Grand Theater: Regional Governance in Stalin's Russia, 1931-1941 by Larry E. Holmes (review)

This book represents an in-depth analysis of practices of school governance in the Kirov region (Vyatka) based on detailed, careful, and thorough archival research. The author, who previously wrote extensively on the history of Soviet schooling and published several books and journal articles based on general observations and case study research, offers an interpretive study of provincial educational bureaucracy during the period of high Stalinism, including the Great Terror. Holmes masterfully combines two rather different albeit not totally unrelated perspectives: on the one hand, he follows the path of "revisionist" scholars of Soviet history such as J. Arch Getty and Sheila Fitzpatrick; on the other hand, he relies heavily on the ever relevant descriptions of Russian officialdom provided by the great Russian writer, Mikhail Saltykov- Shchedrin (who was in exile in Vyatka in the mid-nineteen century and based his immortal satirical sketches on first-hand observations of local bureaucrats). This constellation enables Holmes to focus on numerous episodes from the everyday experience of school directors, teachers, educational administrators, and their subordinates, highlighting instances of conflicts and complaints, friendships and hostilities, intrigues and compromises, abuses of power, sexual affairs, political imprisonments, and sundry other tragic and farcical events in this Soviet Russian province in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Holmes posits that his approach to the study of Soviet educational bureaucracy is similar to the understanding of the nature of performance in theater, thus justifying the book's title. He argues that many of the practices of school governance in Stalin's Russia were reminiscent of theatrical performances, with the authorities, parents, pupils, and the wider public as the actors. Although to some extent these developments echoed similar trends of high-profile politics in Moscow (in particular, they were symbolically represented during the infamous Moscow show trials), the specific identities and interests of provincial agents seriously altered or sometimes even perverted the original meanings of the scripts, which had been imposed on them by the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Drawing on Clifford Geertz's and James Scott's anthropological interpretations of governance practices, Holmes outlines and analyzes several forms of these performances, such as "the art of complaining" (when humiliated subordinates would appeal to the bosses of their bosses), "the escalation of negativity" (deliberately focusing on only the dark side of subordinates and arbitrarily blaming them for misconduct and wrongdoing), and "symbiosis of errors" (deliberately linking professional underperformance or personal misbehavior with political accusations, including stigmatization and severe punishment of "enemies of the people"). Moreover, given the turbulent political environment of the 1930s, former executioners soon turned into victims, and vice versa.

The "Grand Theater" of provincial (as well as Moscow) governance practices reached a peak during the Great Terror, and Holmes correctly points out that after 1938 the Soviet regime's shifting priorities limited the extent of arbitrary rule by local officials and gave greater room for maneuver to all provincial actors. School directors and teachers thus acquired a bit more freedom in their professional and personal lives and slightly greater protection against the top-down pressure of their bosses by relying on legal regulations and institutional mechanisms such as pedagogical councils. However, the rise of what Holmes calls "proprietary professionalism" aggravated the principal-agent problems in Soviet educational governance because of the lack of adequate institutions and appropriate incentives for schoolteachers and directors as well as for local bureaucrats. Based on this study, one might argue that in a broader perspective the softening of the "rules of the game" under the Stalinist system without reforming its substance contributed to the subsequent institutional decay of the entire Soviet provincial governance, a trend that became highly visible several decades later.

Nevertheless, the book, despite being well-written and easily readable, is marred by certain shortcomings and flaws. Its almost exclusive focus on provincial educational bureaucracy tells us little about school education as such. Despite spotty notions of troubles with curricula, the extent to...