Reviews

"This excellent monograph tells the story so well because the author...was able to gain access to Soviet governmental archives containing a wealth of first-hand material."--Foreign Affairs
"A superb, remarkably mature first effort....Using hitherto unavailable archival sources, she develops a fascinating, complex, and variegated picture of collectivization....A bravura performance."--Annals of the American Academy
"What Viola has given us is a significantly richer picture of collectivization and a valuable indication of what can be accomplished through imagination and careful research of the materials of the Stalin era."--Russian Review
"Viola has gathered much new information from Soviet archives, even more from a wide variety of contemporary Soviet periodicals, and from Soviet secondary sources."--The Historian
"Viola's work represents a welcomed addition to the sparse literature."--The Journal of Modern History
"Lynne Viola's study of the 25,000ers brings a new dimension to the story of peasant collectivization in Stalin's Russia. Working in Soviet archives, she has uncovered the people who represented the regime at the moment of its most intense intervention in the countryside. Their mentalities and enthusiasms, successes and failures are carefully explored in this first attempt to see the collectivization from the perspective of the activist."--Ronald Grigor Suny,
University of Michigan
"A most impressive piece of work....A major contribution in terms of significance for the field and thoroughness of research."--Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Texas, Austin
"A valuable contribution to the understanding of a subject that is more often dealt with in polemical terms than in scholarly detachment."--Lyman H. Legters, University of Washington