Recent BooksMarch/April 2020 181solace in the fact that Russia’s top
leaders do not seek to reinstate across-
the-board state ownership or return to a
Soviet-style totalitarian past.Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a
Russian Historian
BY LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM.
Northern Illinois University Press,
2019, 216 pp.Remembering Leningrad: The Story of a
Generation
BY MARY MCAULEY. University o
Wisconsin Press, 2019, 256 pp.These two memoirs are both written by
respected left-wing scholars o¤ Russia,
but they dier in the extent to which
their authors immersed themselves in
Russian life. Siegelbaum entered Co-
lumbia University in 1966 and chose to
study the Soviet Union because o his
communist leanings. His memoir reads
like a bildungsroman: Siegelbaum
describes his early years as a child o “a
Red” (his father joined the U.S. Com-
munist Party in 1939), his participation
as a young Marxist in the 1967–68
student protests, and his subsequent
development into a Russian labor
historian schooled in Marxist theory.
As labor history receded in importance,
his somewhat reluctant shift toward
cultural and material history proved
fortunate: his history o the Soviet
automobile was awarded two presti-
gious prizes. Siegelbaum’s memoir is
also a chronicle o the trends and
debates in his ¥eld from the 1970s until
his retirement in 2018, with a special
focus on the new research opportunities
that followed the collapse o the Soviet
Union, as archives were opened andEastern Europe and Former
Soviet Republics
Maria Lipman
The Tragedy of Property: Private Life,
Ownership, and the Russian State
BY MAXIM TRUDOLYUBOV.
TRANSLATED BY ARCH TAIT. Polity,
2018, 216 pp.
T
rudolyubov traces the roots o
what he sees as the tragedy o
Russia: its failure to establish
democratic institutions that would
defend its citizens against the whims o
their rulers. With concision and clarity,
he blames Russia’s historical lack o
robust property rights. Through much
o¤ Russian history, the ruler dispensed
private property—and especially real
estate—as a “privilege” to the upper
class. In western Europe, by contrast,
property rights emerged in the course
o long social battles and were closely
associated with the development o
common law and the liberal tradition.
Anxious to maintain the state’s unchal-
lenged supremacy, Russian rulers at all
times were wary o private property.
The Bolsheviks outlawed it altogether;
for decades, the state was the sole
owner and distributor o all land and
urban housing. Today’s Russians may
own their apartments and have better
opportunities for a private life than
earlier generations, but the state retains
discretionary power over large proper-
ties, and the threat o sudden redistri-
bution remains. Although he draws a
bleak picture, Trudolyubov ¥nds some