Review: To Make a Village Soviet: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Transformation of a Postwar Ukrainian Borderland, by Emily B. Baran

Abstract

Book Review| November 01 2023 Review: To Make a Village Soviet: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Transformation of a Postwar Ukrainian Borderland, by Emily B. Baran To Make a Village Soviet: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Transformation of a Postwar Ukrainian Borderland. By Emily B. Baran. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. xviii + 234 pages. CDN $120.00 hardcover; CDN $37.95 softcover; ebook available. Heather J. Coleman Heather J. Coleman University of Alberta Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2023) 27 (2): 112–114. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.27.2.112 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Heather J. Coleman; Review: To Make a Village Soviet: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Transformation of a Postwar Ukrainian Borderland, by Emily B. Baran. Nova Religio 1 November 2023; 27 (2): 112–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2023.27.2.112 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search 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... You do not currently have access to this content.