The cinema of Sergei Parajanov

paigns, usually spearheaded by local officials, against peasants accused of hiding grain. Wemheuer shows that local officials were the proximate, but not primary cause of the famine, insofar as they gave wildly exaggerated figures on food output to their political superiors. Once the reality of famine could no longer be ignored, both the Soviet and the Chinese regimes had little alternative but to make concessions to the peasants by allowing them private plots and the right to trade small surpluses and by lowering procurement quotas and taxes. In Part Three he explores how the regimes actively expunged the famines from official memory and how nationalists in Ukraine and Tibet have used the famines to promote claims for national liberation, often in ways that distorted history. This turn to discourse analysis is notwithout interest, but it left this reader a little uneasy at treating famine as rhetoric. Wemheuer ends by contending that the famines were the key reason why peasants were never integrated into the two societies. It is a suggestive claim but is underdetermined by evidence and detailed argument. Notwithstanding their undeniable second-class status, it is not clear that peasants did see themselves as ‘outside’ society. If not all arguments are equally persuasive, the book is nevertheless an impressive demonstration of the power of comparative history and an obligatory read for all who are interested in the history of communism.