Book Review: Stalinism as a Way of Life

Yale University Press published a book of 157 documents from the world’s bloodiest dictatorship 21 years ago today. Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov is a valued resource. Of course, the title, intended to contribute to Yale’s Annals of Communism series, falls short.

Life, strictly speaking, is impossible under tyranny. Nevertheless, Michigan State University’s history professor Siegelbaum and Russian history researcher Sokolov assembled and edited a serious collection of documents from Soviet Russia under Josef Stalin. These are mostly letters from citizens enslaved in Communist Russia.

Papers include secret police records, Communist Party correspondence and memoranda and various other accounts of everyday life under Stalin’s authoritarianism. With 480 pages in the unabridged edition, which went on sale at the time for $35 in hardcover, certain aspects of the Soviets’ socialism can be read, examined and studied first han…