Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union by Robert Hornsby (review)

Evidence from post-Soviet archives confronted students of postwar Soviet dissent with a paradox. Older narratives explained dissent during the era of Leonid Brezhnev as a product of the liberalizing reforms of the years under Nikita Khrushchev (known as the “Thaw”) and their undoing after his ouster in 1964. Archival evidence has cast doubt on this scheme. In fact, the Khrushchev period saw a wide range of protests, including boisterous and sometimes violent working-class disturbances that had no equivalent in the years that followed. At the same time, the image of Khrushchev’s reign as reformist, at least in the sense usually meant by the term, became untenable as scholars began to examine repressive practices and coercive ideological campaigns in the period, some of which were discontinued in the more consensus-driven Brezhnev years.

Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union pieces together a comprehensive picture of both protest and state responses to it under Khrushchev, in the process offering an answer to the paradox mentioned. During the Khrushchev era, the Soviet Union underwent a period of instability that produced diverse manifestations of dissent but also provided the context in which the Soviet state became better equipped to maintain mass compliance. The Soviet state developed new ways of combatting dissent that included the use of new policing techniques, newfound focus on consumer-oriented economic priorities, and the pursuit of a scaled-down political agenda that emphasized “political obedience” over “instilling communist values” (p. 10). By 1964, the regime had learned to contain dissent, even though its means of doing so frequently dampened Communist enthusiasm and alienated Soviet citizens who pressed for more fundamental reforms.

Robert Hornsby pursues this argument in nine densely researched and carefully argued chapters that analyze the major trends in protest in the period and the strategies of repression and control that the Soviet state developed in response to them. To his credit, Hornsby highlights distinct (if not totally separate) “streams” (p. 24) of worker and intellectual dissent, pointing out that the latter has typically and misleadingly set the tone for scholarly evaluations of the Khrushchev period as a whole. Hornsby shows that the two strands of dissent shifted in divergent ways during these years. In particular, worker protest gained in sophistication by the 1960s, as workers mobilized in more organized protests in response to bread-and-butter issues and, in some cases, engaged in the kind of revolutionary politics that had previously been pursued mainly by intellectuals and former prisoners. In a different trajectory, intellectuals moved from the naive Marxism-Leninism that had arisen during the early stages of de-Stalinization toward more far-reaching criticisms and more enduring modes of dissent, such as samizdat (self-publishing). For the state, worker protest was more explosive than intellectual protest in the short term but easier to contain in the long term, in large part because it proved amenable to material inducements. Under Brezhnev, therefore, intellectual dissent became predominant.

Of particular interest is Hornsby’s account of how the party-state was transformed through its efforts to combat the lively currents of protest during the period. Through a process of trial and error and “putting out fires,” the Soviet state gradually became an “insidious and modern police state” (p. 287), one that controlled dissent through more predictable and widespread modes of policing—specifically, eschewing mass custodial sentences in favor of “prophylactic” measures against would-be protestors and under-the-radar use of psychological incarceration for hardened cases—and by drawing the populace into policing efforts, even while devising more effective propaganda strategies to isolate and demoralize dissenters. The picture presented here of a Soviet regime developing reliable mechanisms to prevent and combat dissent convincingly takes issue with the usual view of the Khrushchev years as a period of liberalization undone by Khrushchev’s successors.

Hornsby has produced an authoritative work, one that draws on a wide range of Russian archival sources while making judicious use of...