Thomas F. Remington is professor of political science at Emory University.

This thoughtful book has an interesting thesis: that the failure of the Bolsheviks to create 'the socialist society to which their doctrine pointed and on which their legitimacy depended' was the consequence of their attempt to do so through the process of 'societal mobilization'. . . . He then provides strong support for his thesis by analyzing the weakness of central control, focusing on the bureaucratization of state power and on the development of gray and black markets, the demonstrative consequences (along with repressive force) of the inability of the state to create a socialist order.