Modem Europe
of "Stalinists" to explain the creation of the Stalinist
system.
It is unfortunate that Shearer did not place more
emphasis on his point that certain technical elites (not
to mention military officers, industrial workers, and
Soviet youth) also favored the state mobilization of
resources for economic modernization. Indeed, the
idea of the command economy reflected much deeper
sentiments in Soviet society and in Europe as a whole
concerning the transformative power of technocratic
state management of people and resources. From the
late nineteenth century, and especially during and
after World War I, governments throughout Europe
began to intervene in their economies and societies to
augment economic and military power. It was the
German wartime economy that provided the initial
model for the Stalinist command economy.
In the last third of the book, Shearer describes the
operation of the Soviet economy in the early 1930s. As
other scholars have also pointed out, the rush to
industrialize resulted in enormous chaos and waste.
The Communist Party had to dispatch high-level plenipotentiaries to key industrial regions to combat widespread supply bottlenecks and production crises. The
so-called planned economy was, as Shearer states,
"more spontaneous than planned" (p. 205).
This book is recommended for specialists only.
Shearer's relatively narrow focus on state economic
administration renders it largely inaccessible to general readers. His intricate descriptions of the Soviet
bureaucracy and his painstaking recounting of managerial conferences would prove too dry for either an
undergraduate survey course or a graduate seminar.
For scholars of Soviet bureaucratic politics, however,
Shearer has done very valuable research.
DAVID L. HOFFMANN
Ohio State University
LYNNE VIOLA. Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York:
Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 312. $49.95.
Scholars have long maintained that peasants opposed
but did not actively resist the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR. Lynne Viola questions this
conventional wisdom in a pioneering but convincing
study based on recently declassified Soviet archives.
Viola demonstrates that collectivization was not passively accepted but instigated widespread agrarian
unrest of a magnitude comparable to the great peasant
revolts of the Russian past.
Viola argues that these protests, disorders, insurrections, acts of terrorism, and other types of rural
resistance to collectivization were rooted in the same
"culture of peasant resistance" that gave rise to earlier
revolts in Russia. She views collectivization as not
merely an economically motivated "struggle for grain"
but as the clash of two very different and essentially
alien cultures that unleashed an often violent civil war
between state and peasants, town and countryside. The
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
933
front lines of this struggle ran down the main street of
every village. Viola attempts to study this unknown
civil war by analyzing the aims and activities of the
many peasants who revolted against state-imposed
collectivization and dekulakization in defense of their
culture and way of life. Much of the text focuses on the
opening months of 1930, when forced collectivization,
peasant resistance, and agrarian disorders peaked, and
the state, shaken by revolts, beat a hasty retreat in the
form of Joseph Stalin's well-known article, "Dizzy
from Success." A significant drop in the collectivization rate ensued. In the end, however, the peasant
revolt (or civil war) of the collectivization period
ended, as peasant rebellions normally have throughout
history, in a defeat that enhanced the power of the
state and increased the level of repression. Yet, according to Viola, the victory of the state did not
endure. Subsequent passive, "everyday" peasant resistance undermined the economic viability of the collective farm system and contributed ultimately to the
demise of communism, since collective farming remained the Achilles heel of the Soviet system.
Viola analyzes the various forms that peasant unrest
took at the time of collectivization. She begins with a
discussion of apocalyptic rumors, efforts by peasants to
write and petition the authorities, peasant protests
against state policies in public meetings, attempts by
peasants to escape kulak status through various strategies (such as self-dekulakization, family divisions,
flight to the cities, and the selling off or destruction of
peasant property), denials by fellow villagers that local
kulaks existed, and defense of kulaks by their neighbors. The book goes on to explore the more active and
radical forms of unrest, such as brigandage and the
murders, beatings, threats, and arson directed against
peasant activists and officials who broke ranks with
their communities and sided with the state. This study
pays considerable attention to the most radical forms
of peasant protest, which proved the most threatening
to the state. These were mass disorders in the form of
protests, demonstrations, and occasionally outright
insurrections in which Soviet power was temporarily
overthrown in particular localities and replaced by new
representative bodies selected by the rebels. A chapter
is devoted to "women's riots" (i.e., agrarian disorders
led by or comprised predominantly of women), which
composed a significant proportion of the rebellions in
1929 and 1930. Throughout this work, Viola frequently
points out gender-related differences in peasant political behavior and seeks to account for the prominent
role played by women in the collectivization protests.
Indeed, the author's handling of gender differences in
the peasant protests during collectivization is one of
the most interesting aspects of this valuable, pioneering study.
Viola maintains, on the basis of police statistics, that
the peasant unrest of this time was only rarely put
down by armed force. Rather, repression in the form
of repeated waves of dekulakization that deprived the
village of leadership and "the economy of scarcity,"
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934
Reviews of Books
created by the collective farm system and the 19321933 famine, eroded the peasants' ability to continue
active resistance and to maintain village unity against
the state, especially after outsiders, dispatched to the
village to carry out various state campaigns, were
withdrawn from the countryside.
This is revisionist scholarship at its very best. Viola
reveals an entirely new dimension to important historical phenomena such as collectivization and statesociety relations under Stalin. Her work offers much to
those interested in Russian-Soviet history, peasant
studies, revolution, gender differences in political behavior, and the origins of Stalinist totalitarianism.
ROBERTA T. MANNING
Boston College
MIDDLE EAST
Between Muslim and Jew:
The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 1995. Pp. viii, 300. $45.00.
STEVEN M. WASSERSTROM.
Steven M. Wasserstrom's book offers a new slant on
the fractious and productive encounter between Judaism and Islam. It is the perspective of a learned,
original, and ambitious thinker who is a historian of
religion. Wasserstrom's disciplinary approach is not
meant to revise or replace the socio-historically
minded studies of S. D. Goitein and Bernard Lewis,
among others, but rather to complement them by
examining critical points of the encounter between the
two religious civilizations as manifested in parallel
sectarian conflicts, shared idioms of mystical piety,
common methods of esoteric exegesis, reciprocal historical sensibilities, and mutual allegiances to philosophical schools in the orbit of Islam. Although Wasserstrom makes ample reference to the geographic,
temporal, and socio-political contexts within which
religious ideas, idioms, and modes of thought are
shared by Muslims and Jews, contested by them, or
appropriated one from the other and reshaped, his
work is not immediately or always likely to engage the
historian because of its fundamentally synchronic
methods of analysis. Nevertheless, this is an essential
work for anyone interested in the history as well as the
intellectual and spiritual life separating and connecting
Muslims and Jews during the eighth through the tenth
centuries in the Muslim East.
One of Wasserstrom's most valuable contributions is
his critical examination of the idea of "creative symbiosis." This notion, which Goitein coined to describe
the "Mediterranean society" of the Jews under Islam,
has dominated the way in which scholars conceptualize
the interaction of the two religions during the classical
age of Islam (A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish
Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the
Documents of the Cairo Genizah; Volume V: The
Individual [1988]). Wasserstrom applies a philosopher's keen sensibility to question this conventional
paradigm in general and the very limited valence of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
notions of cultural "borrowing" or "influence" in particular. What emerges is a more sophisticated conceptualization of the complex operations by which Muslims, including highly visible "professional Jewish
converts," "islamized" cultural and intellectual artifacts seeming to originate in Jewish tradition and,
conversely, the processes by which Jews "judaized"
institutions, materials, idioms, and discursive methods
emanating from within Islam. For Wasserstrom, "Jew
served as a ... catalyst in the self-definition of Islam;
and Muslim likewise operated in synergy with a Jewish
effort at self-legitimation" (p. 11).
How does the religionist differ from the social
historian with regard to such transactions, and how do
the two interpret the significance of religion in individual and communal life? Goitein summed up his
life's work by painting a captivating but somewhat
impressionistic portrait of the Jews of Islam, in whose
world religious concerns are ever-present but not
always central to social experience. By contrast, Wasserstrom traces details of the spiritual orientation Jews
shared with Muslims, and he analyzes the defining
ways in which the inner life of the individual and the
spiritual concerns of the community inform the very
behaviors and social institutions historians study.
The book is divided into three principal sections,
each devoted to a different "dimension of symbiosis"
between Islam and Judaism. In "Trajectories," Wasserstrom traces, among other things, the interpenetration of ideas about religious authority, messianic typologies, and apocalyptic activity among proto-Shi'ite
groups in early Islam and the 'Isawiyya, a shadowy
Jewish movement based on the Iranian plateau. The
persistence and appeal of this messianic movement (as
described by later Muslim heresiographers) as well as
the endurance of other "sectarian" Jewish groups
emerging from the social, economic, and religious
upheavals of early Islam are critical for Wasserstrom.
The rabbinate Judaism of the Babylonian ge'onim is
accordingly viewed as only one of several contending
Judaisms, even before one can speak of a mature
Karaism in the tenth century. "Constructions" then
proceeds to examine possible and perceived (by Sunni
Muslims) affinities between Judaism and Shi'i Islam,
especially in the form of Jewish messianism and the
Isma'ili imamate. Wasserstrom acknowledges that the
significance of the apparent correspondence in the
Jews' and Shi'i's respective structures of (a)historical
thinking remains a matter for speculation. He convincingly demonstrates, however, the centrality of ta'wil
(esoteric hermeneutics) as an indispensable exegetical
method common to Judaism, Shi'i Islam, and other
minority and sectarian circles in an age marked by both
polemics and interconfessionalism in religious
thought. In "Intimacies," Wasser strom returns to various narrative and phenomenological manifestations
of the symbiosis such as Isra'iliyyat traditions and
mystical and magical tradition and praxis.
Wasser strom has provided us with a dense, challenging, and insightful work that establishes the fundamen-
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1998