588 Slavic Review Kak partiia narod tantsevat΄ uchila, kak baletmeistery ei pomogali, i chto iz etogo vyshlo: Kul΄turnaia istoriia sovetskoi tantseval΄noi samodeiatel΄nosti. By Igor V. Narskii. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018. 752 pp. Bibliog- raphy. Illustrations. Photographs. ₽684.00, hard bound. doi: 10.1017/slr.2019.151 The most recent book by a prominent cultural historian of Russia’s twentieth cen- tury, Igor Narskii provides a historical perspective on amateur dance in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to perestroika as part of the Soviet politics of culture and as pedagogical practices of professional Soviet performers. Narskii starts by unwrap- ping the main ideas invested in amateur dance by Soviet ideologists beginning with Stalin himself and showing how they changed over time. Through an analysis of of- cial publications and specialized literature and periodicals related to amateur dance, Narskii argues that its politics refected the Soviet ideological imperative to produce a healthier, more disciplined, and enlightened collective body, an imperative encapsu- lated in the concept of kulturnost΄ that has been extensively discussed in the scholar- ship on Stalinism. By the early 1970s, however, state support for amateur dance began to diminish, partially because a network of clubs and similar cultural organizations was expensive to maintain. Coupled with a much greater variety of forms of cultural consumption available to Soviet audiences, this led to a gradual decline in amateur dance in the last two decades of the Soviet Union. To implement their grand visions of teaching kulturnost΄ and citizenship through dance, the Soviet authorities employed a large group of professional chore- ographers to act as organizers of amateur groups, and in the second part of his mono- graph Narskii examines the extensive network of people, organizations, and texts that materialized and institutionalized amateur dance in the USSR. His particular emphasis is on how amateur dance refected the changing understanding of Soviet nationhood. Soviet choreographers were tasked with inventing dances that had to include folk (or “genuine people’s”) elements, look sincere and natural, appeal to the general public, and distract Soviet youth from its fascination with western dances. Their theories of dance reifed ethnicity and nationhood as primordial and essential categories that found manifestation in dances performed on the amateur stage. While the Communist Party leadership did have the fnal say in all things pertaining to cultural policies, Soviet choreographers were something more than simply its pawns; instead, they contributed to the defnition of the Soviet collective body through their writing and performing. The third part of the monograph is a microhistory of the amateur dance group Samotsvety [Gems] founded in Chelyabinsk in 1938. Sponsored by the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, Samotsvety became an exemplary dance collective due to a gener- ous funding, numerous travel opportunities at home and abroad, charismatic lead- ers, and committed members. Here, the author switches to a diferent set of sources including oral history interviews, materials from private collections, the local press, and autobiographical reminiscences (the latter are also occasionally used in the frst two parts of the book). A changed perspective allows Narskii to show how the devel- opment of the repertoire of such groups was determined not so much by ideological diktat, but rather by the aesthetics and pragmatics of amateur dance as a network and a professional activity. As a result, the third part reads as a separate research project, which is not integrated into the analytical model of Soviet power as a didactic power used in the frst two parts of the monograph. The narrative organization of the book is remarkable for the unusually large amount of quotations used by the author. In most chapters, direct quotes constitute almost half of the text; in some—even more. A result of such excessive quoting is