Wheeling and Dealing in the U.S.S.R.

It is the central thesis of Professor Dunham’s extraordinary book that toward the end of World War II the Soviet regime, weakened by a chain of devastating catastrophes, having lost its revolutionary zeal and with it the loyalty of most of its early supporters—the workers and the intelligentsia—entered into a “concordat” with the rising middle class, which was eventually to result in the abandonment of mass terror and the creation of a fundamentally stable, complacent, and—mutatis mutandis—well-functioning social order. This concordat, or alliance—or, as she engagingly calls it, the “Big Deal”—was introduced in the years preceding Stalin’s death, gained rapid momentum in its afterm...