All three of these monographs begin their stories – on housing, youth, and war veterans respectively – with the final years of Stalin's rule. A literature on both the political and social history of 1945–53 has emerged over the course of recent years, but this period has nonetheless been rather overlooked, sandwiched as it is by the terror of the 1930s and the horrors of war on one side, and the literary and artistic renaissance of Khrushchev's ‘thaw’ on the other. It is, however, a fascinating era. The works under review suggest that these eight years cannot be considered a continuation, or reprise, of the Stalinist 1930s, but rather posit that war fundamentally transformed the nature of Soviet society. All three deal, in different ways, with similar questions: how did the terrible devastation of the Second World War change the Soviet habitat? Did citizens' relationship with Soviet institutions and ideals change as a result of their wartime experiences? And how did official visions and projects change from those pursued in the 1930s? In these accounts, the authors question the established periodization; and, by showing that at least some of the post-Stalin trends were foreshadowed in the late 1940s, suggest the death of Stalin in 1953 was not perhaps quite the historical rupture sometimes assumed. They are also keen to place their findings within the broader patterns of Western Europe and North America's post-war history, in their treatment, for example, of welfare policies towards veterans, the emerging youth subcultures, and the goal of creating clean, modern living space for its citizens. As we shall see, the works reach slightly different conclusions, but all three offer excellent, well-researched, and original forays into the social history – broadly construed – of the Soviet Union after 1945.

Parallels with the history of Western Europe come out most strongly in Mark Smith's Property of communists. In this tightly argued work, Smith examines the incredible housing boom that occurred in the Soviet Union from the late 1950s on. Not only in cities, but also in small towns and rural areas, pre-fabricated five-storey blocks sprang up, offering families – and it was predominantly families – the chance to escape the crowded life of the kommunalka. The new flats may have been small, the new districts unfinished, and the quality of construction uneven but, Smith is keen to note, the move to the separate apartment was a huge sign of Soviet progress for the lucky citizens who made it to the top of the housing list. The housing campaigns are normally associated with Khrushchev, and it is certainly true that it was his 1957 decree which dictated the ambitious and rapid pace of construction in the late 1950s and 1960s, but as Smith demonstrates, the roots of this campaign are to be found in the late 1940s. A deficit in accommodation had already been a feature of rapidly expanding industrial centres of the 1930s but the devastation of war depleted the housing stock still further, leaving many citizens living in dug-outs, sleeping at their workplace, or making do with a corner in a relative's room. At the same time that it had made the housing situation still worse, war had raised expectations. As Edele shows in his monograph (see below), the sacrifices and hardships people endured from 1941 to 1945 made them believe that they were deserving of a better life in peace-time; Smith notes that even though there was no public discourse of ‘homes fit for heroes' (p. 29), people claimed the right to decent housing on the basis of their war record. These hopes did not translate into policy; late Stalinism is primarily known for its grand neo-classical architecture that provided spacious accommodation for a narrow elite, and ordinary people either had to wait on a never-ending, and chaotic, housing-list, or take advantage of a May 1944 decree which provided state loans for those who wanted to build their own home. Yet, Smith argues, the changes of the Khrushchev-era could simply not have happened without developments in the late 1940s. Under late Stalinism, a ‘stratum of enlightened officialdom’ (p. 28) emerged who wanted to tackle the problems created by the war more dynamically and in these years architects were already discussing the use of prefabrication and the ‘industrialisation of construction’ (p. 40) – key features of the Khrushchev-era campaigns. What was entirely new – and Khrushchevian – about the campaigns after 1957 was their scale and speed: the housing shortage was to be eradicated in twelve years. This ambition was in keeping with the utopianism of the period and, particularly in the early 1960s, was linked with the renewed commitment to reaching communism. The housing projects were central to this, not only because the 1970s were envisaged as a decade when material abundance would become the norm, but also because they were meant to foster a new kind of community; although the design of the new apartments allowed families to live separately, they were also to be members of a housing district (the mikro-raion) which provided public services as well as opportunities for residents to engage in the running of local life, thus engendering a certain kind of collective identity.

The shabby, worn look of the Khrushchevka by the end of the Soviet Union has led historians to stress the poor quality of the campaign, but Property of communists argues that these inadequacies can be overplayed. Smith notes that living standards rose and that ‘between 1956 and 1963 per capita housing construction in the USSR was by far the highest in Europe’ (p. 4). Although welfare was meant to be a pillar of the Soviet system, its provision in the 1930s had been feeble; in the post-Stalin era, it ‘was so universal that it went far beyond qualification, outstripping the criteria and becoming fundamentally different in kind to the welfare states of capitalist countries’ (p. 16).

The housing campaigns have attracted scholarly interest in recent years and Smith contributes to this expanding body of work in important ways. His approach to sources is commendably critical, and he is cautious of taking letters of complaints from citizens as evidence for the project's failure (p. 122); he argues that although new residents did write to the authorities to complain about the problems they were encountering in their new homes, their letters – preserved in large numbers in the Soviet archives – reflect rising expectations rather than giving us evidence that the whole project was a failure. Where he does, cautiously, use such petitions and letters written by ordinary people, they offer the reader useful insight into what the campaigns meant for those involved. At times, this social or ‘lived’ dimension could perhaps have been developed further. To my mind, the real strength of this work is in its intellectual rigour, which is particularly evident in the final chapters on the nature of property relations. Not only does Smith effectively take issue with the cold-war assumption that property rights did not exist in the USSR, he also offers a very clear explanation of how they worked, both in theory and in practice. He places Soviet forms of ownership within the framework of European practices, noting that ‘absolute ownership’ has proved an elusive concept elsewhere and arguing that in the USSR state tenants and co-operative shareholders had important rights over their living space (security of occupancy, the relative inviolability of private space, and the practice of inheritance); in addition, at least until the 1960s, about a third of housing stock was still held as personal property. Property of communists thus offers not only a thoughtful account of the origins and nature of the housing booms of the 1950s and 1960s, but also an erudite explanation of property rights in modern Russian history – a rather neglected topic.

Stalin's last generation presents the late Stalinist era as a crucible for change even more strongly. Smith sees the rationale and precedents for later policies being developed quietly before 1953, but Fürst suggests that many of the trends normally associated with the Khrushchev era were already in full swing before the dictator's death; what changed was simply the readiness of the government – and the press it controlled – to discuss openly these developments. She argues that a post-war generation emerged which ‘mastered doubt and belief simultaneously’ (p. 4); whilst young people did not see themselves as opponents of the regime, they were ready to push the bounds of Sovietness leading to phenomena normally associated with the post-Stalin decade: interest in fashion, hooligan subculture, small clandestine groups.

Drawing on a wide range of sources including memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, and accompanied by some striking photographs, Fürst's work offers a rich account of late Stalinist youth, beginning with the impact of war on their childhood: malnourishment affected physical development, the death of parents and the destruction of homes turned many into street-kids, and the recruitment of young people to the army meant that the Komsomol cells became largely inactive; for almost all, war and post-war meant hunger and deprivation. War created a new ‘foundational myth’ (Amir Weiner), but as Fürst shows in a fascinating chapter on young people's reactions to the publication of Aleksandr Fadeev's The youth guard, even heroic tales did not always have quite the effect intended. Inspired by Fadeev's story of young martyrs who died at the hands of the Germans after various heroic acts of sabotage, young readers formed small groups with their own rituals, insignia, and sometimes even weapons, and Stalin eventually insisted on Fadeev's work being rewritten and the local party organization awarded a much greater presence.Footnote ¹ In a later chapter Fürst examines a different kind of youth group, namely those devoted to discussing political issues and critical of Stalinism (although not of socialism). As this book shows, the late Stalinist years saw the emergence of a range of behaviours which the Komsomol and party authorities certainly found troubling. A wave of crime (including juvenile offending) swept through the country in 1945–7 and then abated, but ‘the 1950s were the decade of the hooligan’ (p. 181). The picture she offers of how a childhood in violence could lead youth to commit bloody acts is a compelling one, but I have one minor quibble in this chapter: Joseph Brodsky was not convicted as a parasite in 1960 but in 1964, not least because the anti-parasite legislation was introduced in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic not in 1957 but in 1961 (p. 196). Less immediately threatening, but perhaps equally concerning for the authorities, was the development of subcultures, dance-crazes, and a widespread interest in fashion, resulting in a ‘more complex youth cultural scene’ (pp. 208–9). Friendship even, Fürst argues, was not unproblematic, for it suggested a loyalty that might potentially rival the collective and, potentially, ‘obstinacy and resistance’ (p. 259). In general, Fürst is reluctant to embrace the concept of resistance and tries – largely successfully – to find an interpretation which captures the disruptive nature of various youth phenomena, whilst not reducing them to a binary model in which all kinds of phenomena have to be reduced to being ‘for’ or ‘against’ the regime. Instead, she argues that ‘the process of finding a self in the late Stalinist system’ was not ‘one of becoming part of the larger revolutionary project’ as it might have been in the 1930s, but instead one where young people tried to make ‘sense of a normative environment that had increasingly fragmented into contradictory messages, values, and practices’ (p. 295).

Whilst Fürst and Smith both stress the post-war years as a time of change – albeit in different ways – where they seem to part company is in the significance they attach to the period of the 1940s–1960s more broadly; whilst Smith stresses the achievements of the housing project in terms of the creation of a new kind of welfare state, Fürst is more inclined to emphasize the difficulties which post-war shifts presented to the Soviet regime and, looking ahead to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, speaks of the ‘rot’ which had set in several decades earlier (p. 25). Early in the book, she presents ‘mature socialism’ in terms of the ‘forces of decay and decline’ and stresses the role played by the late Stalinist years in terms of ‘creating and maintaining the hallmarks of societal fragmentation, stagnation, corruption, and cynicism’ (p. 28). Stalin's last generation successfully argues that the final eight years of the dictator's life were important and unique, particularly for young people, who increasingly looked outside the Komsomol – to fashion, dance, crime, friendship, romance, and even to revolutionary traditions – to form their sense of self. For me, the link between these phenomena and subsequent ‘decay and decline’ is credible, but if overstressed, risks erasing important episodes which came in between. In the ‘thaw’ era, for example, the kind of critical engagement described here was certainly present, but cynicism competed with optimism, stagnation with dynamism (as Smith's housing campaigns show). Likewise, the caesura with the 1930s might be less pronounced than at times suggested here; was the political rhetoric of the pre-war decade always so unambiguous and clear-cut, I wonder? The language of the Ezhovshchina and the rabid rhetoric which surrounded the ‘enemy’ seems to me potentially as abstract and reliant on ‘unexplained keywords’ as the post-war campaigns (p. 92).Footnote ² This is primarily a question of emphasis, however, and overall this is an ambitious and extremely stimulating book.

The third book under review is Mark Edele's Soviet veterans of the Second World War. The enormous importance placed on the Second World War in Russia's public culture today might lead one to assume that veterans have always enjoyed a privileged position, but the situation, as Edele ably demonstrates, was rather more complex. The veterans' gradual emergence as a status group was not inevitable, but largely the result of the former soldiers' campaigning and their own sense of entitlement. Edele identifies certain continuities here with the 1930s: the notion that certain groups were deserving of special treatment because of their service to the state was an idea fostered under pre-war Stalinism and led some veterans to believe that the enormous scale of their sacrifice meant they were owed special benefits independent of ongoing service. What was different was the size of the cohort who now believed themselves ‘special’ and the government's reluctance to recognize them as such (not least because of the large numbers involved). This led to ongoing tension between former soldiers and Soviet officialdom.

Edele identifies an immediate post-war period in which the mass return began, trains and stations packed with demobbed soldiers making their way home from war, bringing back ‘all kinds of loot, war stories, injuries and often chronic illness to haunt them later in life’ (p. 15), as well as high hopes for what post-war life would be like. In these early years, official propaganda heroized veterans, although the reality of finding work and living space was already a bureaucratic nightmare, and Edele stresses the importance of family and friends – rather than the state's largesse – for successful reintegration into civilian life. By 1947/8, policy shifted, and many of the privileges awarded to former soldiers – including payments given to decorated war heroes – were revoked, even on paper. Edele challenges the view that veterans universally used the war to achieve social mobility (leaving the village behind, making a career in the army, gaining higher education), writing that ‘Whatever group we take – party members, students, or those taking over leading positions after the war – in each case these were a minority of returned soldiers' (p. 147). Only later, he argues, did the veterans as a group achieve special status. The year 1956 saw the founding conference of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, launched by the Soviet government as an institution for international propaganda, which would be based in Moscow. It gradually became something else, with local organisations springing up across the Soviet Union. In this regard, then, the Khrushchev era was not quite the heyday we might expect, and it was in fact in the first decade of the Brezhnev period – and then again under Gorbachev – that the grassroots organizations were at their most vibrant. In 1978, the Soviet leadership issued special regulations which finally gave veterans the status they had been hoping for since 1947/8.

This is a highly engaging, readable, and well-argued book which uses personal stories and literary works to enliven the text as well as official reports and data gleaned from the archives. The chapter on returning POWs offers a particularly important contribution to the literature because it challenges the idea that they universally faced long Gulag sentences or the firing squad. And overall, it is a significant contribution to the history of the post-war period, helping to explain the present status of veterans in Russia. Edele's work shows how a social movement could come to life and, eventually, triumph even in what he calls an ‘authoritarian’ society. The secret of their success was in part down to their unique position, for they were potentially critics of the Soviet regime for its failure to live up to expectations, but at the same time their very identity as a group came from their defence of the Soviet state. Edele is reluctant to present this in too romanticized a hue, arguing that the status veterans achieved was not just a phenomenon ‘from below’. He is surely right, for it required the Soviet government to decide that the concept of ‘veterans’ – a notion it had long resisted – was acceptable. Here, perhaps, a little more could have been said. Why did the leadership change its mind, particularly in 1965 when it allowed the grassroots organizations to flourish? What role did Brezhnev's government hope these groups might play? And was this related to a new nurturing of Soviet patriotism?

All three works reviewed here see post-war Soviet society – including both pre- and post-1953 – as fundamentally different from pre-war Stalinism. Smith stresses the development of a welfare state, Fürst emphasizes the fragmentation of Soviet culture and the emergence of a generation which was ready to negotiate its boundaries, and Edele suggests a shift from a ‘totalitarian’ society – a term he uses in reference to the 1930s – to an ‘authoritarian’ one in which popular movements were now possible. All three are, in their different ways, excellent additions to the scholarship on the post-45 USSR and will be welcomed by academics and students alike.