LAUSR

the final decades of the empire. Saburova and Eklof conclude: “State and society, the authorities and the opposition turn out to have been more closely linked, than has been thought. The manifest rupture between them was caused by the subsequent revolutionary upheavals” (419). The closing chapters examine the “memory wars” that were fought repeatedly throughout the twentieth century over the political and cultural legacy of the Populists. Through their post-revolutionary Society of Former Political Penal Laborers and the journal, Penal Labor and Exile, which was devoted to recording the experiences of political exiles, the Populists championed a less dogmatic revolutionary narrative more concerned with individual freedom that was clearly in conflict with the increasing ideological intolerance of the Bolsheviks. They sought to deploy their own “symbolic capital” in order to press, for example, for the abolition of the death penalty in the new Soviet judicial system (374). In the second half of the twentieth century, the Populists’ “belief that freedom and social justice were indivisible proved appealing to a new generation of intellectuals” (408). This richly researched and compelling study situates the Populists not only in the revolutionary movement of the 1870s and 1880s but also reintegrates them into the wider history of Russia.