Historian Matthew Lenoe provides a lucid and extremely well-researched account of how Soviet newspapers came to adopt the Stalinist model of shrill exhortation between 1925 and 1933...Lenoe's focused study of newspapers brings a number of important refinements to received wisdom, thanks to a robust common sense not always found in scholarly writing on Soviet history.

Lenoe argues that in the late 1920s, Soviet newspapers transformed themselves from educators (offering propaganda) to mobilizers (agitators) of the reading public. This 'mass journalism' eschewed conventional 'news' for stories that glorified the industrialization of Soviet Russia. The style of writing, modeled on the tales of adventure that engaged young male readers, became the prototype for the socialist realism of Stalinist literature...Lenoe is persuasive in showing the party's manipulation of the press and the cooperation of editors and reporters in the enterprise.

The way in which Lenoe connects the Stalinist mobilization project with the central problem of...political legitimacy is especially valuable.... Using materials that have been little studied, Lenoe has posed very important questions about Soviet political culture and drawn interesting and unexpected conclusions that allow us to view the formation of Soviet media in new ways.