Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930

In the summer of 1924, the Bolshevik Party called on scholars, the police, the courts, and state officials to turn their attention to the villages of Russia. The subsequent campaign to 'face the countryside' generated a wealth of intelligence that fed into the regime's sense of alarmed conviction that the countryside was a space outside Bolshevik control.

Richly rooted in archival sources, including local and central-level secret police reports, detailed cases of the local and provincial co...