Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years

Until recent times, incidents of mass unrest in the USSR were shrouded in official secrecy. This pioneering work of historian Vladimir A. Kozlov unlocks these hidden chapters of Soviet history. Kozlov has based his work on exhaustive research in police, procuracy, KGB, and Party archives. He traces the historical context and the sequence of events leading up to a mass protest, 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.