Thanks to the insights of Alltagsgeschichte and cultural history, we know much about the everyday lives of ordinary citizens and of key professional and social groups under state socialism, as well as about the powers and limits of its dictatorial structures. Less often have such approaches been applied to the cultures of the ruling parties themselves, a gap Rüdiger Bergien and Jens Gieseke bridge in this volume. Originating from a 2013 conference at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam, the fifteen essays challenge common perceptions of the ruling parties as hermetic, monolithic actors or as mere “transmission belts” used to implement Politburo directives. The volume instead presents the parties as complex organisms deeply connected to their societies, with each essay examining the parties’ inner world and probing the values, outlooks, and practices of top officials, regional and local bureaucrats, as well as rank-and-file members.

The focus is on the period after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, a four-decade span that saw a decline in the use of terror and the reemergence of the parties as safeguards against personalized dictatorship. Thirteen of the fifteen chapters investigate a single party—the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR), or the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS); two by Christoph Boyer and Padraic Kenney adopt a more comparative approach. Though each chapter mines a diverse range of sources, including demographic profiles of members, secret police files, internal reports, questionnaires, meeting minutes, and interviews with former officials, all embrace cultural and social approaches. This commonality is unsurprising given that both editors and several of the contributors have been affiliated with the ZZF, which is well-known for its sociocultural scholarship on state socialism. These institutional ties provide coherence to the collection, but they might also explain the relatively light engagement with Anglo-American scholarship on Eastern Europe, particularly the chapters on the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Given that British and American scholars of East Germany have studied the flexibility and agency of local party bureaucrats for over a decade, a greater engagement with this research could have strengthened the collection's other insights.

One prominent theme in the volume is the variety of reasons, beyond corruption or conviction, why people joined the party. Michel Christian asserts that, for many young Czechoslovakians socialized under state socialism, joining became a normal social rite, especially when their parents were already members. Sabine Pannen's examination of party life in Brandenburg an der Havel reveals that members valued the exclusive information the Central Committee supplied to local SED groups, allowing them to accommodate decisions or adapt to looming problems. Membership also enabled rank-and-file members to voice at party meetings everyday problems that district officials often tried to address. This is not to suggest that personal or professional gain played no role in attracting members; as Rüdiger Bergien assesses in his chapter on the SED Central Committee apparatus, officials could wield great influence, and many coveted the status, salary, and privileges that came with joining the political elite.

A number of chapters analyze the parties’ inner workings, particularly the various forms of ingenuity at the local level. Andrea Bahr argues that, because local SED officials encountered citizens’ everyday realities far more than central party leaders, they came to see themselves as “lobbyists” (223) for their area, guided more by pragmatism than zealotry. Jay Rowell similarly observes a vast “informal economy of credits and debts” in East Germany, describing Leipzig SED apparatchiks as powerful “brokers” (248) who shrewdly exploited ties of loyalty (or graft) to top officials to renegotiate resources or plan targets at a local level. Such intrigues were especially common at the center of power, as Krysztof Dąbek and Jan Behrends demonstrate in their chapters. Each explores the web of patrons and clients within the PZPR and the CPSU, respectively, where survival required mastery of a subtle system of practices, signals, and gestures. Given the desire to promote an outward image of unity, conflicts within party circles were waged clandestinely, thus requiring sensitive antennas to detect shifts in power constellations. As one Polish official commented, “In order to not get into trouble, one had to observe carefully; three-quarters of my energy was spent on observation, like a weathercock” (264). One finds a fascinating parallel here with techniques of fiction writing under communism, whereby citizens, aware of extensive censorship, learned to read between the lines, sniffing out vague allusions or pointed phrasing to discern hidden meanings.

Several chapters examine the collapse of state socialism, building on familiar narratives about the gradual paralysis of a malfunctioning economy. Pannen and Bahr both suggest that, as the GDR's supply crisis grew to dire proportions, district SED officials were unable to address local concerns, causing rank-and-file members to lose faith in the party as a precursor to the final collapse. Rowell and Dąbek similarly show that apparatchiks’ frequent interventions to redress local shortages only created more problems, ones that proved impossible to fix as resources dwindled. Jens Gieseke asserts that, at the higher reaches of power, many in the SED apparatus were increasingly baffled in the 1980s by party policies, a point Behrends echoes in his study of the mounting opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the CPSU. In both cases, conflicts that had once been hidden were now exposed, eroding internal party unity and critically weakening both regimes.

Of special interest to scholars of East Germany will be Martin Sabrow's chapter on Erich Honecker. As in his recent study of Honecker's life before 1945 (Das Leben davor, 1912-1945 [2016]), Sabrow here uses a generational perspective to explain the seemingly contradictory nature of the SED chief's policies, which oscillated between reform and repression, innovation and intransigence. After years as an activist in the Young Communist League and a decade of incarceration under the Nazis, Honecker (and many communists of his generation) emerged after World War II unable to see beyond the categories of comrades or enemies. He thus never fully trusted East Germans to make up their own minds about politics, and, while his fear led him to embrace elements of pragmatism to preserve the system, this flexibility was always tempered with unease and a willingness to crack down on even well-intentioned criticism.

The volume, as the editors admit, is heavily tilted toward East Germany and the Soviet Union, and the only studies of local party organizations are ones from the GDR. The insights on those regimes are significant, but there was a missed opportunity here for a more comprehensive analysis of communist Eastern Europe as a whole, especially of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary (though the last briefly appears in Boyer's chapter). Moreover, though several essays stress that men dominated the parties, the meaning of this imbalance could have been further explored given the centrality of gender to the everyday practices the contributors seek to uncover. Finally, a few chapters suggest a perhaps too-neat bifurcation between well-intentioned bureaucrats and repressive security officers. The vast number of SED members who were also Stasi informants complicates this assessment, though the number of relatively altruistic apparatchiks is, no doubt, larger than has previously been acknowledged. All in all, scholars of state socialism and of East Germany in particular will find much of interest here, broadening their understanding of the complexities of the ruling parties in the Soviet bloc. These essays certainly validate the need to take institutions seriously as powerful tools for influencing the mindsets and actions of their members.