War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power

By focusing on the war years, when the institute evacuated to the isolated provincial town Iaransk, Holmes adds to the developing scholarship about the politics and planning of evacuation and return, and he continues to show how local studies can illuminate national issues. ... Holmes’s broad and thorough examination of nine national and local archives, newspapers, memoirs, and personal interviews has led to an exhaustive account of the institute’s war years. The institute serves as the medium for examining the exercise of power during the war both within the institute and among various party, government, and industry organs at the local, regional, and national level. ... Holmes convincingly shows a political process that was nearly always based on self interest, both institutional and, at times, personal. Scholars and graduate students interested in local power politics should add Larry Holmes’s new book to their reading lists. * The Russian Review *
Larry E. Holmes skillfully portrays the evacuation and enforced exile. ... Holmes paints magnificent accounts of great friendships and love that bonded institute faculty and students together. ... Holmes details an intertwined and complex relationship between local, regional, and national agencies of the Soviet Union. The book shatters outdated models of Soviet power that supposedly was based on lines of command, and shows the Soviet state and society in all its complexity. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that institutional and personal behavior was both consistent and at odds with a triumphant wartime narrative. The book, based on thorough research, is outstanding and makes an invaluable contribution to Soviet history. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *
This book is a continuation of Larry E. Holmes’s remarkable efforts to use the history of Soviet education to provide new insights into the internal workings of Stalinism. . . . Holmes’s latest book provides a new paradigm for researching the relationship between individuals and the Soviet system in the 1940s. ... War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power makes an important contribution to scholarship on Stalinism and the home front during World War II. Historians interested in the experience of the Soviet people will need to engage with Holmes’s thoughtful arguments about the ways that individuals negotiated, challenged, and became victims of diffuse and tangled webs of power. * Slavic Review *
Meticulously researched. . . . this book gives us a grassroots view of the wartime struggle to survive that defined the late Stalin years. * American Historical Review *
Continuing a long-held association (even fascination) wit h the town of Kirov (now Vyatka), Larry Holmes’s new book is an interesting . . . study. . . .This book offers an interesting, in-depth narration of an institution, providing great texture and numerous telling anecdotes, but the significance of all this remains up to the reader to consider and interpret. * Europe-Asia Studies *
In Larry E. Holmes's hands, the history of this institution turns into a microversion of events at the global level — a country in chaos and confusion, reeling after an invasion by the seemingly invincible German army. While keeping in sight the events at the global level, he also does an unparalleled job of narrating a very complex local history. In his analysis, Holmes not only undercuts the prevailing 'triumphalist' narrative still found in Russian accounts, but also graphically describes the chaotic and internecine warfare taking place horizontally among local institutions for scare manpower and physical resources such as space, fuel, even furniture and lighting. As Holmes points out, it was a dog-eat-dog world, in which suspicion, jealousy, and duplicity dominated, and what were essentially the deficiencies of a system mutated into bitter and consequential personal feuds. Indeed, one of the achievements of this book is to make the reader almost empathize with people whose behavior was brutal, often vicious, and simply reprehensible. -- Ben Eklof, Indiana University