Reading The Soviet Prefects Today
Journal: Kritika
Year: 2021

Reading The Soviet Prefects Today Yoram Gorlizki (bio) Mary McAuley, my doctoral supervisor, once remarked that there were only two PhD-based books that changed the way we thought about communist politics. One, published in 1962, was Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power; the other, appearing later that decade, in the year of the moon landings, was Jerry Hough's The Soviet Prefects.1 After such high praise, I quickly tracked down a secondhand copy of The Soviet Prefects and