Crowning a career of outstanding contributions to the study of the Russian revolution, William G. Rosenberg’s magisterial work, States of Anxiety: Scarcity and Loss in Revolutionary Russia, elevates the narrative of the people’s suffering to an equal plane with traditional liberal, moderate socialist, and Bolshevik “great stories” of the world war, revolution, and civil war in Russia. While the Soviet Great Story centered the Bolshevik and Communist Party as the key agent of historical change, moderate socialists emphasized fortifying organized society to bring about democratic socialism. Liberals, on the other hand, invested hope in the state, propped up by civil liberties and property rights, as the instrument for adapting Russia to the modern world. A progressive view of history is embedded in all three “great” stories, while the experiences of the people’s suffering reflect a cyclical historical pattern. Rosenberg integrates comparative analysis of these four stories into a chronological retelling of Russia’s experiences in 1914–22.

The book is divided into three parts, which are further divided into chapters. A preface and an epilogue connect the interpretive narratives and economic cycles of the shock that war and revolution posed to Russia’s empire, and the role they played in the formation of a new Soviet state, to traumas that accompanied other major turns in Soviet history, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and its transformation into new political states. The introduction explains the relevance of the revolutionary narratives for post-Soviet Russia’s political and economic choices, while the epilogue succinctly traces the impact of and repetition of scarcity and loss through the Soviet period and afterwards.

Having begun his career studying top-down political history and then having turned to examining mass worker movements, Rosenberg in this present work combines the approaches of political, social, and economic history. His previous work on liberals, railroads, and strikes informs this cogent synthesis of events in Russia from World War I through the Russian Civil War. This book reflects the author’s deep engagement with theory from a variety of disciplines and subfields, familiarity with a vast array of secondary literature, and much painstaking research in archives, including most valuably in soldiers’ letters from the front to their families during WWI and in censors’ summaries of these letters for higher-ups. He discusses disagreements among scholars about the Russian economy in 1914–17 and the problem of analyzing economic data across a wide variety of regions. He also attaches emotional signifiers to experiences of loss. Throughout the book, Rosenberg incorporates women’s experiences into his analysis. Though there is some mention of national minorities, the focus of attention is on the Russian people and the political center.

The impact of actual and perceived scarcities combined with resentment over real and imagined corruption are at the heart of the people’s great story. Rosenberg details quantitatively the scarcities and losses in many areas of the Russian economy that affected soldiers, peasants, workers, professionals, property owners, and people of privilege. He conveys the people’s qualitative experiences of these deprivations by showcasing accounts of their emotional impact, and probes leading political figures’ efforts to grapple with the many crises that beset Russia, including significant distribution bottlenecks and financial constraints. Rosenberg identifies lacunae in how elites and commoners understood one another’s experiences, which underlay actions worsening the crises. For example, he writes: “Commanders at army headquarters seemed to transfer popular images of sturdy Russian peasants onto strategies and operational orders that not only were physically unrealistic but severely damaged their soldiers’ physical and emotional well-being” (47).

Growing support for the Bolsheviks in 1917, he writes, stemmed significantly from their “approach to social instability that explained objective realities in ways that deftly mobilized subjective feelings, linking how things seemed to how people felt” (217). Lenin’s role in this discourse was central, for he “managed so quickly to capture popular political discourse by explaining the complexities of scarcity and loss in simple and believable terms” (409). In his section about the Russian Civil War, Rosenberg further develops the story of the people’s suffering as Bolsheviks too grappled with problems of supply, distribution, and finance, yet this part is less cogently framed by the great stories than parts one and two.

The book’s illustrations include a map of European Russia among the front materials. Photographs are situated in the center of the book but could have been more usefully positioned at relevant points in the text. This work will be useful to graduate students studying for doctoral exams and scholars revising lectures.