Jan Gross's fine piece of scholarly craftsmanship can be appreciated on several levels. Obviously it is in the first instance an exposition of the initial stages by which the basis was laid for the incorporation of Poland's pre-1939 eastern territories within the Soviet Union, a process that began, according to the author, with the Soviet military conquest of the present western Ukraine and western Belarus in September 1939. In six chapters, Gross explores the manner in which the Soviets remade the system of social - organization in these territories. During the first weeks following the invasion, he contends, the occupying Red Army and NKVD transformed the state administration from a ‘routine, dull and predictable bureaucratic instrument’ into one that was ‘arbitrary and capricious', which ‘no longer attempted to shield its subjects from violence [but] now meted out violence against them’ (p. 70). Subsequently, the elections held on 22 October 1939 to provide an ostensible popular mandate for the incorporation of the occupied territories into the USSR extended this transformation, according to Gross, by bringing virtually every individual citizen into direct contact with the state apparatus and subjecting his behaviour to public scrutiny. The exposure of all citizens before the authorities brought about as a result of the election campaign then made it possible, as Gross demonstrates, for the state effectively to induce obedience, whether by persuasion-through the restructuring of the educational system-or by coercion-through mass arrests, deportations, torture, and executions. Although, he notes, ‘after World War II the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia still had to go through important stages (like the collectivization of agriculture) before the Soviet regime stabilized', what happened in these territories between September 1939 and June 1941 offers in his opinion ‘a comprehensive insight into the process of installing a Communist regime’ (p. 225).

Gross's study, however, as he himself is aware, offers more than a mere description of this process. In attempting to explain how the Soviet conquerors managed so quickly and so thoroughly to establish a direct unmediated relationship between each individual and the state in which ‘nothing, not even the most private family life, can be legitimately shielded from state interference and regulation’ (p. 116), he develops a thesis that in a sense stands earlier theories of totalitarianism on their heads.