Description: Until recent times, incidents of mass unrest in the USSR were shrouded in official secrecy. This pioneering work of historian Vladimir A. Kozlov has opened up these hidden chapters of Soviet history. Through exhaustive research in police, procuracy, KGB, and Party archives, Kozlov has been able to trace the historical context and the sequence of events leading up to a mass protest. He explores the demographic and psychological dynamics of the situation, and examines the actions and reactions of the authorities. Such painstaking analysis reveals that many rebellions were not so much anti-Communist as essentially conservative in nature, directed to the defense of local norms being disturbed by particular instances of injustice or by the rash of Khrushchev-era reforms. This insight makes the study valuable not only for what it tells us about postwar Soviet social history, but also for what it suggests about contemporary Russian society.

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