water for the metropolis, which was conceived as the capital of world communism. The author devotes some interesting pages to the topic of hydraulic despotism and how the Stalin regime corresponded to the notion of a hydraulic society. The second chapter is particularly interesting as it introduces some new material. On the basis of the archives of the Dmitlag camp, the author demonstrates how the idea of reforging evolved after the White Sea-Baltic Canal. Especially fruitful in this context is the long-hidden Biblioteka Perekovki (Library of Re-forging), a series of booklets written by and for Dmitlag inmates, as well as newspapers and the journal Na shturm trassy (Storming the Worksite). The focus of the third chapter, entitled “Creating Metaphorical and Ideological Space: Cultural Production and the Moscow Canal,” is the sculptures adorning the canal route, the paintings crafted by official and inmate artists, and the literary works conceived as laudatory histories of the Moscow canal. Chapter 4, “Monuments, Monumentality, and Memory: Forgetting and Remembering,” introduces the reader to Lenin and Stalin monuments and the architecture of the locks, the Northern River Station, and the commemorations from 1947 to 1997, the Gulag history, and to present day Dmitrov. It raises questions about the modes of preserving the memory of the Gulag and how modern Russia comes to terms with its tragic past. The final chapter is dedicated to the present and future of the Moscow Canal. Here, the section on the discursive strategies of the modern reading of this landscape is especially interesting (“Creating a Rhetorical Future for the Moscow Canal”).

Stalinism produced not only reality, but also extensive and rich mythology, which was internalized by many generations of Soviet people and retained its appeal to their descendants. The book is an excellent example of a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis of complex historical phenomena that have different dimensions (political, social, economic, cultural), including the political mythology of Stalinism. What makes this book especially valuable and holds a very variegated material together is the focus on creating a Soviet cultural space. It deals not only with the symbolic space of Stalinism, but also with the traces of the space of the Gulag and with the commemorative space left after it. The book is by nature interdisciplinary. Connecting political, social, and cultural history, the author turns to cultural geography and spatial studies to interpret and contextualize a variety of discursive, structural, and cultural products dedicated to, and in praise of this signature Stalinist construction project. It is drawing on an extensive range of archival sources, personal interviews, and contemporary documentary materials and combines a detailed, sophisticated analysis with broad generalizations that makes it an important contribution to the cultural history of Stalinism, the need for which is commonly recognized today.