The rule of Leonid Brezhnev, in particular the time after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that ended the Prague Spring, is commonly known as zastoi, Stagnation, and often implied to include the brief reigns of Andropov and Chernenko just before the new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced Perestroika in 1985. Zastoi is widely held to have been a period of growing ideological rigidity during which the creative entropy of official culture, especially in literature, was offset by the burgeoning cultural underground and by exciting literary works circulating in samizdat. Polly Jones is among a growing number of researchers in Soviet/post-Soviet studies (an extensive survey of names and traditional as well as new approaches is provided in the volume’s introduction) who set out to complicate this binary vision by showing that official culture was not monolithic and that the line separating official and unofficial culture remained permeable.

Jones’s monograph constitutes a single large case study. She examines the prestigious Fiery Revolutionaries (FR) series, published by Politizdat, the state publishing house for political literature, and encompassing 156 biographies of revolutionaries – Russian/Soviet and foreign – published between 1968 and 1990, authored by 106 different writers. FR is a convincing case study, representing as it does several key trends of its time: the renewed importance of the revolution as a propaganda tool after the death of Stalin in 1953 and the attempts at De-Stalinisation after 1956, a growing awareness that propaganda had to be aesthetically engaging in order to satisfy a readership with rapidly evolving literary tastes (cf. the analysis of reader responses to the work of the popular novelist Yurii Trifonov in Chapter 5, pp. 202ff.), and the biographical turn that fed off a fascination with history and documentary while reconceptualising biography as an emphatically literary genre (cf. Chapter 3). Yet this case study has wider implications; Jones makes a cogent case for the FR series as a microcosm of official culture, as it epitomises many habitual predicaments that marked late Soviet culture as a whole, including the frequently uneasy coexistence of literature, history and politics.

The individual chapters are designed around the central paradox of the FR series: Politizdat, perhaps the most strictly regimented publishing house in ideological terms, represented an astonishing intellectual “niche.” Alongside the most respected writers of late Soviet official culture, FR showcased many authors who were at the fringes of official culture and are in fact better known as dissidents, such as Vladimir Kornilov and Raisa Orlova. Others were popular in dissident circles (the guitar bard Bulat Okudzhava) or involved simultaneously in all three strands of publishing that fragmented late Soviet literature, such as Vasilii Aksenov and Vladimir Voinovich, who published in gozizdat (publishing with a Soviet state publisher), samizdat (self-publishing, usually in typescript, effectively illegal) and tamizdat (publishing with an émigré publisher, frowned upon). Yet other authors had served Gulag terms (e. g. Yurii Davydov). Politizdat’s recruitment of these writers reflected a 1953 resolution by the Central Committee that had deemed that linguistic shortcomings were weakening propaganda efforts. In other words, “unorthodox” writers were recruited in the hope that their literary prowess would improve the quality of Soviet propaganda (p. 29, pp. 125ff.) And it worked. The result was a number of aesthetically and intellectually complex works that enjoyed great popularity with the public; some volumes became bestsellers and flew off the shelves (e. g. Yurii Trifonov’s novel on Andrei Zheliabov). Writers were attracted to the FR series not only by unusually generous fees and the opportunity to publish, but also by the opportunity to pursue original historical research, sometimes for several volumes. As a result, new scholarship and many complex and ambivalent ideas found their way into the series.

Jones takes a magnifying glass to the process of writer recruitment, often via informal networks (Chapter 2, pp. 72ff.). In addition, she describes and analyses the research authors were doing in preparation for their books (Chapter 4). These painstakingly researched sections are perhaps the greatest gems in this book, not least when they enable Jones’s reader to experience the fluidity with which some writers moved between official and unofficial culture. As a result we come to understand these spheres as a continuum – after all, many Soviet citizens read samizdat without harbouring dissident ambitions – rather than neatly separate worlds. The study draws on an impressive number of sources, including archival documents and criticism and journalism published in the Soviet Union, as well as oral history and the author’s own (literary) analysis of some of the novels published in the FR series and of the process of their composition.

But while FR produced many unexpectedly brilliant and well-accepted titles, others struggled to find readers, conforming to the stereotype of late Soviet literature that failed to strike a chord with an increasingly sophisticated readership which had access to more exciting reading matter via samizdat and tamizdat. This is the other half of the paradox that was FR: censorship and ideological pressures placed heavy restrictions on the series, which prevented it from being truly “revolutionary.” The genre of political propaganda for a regime in decline proved hard to revamp. The unevenness between the individual volumes in the FR series – in aesthetic terms, in terms of scholarly quality, and with regard to reader appeal – exemplifies efforts to reform official culture that were ultimately doomed to failure because this culture was resistant to insights that would have triggered a paradigm change. The paradigm change came with Perestroika, and it spelled the end of the Soviet project.

Jones’s conclusion – that FR represented two sides of a coin and ultimately got stuck in the middle, as neither consistently innovative nor hopelessly retrograde and stagnant – is valid and amply substantiated. It does not come as a surprise, especially to readers who have overcome black-and-white ideas of the Brezhnev years. Yet this book has not been written for its conclusion. Its strength lies in the wealth of detail the author has unearthed, which elucidates the sheer complexity and contingency of the processes that gave birth to individual volumes as well as the entire series. Jones’s meticulous close reading of so many aspects of the FR series invites nuanced conclusions about late Soviet culture and, last but not least, presents it as a rewarding field for more research into the history of its literature.