This book examines the development of the complaints mechanism in the context of the ups and downs of Russian legal modernization from the pre-revolutionary to the modern period. The inadequate judicial system and legal culture made this channel of communication indispensable in Russia. The broad time period allows the author to analyze the development of complaint mechanisms through different regimes: from monarchical, personalized communication to interaction with institutions. The author mostly uses the framework of the social contract: the exchange of citizens’ loyalty for the care and protection provided by the state (201).

The first chapters are an important addition to the literature on the bottom-up flow of popular voices in the dictatorial Soviet Union. Because of censorship, intrusive propaganda, and repression from above and fear and mistrust from below, many of these regimes had a problem of a broken feedback loop in the circulation of information that impeded adequate knowledge of the population/society needed for effective management. “Citizens and consumers had no regular channels for the market system feedback to express discontent and protect their rights” (36). With flawed censuses and elections and a subservient judiciary on one side and low legal literacy on the other, the practice of the people’s complaints flourished in the USSR and was one of the compensative or quasi mechanisms in state-society communication, along with such channels as surveillance, state-sponsored workers-/village- correspondents, and denunciations.

It was mostly social historians who studied the practice of letter-writing to the authorities, reviews of the secret police on the people’s morals, public discussions of the laws, diaries, and other documents originating from below in the early Soviet period. In contrast, Elena Bogdanova, a sociologist, studies the legal aspect of complaints and their place in the judiciary, emphasizing their para-legal mechanism. The references to laws prevail in the source’s apparatus. Such an approach makes this monograph a very welcome addition to the scarce English-language historiography on Soviet/Russian legal mechanisms, which is still mostly dominated by Peter Solomon’s seminal work. While social historians have focused on the grassroots, Bogdanova is more interested in the political and bureaucratic pathways—how complaints were invited, processed, and resolved in a top-down mechanism of legitimation and power: as “a tool to support authoritarianism and the paternalistic patriarchal contract” (199). Thus, the chapters discuss the addressees, institutions, and formal channels rather than the language of the letters and the human perspective from below that characterizes social and cultural history. These early chapters lack statistics and examples of complaints, but curious readers can find them in the Russian document collections of Aleksandr Livshin and Igor Orlov, among others.

Ch. 4 on the 1960–70s, which grew out of the author’s candidate dissertation, is richer in this sense with tables, statistics, interviews, and, most importantly, samples of the complaints. However, these samples are rather boring, for example, about twelve kopeks in losses or a leaking roof in an apartment building that was finally repaired after seven years of writing to various addresses (159). The final chapters on post-Soviet and Putin’s Russia are abundant in empirical data and offer far-reaching conclusions. Exploiting traditional, even monarchical, roots, the technology of contemporary complaints “legitimize(s) a sole-leader model of state ruling” (202). Complaints, in general, remain popular, especially to the president—up to several million per year involving letters and periodical live hotlines with the leader. According to Bogdanova, however, the complaints delivered to him during these propagandistic shows, have a low resolution rate. Despite post-Soviet legal reforms, the existence of a monarchical component in the complaints mechanism is at odds with the rule of law. Russia’s uneasy legal modernization involves a compromise between legality and informality. The book is a valuable contribution to historiography. It deals with zigzags in legal development, everyday hardships of the population, bureaucratic machinery, and larger problems of history and politics.