Reflecting on the centenary of the Russian revolution, Sheila Fitzpatrick noted its uncertain place in the current historical imagination.Footnote ¹ Yet subsequent years have seen a steady stream of groundbreaking work. Much of this work delves into the inner workings of the early Soviet republic. Matthew Rendle and Aaron Retish wrote on revolutionary law, Ekaterina Pravilova and Jennifer Siegel on finances, Andrei Ganin on the Red Army, and Aleksandr Rozhkov on childhood and education, to name a few. Anne O’Donnell’s subject is arguably even more fundamental though virtually untouched by historians: the destruction of the entire system of private property by the Bolsheviks. Initially envisioned as the seizure of key economic assets, nationalization quickly encompassed all buildings and movable property down to furniture, dishes, and clothing, with momentous effects on the Soviet state and society and with powerful post-1991 aftershocks.

As often happens with Soviet-era records, much of this story is either hidden in inaccessible repositories or was physically destroyed by a regime eager to forget the years of revolutionary chaos. O’Donnell nonetheless located a rich set of archival materials, including some surviving neighborhood records of confiscation and crucial papers of the early Soviet administration (Goskon, Rabkrin, and Bonch-Bruevich’s Sovnarkom office). Some are true archival gems, such as the report of the intrepid Bolshevik official who audited the Cheka’s Lubianka headquarters in 1918. O’Donnell’s research highlights the intricacies of the Soviet regime during its formative and most vulnerable months: while the Whites were marching on Moscow, the Bolsheviks were attempting to audit and redistribute housing and household wares. Power and Possession addresses urban spaces and the people and things that filled them, with almost all the evidence coming from Moscow and Petrograd and a handful of examples from smaller towns.

Individual chapters address the politization of the housing question prior to the Bolshevik takeover (Prologue), and the massive seizure of living spaces and household goods that began in 1917 (Chs. 1, 2, and 3). The book especially highlights the “conquest” of Moscow’s living spaces by the new government’s move in March 1918 (55) that emptied entire neighborhoods. But while the revolutionary government did influence wholesale dispossession in a variety of ways, the key actors of the book are local and municipal authorities that sometimes openly countermanded the Sovnarkom (244–45). Chapter 4 recounts the tragic story of the early Gokhran, the central repository for valuables whose staff were accused of theft and executed in 1921, in part due to the inherent difficulty of collecting, evaluating, and disposing of items that were supposed to have no value under the new rules. Chapter 5 focuses on the laws of 1920 and 1921 that put limits on property confiscation, denationalized some property (occasionally even returning it to former owners), and marked “[t]he process of closing the Revolution” (237), albeit in an ambiguous and ambivalent way.

Power and Possession argues that the Bolshevik dispossession was a complex process and not a one-off decision from above. Even more complex was its historical significance: mass confiscation created the vast category of state property that had to be defined, described, and valuated. The effect, O’Donnell argues, was that the new property regime, introduced to underpin the rule of workers and peasants, instead was a key source of its weakness. Subscribing to J. Arch Getty’s theory of “weak totalitarianism,” O’Donnell shows that the various agencies that comprised the new state could not be sure what assets they controlled and what “control” even meant under socialism. The “bundle of rights” commonly understood to define property was not simply taken away from their owners and passed to someone else, but taken apart and “dissipated” (55, 96). The Soviet state thus was “unable … to secure physical control, informational authority, powers of disposal, confidence in its own capacities” (135). At the same time, control over such humble objects as apartments, furniture, or a good pair of boots became a key element of the regime’s power (56) and would remain so for decades.

Power and Possession reconfigures central scholarly conversations on the late imperial and early Soviet periods, including histories of urban unrest and anomie (Leopold Haimson, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Ilya Gerasimov), individual engagement with state power (Barbara Alpern Engel, Siobhán Hearne), the revolutionary continuum of violence (Peter Holquist, Eric Lohr), and the fin-de-siecle’s attention to languages, images, and emotions (Boris Kolonitskii, Vasilii Aksionov). Importantly, the book recognizes that property is not a single immutable concept. Still, the book somewhat inconsistently accepts pre-1917 property law and its property regime as the norm. Even conceding that the pre-revolutionary era may have subsequently looked idyllic to many Russians, even the wealthiest pre-1917 property owners were not necessarily happy and secure, whether they owned land or, say, investments subject to market fortunes. Modern European systems of private property more generally are ultimately rooted in violence and oppression and in 1917 were still often irrational, arbitrary, and dangerous in Russia and elsewhere. Modern England’s foundational legacy of enclosures or the US dispossession of Native Americans have not been disowned or corrected to this day. Private owners litigated, quarreled, and dispossessed each other, and courts of law could not be simply presumed to be more helpful than, say, Bonch-Bruevich’s Sovnarkom. O’Donnell’s view of the western “[l]iberal markets” as rational and valuing efficiency (85–86) is admittedly widely shared but also open to criticism.

While exaggerating the stability and predictability of a presumed baseline European property regime, Power and Possession continues to dabble into ideology when it asserts that nationalization necessarily equals waste (20), that the Bolshevik regime was grounded in “lawlessness” (16) and that dispossessing the rich necessarily means robbing everyone else (25). There is no doubt that it was heartbreaking to millions of Russians to lose their homes and their keepsakes down to treasured photo albums (233–237). Power and Possession shows vividly what it was like to lose everything. Yet it leaves out the people who gained. A veritable army of ubiquitous sovsluzhashchie, most of whom likely had already owned dishes, clothing, and furniture inhabited confiscated spaces next to laborers and former peasants who had not. At least some pre-1917 elites clearly kept their status, as Tamila Lankina and others have shown. The revolution disrupted daily life, and yet it seems to have also reinforced people’s attachment to their things, and not simply because Sovnarkom wanted to rule through material possessions. One additional quibble about this otherwise engaging, important, and thought-provoking book is its final reference to Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s 1937 famous painting of the proletarian housewarming party. Calling him and his painting socialist realist (283) is fair neither to socialist realism nor to Petrov-Vodkin.