The east-central European state socialist systems had many ways to manage and organize their citizens, and socialist mass organizations, such as those focusing on youth or women were among the main mechanisms used. These organizations occupied a space that in democracies is taken by civil society, with the major difference being that these organizations were generally initiated or at least guided from the top down and worked toward the wishes of the ruling party.

An important anomaly in this landscape were the Red Cross organizations studied by Maren Hachmeister in her PhD dissertation focusing on Poland and Czechoslovakia. As traditional organizations from the interwar period and members in an international movement, they not only survived the introduction of state socialism, but thrived as a surrogate socialist mass organization, even though they never entirely fit the model. A self-description as humanitarian, apolitical, civil society actor was a recipe for liquidations for other organizations, but this was not case for the Red Cross societies, which instead managed to carve out a place in a landscape of socialist mass organizations. Hachmeister sets out to research these organizations’ space to structure their own activities in this political context.

She borrows the concept of “self-organization” from the natural sciences (9) as an alternative for the concept of civil society, which is too connected to the idea of working in or toward democratic structures. Hachmeister wants to know whether the Red Cross associations were able to evade party influence in such a way to become a cradle of proto-civil society structures. She pursues this question by studying the Red Cross associations’ tracing services, voluntary blood donations, youth activities, and “elites.”

The first two topics are good choices to find a preliminary answer to these questions. The tracing services and blood donation work were Red Cross initiatives stemming from the organization's traditional roles that helped the Czechoslovak and Polish organizations legitimate their place in society or even make their activity indispensable. By becoming problem solvers, the Red Cross associations gained some freedom to operate. Somewhat surprisingly, both state parties allowed this to happen. Although nationalizing the organizations’ property and intervening rhetorically, both states never tried to take over these functions, and often happily cooperated or delegated tasks. The Polish tracing services were an excellent example, where outsourcing humanitarian matters between Poland and West Germany saved the Polish state from awkward and politically sensitive work.

A further reason why the Red Cross associations blended in so well into state socialist society is to be found in the way that socialist and humanitarian messaging converged with relative ease. The Red Cross ideas of humanity and solidarity were not so far removed from the party's talk about “the socialist man” and mass solidarity (188).

By taking up essential tasks and blending in rhetorically, the Red Cross associations managed to maintain a surprising level of continuity across the obvious watersheds of 1945–1948, 1968, and 1989 (191). Because some form of professional medical knowledge was needed in many leadership positions, they were not subject to the same parameters of political loyalty and faced much less-frequent elite change than less specialized or skill-based mass organizations.

Hachmeister concludes that the Red Cross organizations in both Poland and Czechoslovakia managed to carve out some space for activity autonomous from the state, even though they were embedded materially and ideologically in that state. Some level of party influence and penetration was needed for daily operations, but the further a structure was removed from top—where cooperation with the state was unavoidable—the more space was available for “bottom-up” initiatives, which, according to Hachmeister, provided an infrastructure for a future civil society (262).

Hachmeister concludes that the organizations could self-organize because they were taking up traditional tasks, which were considered neccesary in society and matched the organization's prestige. Lastly, there was the more problematic self-description as apolitical (259–61), which of course was only partly true given that every organized activity in state socialism was political.

Both Red Cross associations were also political in the sense that for individuals they could serve as an alternative to party membership, even though decisions taken out of party loyalty and party politics had their place in both associations. Hachmeister shows that in the Polish Red Cross, people with politically undesirable backgrounds could make careers that would have been difficult elsewhere in society. In the Red Cross, practical skills, knowledge, and certain networks were more important than loyalty to the party. For children, the youth organizations of the Red Cross offered a welcome skillset, as well as a much more voluntary organizational form that focused on independent thinking rather than ideological correctness.

Hachmeister has worked through an impressive amount of archival material in several languages and countries. Her chapters strictly follow the static structure that is inherent to a comparative study and remain close, sometimes too close, to the available sources. This means that the bigger insights the book certainly contains sometimes get lost in the details of a certain case study, episode, or document. The reader will at times grapple with the question of what the significance of a certain part of the book means for the bigger story.

For those who read on, however, the book offers interesting insights into how these two organizations with a life span stretching far beyond state socialism adapted and functioned in this often neglected period of time in their own organizational histories. By doing this, Hachmeister carries out the historian's duty of showing that 1945–1989 was no black box or even a great exception in the Red Cross's history. As is so often the case, continuity, complexity, and adaptability loom much larger than those looking for easy stories would wish to find.