Jelena Subotić’s Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism has already received such broad recognition and numerous awards that its invaluable contribution to memory studies likely does not need repeating. It is not only a study of Holocaust remembrance in particular, but contributes broadly to our understanding of memory appropriation by the state, through a careful and vivid analysis of its transformation over time in several Eastern and Central European countries. Subotić provides a study of how memory can serve as a strategic tool for reinforcing state interests. The central argument of the book is that the states in question – Croatia, Lithuania, and Serbia – engage in memory appropriation in order to qualify their ontological insecurities (14). The strategies include “memory inversion,” appropriating the Holocaust to emphasize crimes against them (primarily in Serbia), “memory divergence,” placing blame for the genocide on German Nazis (Croatia), or “memory conflation,” wherein Holocaust memory is combined and equated with Communist crimes (Lithuania, 15). These appropriation strategies, which overlap and are combined in the various states, allow states to paint themselves as the ultimate victims, absolving them of responsibility for their role in Holocaust crimes. The danger, of course, is that this not only set ups the false equivalence between victims of Communism and of the Holocaust, allowing for the relativization of Nazi collaboration as anti-Communist resistance, but also because it banalizes and trivializes the specific suffering of the Jewish population.

Tomila Lankina has written a pathbreaking book. Impressively combining theoretical ambition, sensitive attention to historical detail, and the skillful use of multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia brings the study of Soviet history squarely back onto the agenda of contemporary comparative social science. For those of us who have spent much of our careers trying to explain to academics and policy makers alike why the story of the rise and fall of the USSR still matters for understanding our contemporary world, Lankina’s book is both welcome vindication and a reason for real optimism about the future of social-scientific inquiry. This is, simply put, the best book I’ve read about the Soviet system and its legacies in many years.

An original, empirically rich, and analytically multilayered and provocative statement by Tomila Lankina, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia (2022) is a meticulous work of sociology focused on the exploration and elaboration of social mechanisms of resilience in a transforming polity and society. It is also an attempt to link the past, the 19th-century reform of the estate system in Russia, to the present, Russia’s failed democratization, by arguing that the social basis for democracy in postcommunist Russia was associated with the thin stratum of the more privileged, educated, and politically engaged members of the middle class who were able to build on the intergenerational capital and became “the silent custodian of institutions and values that nurtured the democratic promise of post-communism” (391). As such, it is a passionate statement against Soviet historiography that has been influential in shaping the mainstream Western understanding about the socially transformative nature of communism. The book goes against the received wisdom about the degree to which the Soviet society has been modernized and transformed through communist experience: “the narratives of grand revolutionary rupture,” as Lankina phrases it (394). Excavating specific family histories, Lankina shines light “on the ‘tectonic’ layers of skills, values, and occupational complexity” that underlay wealth-supporting strategies along with the pursuit of better education and the acquisition of better-paid jobs in the Soviet Union. The already privileged social groups—the urban and rural meshchane—were better “connected, networked and engaged” and therefore better-equipped “with the skills, tools, and capital” (393). The Soviet regime reincorporated these privileged professional groups into an elite layer (prosloyka) of the Soviet society, commonly known as Soviet intelligentsia.

There is no greater honor for an author than to respond to such generous and thoughtful engagement with one’s work such as the two commentaries by Mila Dragojević and Tamara Trošt. These commentaries are that much more appreciated as both Dragojević and Trošt have contributed tremendous scholarship on memory politics and historical narratives in the Western Balkans and in many ways Yellow Star, Red Star builds on their own work.

I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to Professors Stephen Hanson, Egor Lazarev, Bryn Rosenfeld, and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova for taking the time to read the book carefully and for offering their thoughtful comments and critique. I am also grateful to the editors of Nationalities Papers for providing a forum for and facilitating the symposium.