After reviewing blockbuster biographies of Stalin and his “house of government,” I was glad to have the opportunity to read a book in which workers and peasants are the main protagonists. In Elizabeth Harry's Permanent Revolution, the reader encounters them as “supplicants,” writers of letters to Lenin and Stalin between 1921 and 1927, the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Harry quotes from as many as a thousand (my estimate) of such letters that she found in fondy 5 (Lenin's Personal Secretariat) and 17 (the Central Committee of the KPSS) in RGASPI. She has analyzed them on the basis of their “language and meaning” with “special attention … given to appeals of supplicants who claimed the universality of their problems or viewpoints” (xv).

Following a brief introduction that reviews the checkered reputation of NEP among western historians, Chapter 1 sets out the reasons for the adoption of NEP (“the Bolsheviks were frustrated by their inability to stem the economic breakdown,” 12), early problems, persistent tensions associated with the reintroduction of market relations, and the forces gathering within the state to put an end to “the revival of capitalism in the midst of a socialist revolution,” (19). Chapter 2 discusses the terms in which the supplicants addressed “the center,” and their conceptualizations of socialist society as a collective family. As Chapter 3 argues, they viewed NEP as a threat to the integrity and survival of the family because of its anti-egalitarian thrust. Chapters 4 through 9 deal successively with those individuals, social groups, attitudes and practices that the letter-writers identified as responsible for their own immiseration and the failure of the revolution to fulfill its promise: unemployment, parental abandonment, and lack of educational opportunities (Chapter 4); bureaucracy in both party and state bodies (Chapter 5); elitism and privileges among party members (Chapter 6); foreign enemies (Chapter 7); the suspect motives of peasants and implacable hostility of “former people” (Chapter 8); and the intelligentsia as an obstacle to the advancement of more deserving workers and peasants (Chapter 9).

It is not difficult to sympathize with many of the letter-writers who make palpable with colorful language their disappointment with the outcome of the revolution and the dashing of their hopes for a more just social order. Harry is sensitive to their plight but not averse to observing that their proffered solutions perpetuated the objectionable practices, as in “Even while criticizing the favoritism that plagued the system, the unemployed and indigent themselves petitioned the center for special consideration.” (80; also 106). Eventually, the piling up of so many complaints is wearying to read, and one wonders whether the secretaries employed by the Central Committee, or whoever read these appeals, didn't become inured to them. Harry does not help by the formulaic nature of her exposition. “Yet another party member … ;” (76) “in a similar vein … ” (77). She uses the verb “lament” with deadening frequency.

Speaking of lament, I wished the author had made use of Golfo Alexopoulos’ interpretation of the strategy that disenfranchised citizens in the 1920s and ’30s often employed in appealing, sometimes to Stalin, for reinstatement of their rights. Their tragic narratives, Alexopoulos observed, often took the form of a “ritual lament” that emphasized their own helplessness before overwhelming circumstances and implied that their letter's recipient bore responsibility for their death should they starve or take their own life. Letters cited by Harry also contain such emotive language as “I beg you to save me;” “no help of any kind from anywhere—and truly we will die;” (58) “I think about killing myself, but … I still want to live;” (61) and “their economic situation is so bad that they have considered suicide” (66). Failing to analyze the letters, Harry takes them at their word and assumes that Soviet leaders—especially Stalin—shared their animus.

But it is in the last chapter, “Above and Below,” where the book goes completely off the rails. Disregarding Stephen Kotkin's dismissal of psycho-biography, it cherry-picks from a few biographies alleged traits from Stalin's youth that correspond to those encountered in selected letters in order to assert “Stalin's personal bond with the masses,” (188) and other such fictions. Stalin becomes “the champion of Joe-Six-pack” (191) and was so destined because “unlike other leaders, for whom building socialism … was an intellectual exercise, for Stalin, social injustice and exclusion was part of his personal experience” (193). The worst of it—the most offensive statement in the whole book—is the assertion that “historians from elite backgrounds cannot grasp the driving force behind revolution, because it is for them an intellectual problem” (193). So much for empathy, the most important quality an historian can possess.