58 Problems of Post-Communism January/February 2011 Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 58, no. 1, January/February 2011, pp. 58–66. © 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1075–8216 / 2011 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/PPC1075-8216580105 JESSICA ALLINA-PISANO is an associate professor of political science at the University of Ottawa. She won the 2009 AAASS Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2008). The work leading to this article was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds that were made available by the U.S. Department of State under Title VIII (The Soviet–East European Research and Training Act of 1983), as amended. As the Soviet Union emerged from World War II, extended its influence westward, and struggled to regain control over the population, a village on the western border strategically deployed its labor resources and selectively, but regularly and openly, thumbed its nose at state demands in order to protect the economies of individual households. “Opting Out” Under Stalin and Khrushchev Postwar Sovietization in a Borderland Magyar Village Jessica Allina-Pisano T HE 1965 local elections in the village of Solontsy, like the elections of previous years and those of years to come, seemed to signal a demonstration of complete civic compliance with the demands of the Soviet state and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Solontsy was in many ways an unexceptional village in the Ukrainian SSR, save for the fact that its westernmost household happened to sit flush against the heavily guarded border between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. As in other villages from the Danube to the Pacific that year, Solontsy’s Party organizers had no trouble mustering the entire population to the polls. So, in the first dark hours of a cold December day, at one of the farthest western edges of the Soviet empire, all 210 voters who lived along Solontsy’s single dirt road had cast their ballots by eight o’clock in the morning. 1 The apparently tight hold of the state on the population had not begun with that election, nor with the elections nearly twenty years before, after the Red Army delivered Solontsy and the surrounding region from the grip of Hit- ler’s and Horthy’s soldiers—only to thrust that part of the European countryside into a new period of colonization and control. During the early years of Stalinist occupa- tion, Soviet functionaries came to know Solontsy and every other village in the region of Zakarpattia in intimate detail as they enumerated and harnessed every available resource to the lumbering cart of the state. Bureaucratic conduits of information in the postwar years extended from the halls of the Kremlin all the way to village stables, where collectivizing rural communi- ties newly absorbed into the Soviet Union kept minute records of property movements from household to kol- FIELD NOTE