One Day We Will Live without Fear: Everyday Lives under the Soviet Police State.

• Author: Gregory, Paul R.
• Position: Book review

* One Day We Will Live without Fear: Everyday Lives under the Soviet Police State

By Mark Harrison

Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2016.

Pp. xxi, 280. $24.95 paperback.

In this remarkable book, Mark Harrison explores a new genre of social science. Everyday Lives is designed to create an understanding of how the Soviet economic, political, and social system worked, particularly in its use of repression, by telling the stories of people who lived it. Harrison calls upon his skills as an economic historian to extract from the stories general rules that the system followed, such as "the enemy is hiding," "start from the usual suspects," "fear the young," "stop the laughing," "stomp out the first spark before it spreads," and "maintain the appearance of order." Harrison buttresses his stories with social science and empirical research to place them in a more general context.

Six stories of ordinary and remarkable people form the core of Everyday Lives. Each story is an entertaining and sometimes incredible tale of how the Soviet police state worked. In each case, Harrison provides the historical context of the story, introduces each main character in such a manner that the readers feel they know him or her, and then embarks on that person's story. Each story has twists, turns, and surprises, at times so complicated that the reader must just sit back and enjoy the roller-coaster ride.

If Harrison's first story, "The Mill," were not backed by historical facts and archives, readers would write it off as the fantasy of a Hollywood scriptwriter. It starts with a victim, unfortunate to have a Polish-sounding name, and then moves to an NKVD (Soviet secret police) higher-up, twiddling his thumbs in remote Khabarovsk and plotting a way to get his name in lights back in Moscow. He needed to put some numbers of unmasked enemies of the people up on the board. His solution: erect a fake border between the Soviet Union and Japanese-occupied territory, build a Potemkin Japanese village, and send innocent people across to be captured, interrogated, and tested for allegiance to the Soviet cause. This "mill" "uncovered" a substantial number of "traitors," most of whom were executed after "trials" before a special court. Harrison tells the stories of victims, the Japanese cook and the guards in the pretend village, and the eventual investigation of the operation in the aftermath of Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization program. The instigator of the...