Golfo Alexopoulos begins her first chapter by analyzing a 1917 Soviet poster titled “Autocratic Structure.” At the top of a stratified pyramid is Russia's tsar, whose fur-trimmed cloak is draped around four layers of oppressors: the priests; the judges and bureaucrats; the police; and the landowning and bourgeois elite. Holding everyone up with their toil at the bottom of the pyramid are the workers and peasants. All but that last stratum were expected to disappear under the proletarian dictatorship because members of the exploiting classes, the former people, would stand outside the embrace of revolutionary society. The 1918 constitution of the Russian Republic codified their outsider status, specifying that they could not vote, receive public assistance, or work in the civil service or military. They also languished on the lowest rung of the Soviet ladder when it came to securing housing, jobs, and ration cards, and, by the decade's end, became candidates for exile and forced labor. Through her examination of Stalin's outcasts, Alexopoulos demonstrates that the meanings of social class and, by extension, citizenship, shifted in response to policies and historical circumstances. In other words, notions of what constituted a Soviet citizen evolved in tandem with the changing definitions of who was to be excluded from the polity.

According to Alexopoulos, policies of rapid industrialization, forced collectivization of agriculture, and concomitant class war in the late 1920s resulted in a broadening of the category of disenfranchised Soviets to include outcasts' family members, new economic policy (NEP) ubiquitous private traders, and kulaks. Penalties for exclusion increased as well. To be cast out translated at its least lethal into discrimination when it came to housing and jobs, and more perilously into arrest, deportation, forced labor in Stalin's massive industrialization projects, and lack of access to food ration cards. With these policies, the regime not only reduced expenses and provided itself with a pool of slave laborers, it succeeded in “engineering a new political community”(18). But slippery criteria for determining who was in and who was out left local officials free to make their own (often punitive and arbitrary) judgments. Among the disenfranchised could be found “a ladies man”(61), a sorcerer, a widower branded as a private trader for having “sold his dead wife's clothing”(63), shepherds, and even a layman whose nickname of “Priest” proved his undoing. Much as the purges of the late 1930s provided local officials with room to unleash vendettas, the power to disenfranchise local citizens allowed authorities to settle personal and political scores, to reshuffle personnel, and to demonstrate their zealousness to higher ups. Patterns remained nevertheless, with Alexopoulos finding among the excluded disproportionate numbers of “social deviants”(60), national minorities (especially Jews, who tsarist-era discrimination drove into urban petty trades), and “the most defenseless members of a community”(73), i.e., the poor, the weak, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, the elderly, and women in general.

The fate of the disenfranchised lay ultimately in the hands of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee's Central Electoral Commission. Alexopoulos gained unique access to the operations of this agency, having been the first historian to plumb an obscure and formerly closed archive in the “tiny agricultural town of Ialutorovsk”(1) in Western Siberia. There, Alexopoulos discovered more than 100,000 dossiers of outcasts whose 1926–1936 petitions for reinstatement of citizenship reached the Commission. Alexopoulous analyzed .05% of these files—500 in all—finding that petitioners curiously strayed from standard Soviet narratives of self that emphasized self-criticism, loyalty, and labor. Rather than spouting requisite mea culpae or claiming to be communist warriors on the front of socialist construction, petitioners tended to adopt different approaches. Many forced laborers, for example, virtually demanded reinstatement of rights because they had rendered critical service to the state. Others, like the woman who referred to her life as “one complete torture” (121), employed the form and language of time-honored ritual laments by characterizing themselves as unfortunates deserving of pity. Lamenters, argues Alexopolous, both implicitly and explicitly counted on authorities to distinguish themselves from “the notorious ‘heartless bureaucrats' of the old tsarist power structure”(124). In reality, Russian Orthodox traditions emphasizing compassion for the unfortunate may have been equally relevant, but in any case, the fact that a full ninety-three percent of these 500 outcasts were reinstated as citizens made it clear to Alexopoulos that the petitioners' unusual discursive strategies worked.

Although it appeared that the lives of the disenfranchised took a turn for the better when, in celebration of socialism's purported victory, the 1936 Stalin Constitution mandated their right to vote, this was not the case. At that point the Central Electoral Commission lost control over them and they fell under the jurisdiction of the judiciary, police, and secret police, whose members were busy bloodying their hands in the purges. The disenfranchised, with their questionable pasts, found themselves targeted with renewed vigor, and reinstatement became a vain hope. Guaranteeing their continued marginalization was the vetting faced by all citizens who applied for jobs, housing, and services: de rigueur among questions were those about social origins. A former person from whose 1937 diary Alexopoulos quotes had it right: “They will never allow us to be equal, and they never will believe that we've forgotten and forgiven everything. We're damned, from now until the end of our lives”(177). As Alexopoulos argues, “An earlier policy of social engineering that involved the dual practices of purging alien elements and evaluating worthy citizens was replaced by a campaign of expulsion with almost no possibility of redemption”(184).

Alexopoulos's monograph is a worthwhile contribution to recent social histories of the early Stalinist period. Unlike the more prominent victims of the regime's first twenty years, the disenfranchised left few traces of themselves. By tapping their petitions for meaning and by assessing the regime's response, Alexopoulos has not only resurrected a lost social group, but she has succeeded in showing how the Soviet fold expanded and retracted according to historical circumstances. As the regime cast out and reclaimed its own, its definition of those who belonged and, by extension, those who did not, came into sharper focus.