The most recent book by a prominent cultural historian of Russia's twentieth century, Igor Narskii provides a historical perspective on amateur dance in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to perestroika as part of the Soviet politics of culture and as pedagogical practices of professional Soviet performers. Narskii starts by unwrapping the main ideas invested in amateur dance by Soviet ideologists beginning with Stalin himself and showing how they changed over time. Through an analysis of official publications and specialized literature and periodicals related to amateur dance, Narskii argues that its politics reflected the Soviet ideological imperative to produce a healthier, more disciplined, and enlightened collective body, an imperative encapsulated in the concept of kulturnost΄ that has been extensively discussed in the scholarship on Stalinism. By the early 1970s, however, state support for amateur dance began to diminish, partially because a network of clubs and similar cultural organizations was expensive to maintain. Coupled with a much greater variety of forms of cultural consumption available to Soviet audiences, this led to a gradual decline in amateur dance in the last two decades of the Soviet Union.

To implement their grand visions of teaching kulturnost΄ and citizenship through dance, the Soviet authorities employed a large group of professional choreographers to act as organizers of amateur groups, and in the second part of his monograph Narskii examines the extensive network of people, organizations, and texts that materialized and institutionalized amateur dance in the USSR. His particular emphasis is on how amateur dance reflected the changing understanding of Soviet nationhood. Soviet choreographers were tasked with inventing dances that had to include folk (or “genuine people's”) elements, look sincere and natural, appeal to the general public, and distract Soviet youth from its fascination with western dances. Their theories of dance reified ethnicity and nationhood as primordial and essential categories that found manifestation in dances performed on the amateur stage. While the Communist Party leadership did have the final say in all things pertaining to cultural policies, Soviet choreographers were something more than simply its pawns; instead, they contributed to the definition of the Soviet collective body through their writing and performing.

The third part of the monograph is a microhistory of the amateur dance group Samotsvety [Gems] founded in Chelyabinsk in 1938. Sponsored by the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, Samotsvety became an exemplary dance collective due to a generous funding, numerous travel opportunities at home and abroad, charismatic leaders, and committed members. Here, the author switches to a different set of sources including oral history interviews, materials from private collections, the local press, and autobiographical reminiscences (the latter are also occasionally used in the first two parts of the book). A changed perspective allows Narskii to show how the development of the repertoire of such groups was determined not so much by ideological diktat, but rather by the aesthetics and pragmatics of amateur dance as a network and a professional activity. As a result, the third part reads as a separate research project, which is not integrated into the analytical model of Soviet power as a didactic power used in the first two parts of the monograph.

The narrative organization of the book is remarkable for the unusually large amount of quotations used by the author. In most chapters, direct quotes constitute almost half of the text; in some—even more. A result of such excessive quoting is that Narskii's analysis remains largely within the most obvious conceptual frames suggested by his sources: dance as a political medium and a form of social engineering (in particular, nation building). This reproduction of the “top-down” perspective largely brackets off such important categories as age, class, and gender from his account, even though these categories are prominently featured in his own autobiographical reminiscences. And while dance is the most corporeal of the arts, an overemphasis of the printed media leads to an almost complete lack of the body and its cultures in Narskii's analysis, leaving the readers with only their discursive framings and traces.

Igor Narskii's monograph is a solid study of the political economy of amateur dance; cultural historians of Soviet Russia will find it particularly useful. It answers two of the three questions used as part of its title: how the party taught the people to dance, and how the choreographers assisted it. What came out of it remains much less clear, as the monograph only in passing touches upon the themes of performativity, corporeality, and visuality in Soviet amateur dance.