With his book Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule, Michael David-Fox joins one of the most consequential academic conversations that over the past forty years has redefined the way historians and social scientists approach the study of society. It is the conversation on the nature of power and human agency under imposing conditions of modernity. David-Fox’s particular intervention into the problem might strike a well-informed reader as somewhat counterintuitive. Tracing the political history of Stalinism from the 1920s into the 1940s, he proposes to rethink the workings of modern power in its revolutionary-Stalinist incarnation not from the grounds of its center but from a “place far from Moscow”: the Smolensk region and its local institutions and actors. Into the foreground thus come regional party bosses, rank-and-file activists, peasants, collective farmers who confront the grand historical events that invade and shatter their lives—the Smolensk Affair, the collectivization, the Great Terror, the Great Patriotic War, the German occupation—with savvy resistance, manipulation, and perseverance. Be it entrenched regional elites with a mind of their own or village youth such as Vasilii Maslennikov, determined to escape the collectivized and malnourished countryside, the collective portrait of David-Fox’s historical protagonist captures the infinite dynamics of choice, life, and death in the middle of the long Stalinist Revolution. It brings into full view how ordinary people living in extraordinary times confront challenges, make choices, ultimately exercise agency, and, in David-Fox’s words, “could potentially become both victims and perpetrators, powerless in one area and powerful in another.”Footnote ¹

The concept of power at work in this epic study of Stalinism thus seems to be solidly grounded in the poststructuralist and, in particular, Foucauldian school of thought. Indeed, have not pioneers and practitioners of the school spent the last decades problematizing centralized and statist notions of power? And have they not resolutely reframed the question itself around local, diffused, open-ended, and multidirectional deployments of power among historical actors? Indeed, David-Fox himself states that in his “flipped” scenario of the “dynamics of power and politics,” power is “multidimensional, flowing in many channels and directions among people, groups, political institutions and systems, and entire society.”Footnote ²

Yet the parallels between David-Fox’s approach and the Foucauldian conceptualization of power go only so far. The differences are as important as the similarities. What sets David-Fox’s book apart is that with all the attention paid to local, diffused, multidirectional sites and operation of power, the book never loses the sight of the “center,” that is, the book never loses sight of statist powers of Stalinist modernity that, according to David-Fox, drew on formidable resources and operated with at once ordering and disorienting, mobilizing and deadly intentionality. This way the book ventures beyond the Foucauldian theory of domination and its signature unease with the concept and actuality of the modern State. Even in his later work on biopolitics and governmentality, Foucault leaves the modern State unexamined and, as a result, untheorized.Footnote ³ David-Fox, on the other hand, uncovers the multi-faceted ways the “center” operates through society and people’s lives. In his account, the Stalinist state, this “hypo-centralized site” and practice of power, strove to enable not only order but also chaos. It restricted the field of human thought and action to the point of death as well as presented humans with choices (however restricted and enforced) and room for maneuver and improvisation.Footnote ⁴

Lastly and most importantly, David-Fox also undertakes the daunting task of understanding the relationship between different levels and levers of power in his study: central, regional, district, and local. The goal in the book is thus not simply to flip the script, nor merely to reconceptualize centralized and statist forms of power. It is also to explain how modern power can be at once centralized and diffused, repressive and productive, intentional and open-ended.

What is left for us to consider is the other critical dimension of David-Fox’s intervention into the conversation about power and modernity—that of power and human agency. As I have argued elsewhere, the latter problematic comes with a long list of dogged questions that I now want to posit on behalf of David-Fox’s protagonists.Footnote ⁵ How are we to understand the historian’s decision to account for his protagonists’ acts of evasion and resistance, manipulation and self-advancement, even indecision and inaction, that is, the multitude of rational and irrational ways of coping with the Stalinist Revolution, under the rubric of agentic intent, “however limited and however tragic?” What is gained analytically and politically when one empowers the politically powerless, the economically dispossessed, and, if one looks at the Smolensk countryside in 1931, the physically emaciated by foregrounding their everyday choices and decisions toward making sense of catastrophic events and surviving them? Is this inherently liberal analytics of choice, decision, and agency warranted for understanding ordinary people’s struggles and maneuvering in Stalinist Russia?

Of course, the emphasis on agentic powers of the powerless has enjoyed a long history in history departments and the social sciences more generally. In its most recent poststructuralist reincarnation, this classic liberal belief in the agentic human subject has become a powerful analytical tool that has allowed cultural and social historians to discover agentic intent in virtually anything humans do, think, and even desire in history under conditions neither of their choosing nor making. The agentic trope has proven to be particularly useful on account of the oppressed, the enslaved, and the underprivileged who, in their struggle to survive various regimes and systems of domination, live a life of evasion, resistance, and transgression of power. Their ongoing and covert perseverance in taking advantage of their oppressors, however minimally, and bending disadvantaged situations towards their ends, also however minimally, serve here as the hallmark and limit to what humans do in history as agents. It is not surprising that nowadays one would be hard pressed to find any mention of victims or losers of history in much of contemporary social and cultural history. The preferred analytical vocabulary of the moment is that of agent-hood of the disempowered and not of victimhood.Footnote ⁶

Over the past decades, this academic discourse on human agency has given some students of history including this author pause. Indeed, does not the present-day deployment of the agency category display the alarming tendency to extend it virtually indefinitely to measure up with human life itself in all its day-to-day ordinary, extraordinary, and tragic metamorphoses? Inside this generous vision, everyone everywhere seems to have a little bit of agency, socio-economic inequalities and political violence notwithstanding. And, if the agency category has come to denote something akin a universal human condition, as one of its early theoreticians argued, what is the analytical value of pointing agency out? Of course, at the core of this overextended concept there is at least one gaping lacuna. In its present use, the concept, for example, allows scholars to sideline in their study of the agentic the question of the structurally and ideologically consequential change in history and what humans might have to do with it. Overextended and de-radicalized, the agency concept arguably runs the risk of becoming an empty category that encompasses everything except the structurally consequential and explains little.Footnote ⁷

In this short essay one cannot aspire to offer an exhaustive critique of what can go wrong analytically and politically with historians’ overreliance on the agentic trope. What one can do is to begin thinking together with Michael David-Fox about this trope as a commanding and far from innocent interpretive language that mediates between the historian and their historical material. I cannot help but wonder what stories and insights into the human suffering and resolve amid the Stalinist revolution has the use of agency as principal analytics might have interrupted or marginalized?

A monumental study of the Stalinist political revolution for the twenty-first century, David-Fox’s Crucibles of Power without doubt will generate more than one debate about the complex nature of modern power in its Stalinist variation and its deployment onto historical protagonists and by historical protagonists. As importantly and invaluably, it also brings the field of modern Russian history in conceptual and methodological conversation with the discipline of history as a whole. I look forward to the discussion of this book in this Slavic Review issue and many more debates in the profession at large.