In this well-written book, Emily Baran takes her readers to Soviet Ukraine in the first years after World War II, and the small town of Bila Tserkva on the border with Romania. Bila Tserkva was a true backwater, one of a cluster of poor, Romanian-speaking villages in an isolated corner of the newly conquered and remote Soviet region of Transcarpathia. Its most distinctive feature was its large population of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1949, the state arrested seven men from that community, tried them as dangerous subversives belonging to an underground network aimed at destroying the Soviet Union, and sentenced them to 25 years in prison camps. Baran uses the extensive paper trail of the investigation and trial to explore what the case reveals about state and society: the nature and mechanisms of Sovietization, and how the Witnesses and their fellow villagers navigated the process.

All modern states seek to identify...

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