After the official transition to socialism in the mid-1930s, the state continued to rely on urban women’s labor outside the home. With socialization of household tasks still a distant dream, domestic service was reimagined as an integral part of the socialist economy, signaling a major change in the understanding of housework’s place in Soviet society. The domestic worker became a reliable house manager, responsible for the maintenance of the Soviet housing stock, a dedicated nanny who raised Soviet children, and a professional caregiver who indirectly contributed to her employers’ productivity by taking care of their needs at home. Yet, the recognition of domestic workers as equal builders of socialism only solidified the gendered hierarchy of labor. Urban men and women working outside the home had the privilege of transferring the responsibility for housework to peasant migrants or women from other marginalized categories. As a result, many Soviet citizens continued to view domestic labor as degrading.

Transition to socialism meant that the relationships between domestic workers and their employers had to be reimagined. Rather than framing the relationship between domestic workers and their employers as a contractual one, the state now celebrated employers and domestics who treated each other “like family.” The economic nature of the relationship between Soviet families and their domestics puts into sharp relief the meaning of Stalinist socialism for domestic workers and their employers. Similar to capitalist countries, class inequality lay at the heart of domestic service in the Soviet Union. Yet, this inequality was less stark and more fragile. As a result, domestic workers were able to negotiate special bonuses, such as extended vacation time to visit families. However, in return domestic workers had to give up labor rights guaranteed by Soviet laws, such as days off or regular pay. The chapter demonstrates the limits of legal regulations within the household and the role of informal arrangements in domestic service.

The two chapters in Part V recount Ilf and Petrov’s hurried trip through the American South to New York and their encounter with the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere in which as they completed their travelogue. The last leg of the writers’ journey solidified their vision of America as a land of scenic wonders and standardized technical marvels. The new experience on this portion of the trip was the opportunity to observe American race relations in the “Negro states of the South.”

Empires and nations pull in different directions. Empires are founded on principles of institutionalized differences and distinctions, both laterally between peoples or geographies and vertically between those on top whose superiority grants them the right to rule over others and those below whose inferiority condemns them to be ruled by others. Nations, in contrast, are imagined and affective communities that promote, at least rhetorically if not always in practice, the commonality, horizontal equivalency, and homogeneity of the population that constitutes the nation. A nation at its inception is a political claim that a shared culture, ethnic, political, or religious, gives a people the right to self-rule, and possibly to sovereignty and statehood. At one end of the political spectrum, empires operate through hierarchy and difference between subjects and rulers, while at the other end, nations function on the basis of equality and shared nature, whether ethnic, religious, or political, of their citizens.

This chapter explores why the promises of allocative efficiency in neoliberal and Soviet economics - neoclassical ‘general equilibrium’ and the Soviet's ‘balanced plan’ - cannot be fulfilled. Early Soviet conceptions of planning had aspired to be based on an evolving social reality, in contrast to the highly abstract, competition-based, and hence de-historicized neoclassical arguments for general equilibrium. The Stalinist shift to synoptic planning had nevertheless confronted Soviet economists with the same challenges their neoclassical colleagues faced in the west: that of how to produce essentially machine-like models of allocative efficiency in social reality. These challenges would drive later generations of Soviet and neoclassical economists to fixate on, and fail to solve, the problem of how to account for the information that was evidently ‘lost’ both in planning and in market mechanisms. Innes explains why both concepts of allocative efficiency had proved even theoretically incoherent by the 1970s, and demonstrates that it was at this, the lowest point of intellectual credibility for the theory of general equilibrium, that it became a foundation of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

This chapter completes the story of Giorgio Amendola (and his wife Germaine) and his communist brothers: the independent Antonio (who died young in 1953) and the orthodox Pietro. After an account of Giorgio as a fighting partisan, or an organiser of fighting partisans, we move on to his history in the renamed Italian Communist Party after 1945. We examine his role in the establishment of the Italian Republic in 1946–7 and the concentration Togliatti then expected from him on the South. The PCI’s slow detachment from Stalinism is also reviewed. Until his death, Giorgio could never bring himself to prefer American civilisation to Soviet. Nonetheless, he actively favoured the PCI policy of a national ‘Italian road to socialism’. The automatic succession of Luigi Longo to party leadership in 1964 dashed Giorgio’s hopes in that regard. By the 1970s, he had become a (massive) party elder, with time to write his deeply humane memoirs. He died on 5 June 1980, Germaine following him to the grave within hours; she had become a well-regarded painter and the two were always thought to be engaged in their deeply romantic love story. They were given public and family burial in the Campo Verano.

Chapter 18 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of totalitarian states on the left and the right and the march toward humanity’s most horrific acts of self-destruction and “urbicide” during World War II. The chapter begins with a section on the promising urban gender, sexual, and racial revolutions of the 1920s that opened up new urban spaces of pleasure and expression for many people who had lived far more circumscribed roles before. Nonetheless, totalitarians found ways to leverage many different urban spaces into power. They rebuilt cities to strengthen their grip, then to arm themselves for a war of annihilation. New facilities devoted to drilling for petroleum, transporting it, and refining it became central to the course of the war. Acts of mass imprisonment, torture, and racial extermination led to the construction of some of world history’s most horrific built spaces. Meanwhile, the aerial bombing of cities and civilian neighborhoods became routine, culminating in fire bombings and the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This chapter examines how kolkhozniki and their supporters in the state and party structure went about recovering land and resources taken from them and punishing the local officials responsible. Similarly, examining how local authorities avoided punishments handed down to them for illegal appropriations offers insights into broader difficulties faced by central authorities in re-establishing control over the post-war agricultural sector.

This chapter provides a historical background of the enduring devastation of the post-World War II agricultural sector in Ukraine that encouraged local authorities to pursue various policies to organise their economies in opposition to laws and practice of their superior central authorities. This chapter provides the proper context to understand the case studies analysed in the following chapters.

Chapter 2 analyses the various methods used by local authorities to appropriate land illegally from the collective farm sector and to disguise these attempts from superior authorities. It begins to trace the scale of this activity across Kyiv Oblast and Ukraine and to unravel a widespread conspiracy at different levels of government that conducted illegal appropriations and protected their members from prosecution from superior authorities.

This chapter argues that that Nazi trials in eastern Germany helped legitimate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship while remaining reasonably fair down until 1950. In forging their new dictatorship, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) relied on a nominal alliance with bourgeois and Social Democratic politicians. This alliance was based in part on a shared interest in punishing Nazi crimnals. Nazi trials in the East helped the SED identify and eliminate unreliable personnel among prosecutors and judges. More importantly, it helped craft and cement the justification for the new police state, by rationalizing denunciations to the new secret police (the Stasi) while criminalizing denunciations to the former secret police (the Gestapo). At the same time, these trials retained important due process protections for defendants. And, if Soviet complaints are to be believed, there were far more acquittals and modest punishments than the communists wanted. After the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, though, this changed. In the so-called Waldheim trials of 1950, the prosecution of Nazi criminals became a classic example of authoritarian justice, with pre-determined outcomes and no due process. But this was a result of the new dictatorship, not its cause.

Chapter 4 examines how the Communist Party co-opted existing narratives about fangyan and the nation for its revolutionary goals from the 1930s through the 1950s. On the one hand, the CCP’s increasingly efficient bureaucracy, buttressed by linguists at the state-sponsored Chinese Academy of Sciences, declared Putonghua the Chinese national language and framed fangyan as obsolete remnants of a past that would naturally disappear on their own. On the other hand, those in theater, radio, and literature proclaimed that fangyan were indispensable to their objective of spreading revolutionary messages. Together, the coexistence of these two narratives shows that despite the CCP’s national language agenda, there were powerful voices declaring that a revolution “from the people” should be presented in the language of those people, i.e., fangyan.