Cultivating the Masses is a major contribution to an ongoing effort to place the interwar history of the Soviet Union in comparative, transnational, and transcultural perspective according to the central assumptions of this paradigm.... This book is a meritorious contribution to that ongoing conversation.
Glennys Young
Russian Review
David L. Hoffmann offers a powerful counterweight to... simple (and self-exonerating) explanations in the first major comparative assessment of Soviet socialism in its turbulent foundational decades.... Hoffmann has presented an ambitious survey of Soviet state practices that deserves an audience in all fields of modern world history. Even if some might dispute his largely structuralist interpretation of the system's most infamous abuses, they will be hard pressed to ignore the abundance of evidence he presents of influences common to the transition to modernity. His prose is lucid, and the comparative approach and chronological scope of this monograph make it an attractive choice for the classroom.
T. Clayton Black
The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928
For well over a decade now a major debate in Soviet historiography has centered on Bolshevik Russia's suspected participation in a happening called modernity, a happening that is as exciting to attend as it is difficult to locate.... Hoffmann's Cultivating the Masses is the latest book-length contribution to this debate; it testifies to the tenacity of the problematic, while raising doubts as to its continuing fecundity. The research behind Hoffmann’s historical narrative is impeccable throughout... and his handling of non-Russian contexts is truly impressive in its breadth.
Petre Petrow
Slavic and East European Journal
In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann argues that the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin was not an anomaly in European history—rather, it was one variant of that continent's broader experience with industrial modernity. A challenging thesis, this contention leads Hoffmann not only to reject the popular view that the USSR followed a unique, Sonderweg-like historical trajectory but also to cast doubt upon more routine claims that Soviet state policy development was essentially sui generis, proceeding according to an insular, domestically determined agenda.... A fascinating study, Cultivating the Masses deserves to be widely read.
David Brandenberger
The Journal of Modern History