This article covers the relationship between the National Labour Confederation of Spain and the Comintern and its union adjunct the Profintern, from the Confederation's initial support for the October Revolution to its subsequent outright rejection of communist politics, with reference to the positions adopted by revolutionary syndicalist movements in other countries. During this period a small number of individuals attempted to tie the Confederation to the Communist International, but failed. The article covers an important period in Spanish labour history, and helps to explain the mistrust that would bedevil the Spanish revolutionary working-class movement until the Civil War. Previous research has presented the battle for control of the CNT as a straightforward battle between anarchists and communists. This was not the case. The pro-communists were a miniscule faction, led by men recently affiliated to the CNT and who had no understanding of the depth of rejection of politics by Confederal militants. They only managed to take control of the national committee by chance. Aware of their weakness they were forced to act in a secretive and often underhand manner. Using material not consulted in previous studies this article shows the extent of their subterfuge and of the opposition this created in the Confederation, as well as demonstrating that the CNT was not the only revolutionary organisation to reject the Bolshevik International.

Letters have always been an important medium between rulers and subjects in the Soviet Union and Russia. This article looks at letters from young people to Soviet party officials, newspapers and youth organizations, using them as texts in their own right rather than as sources for the events they describe. A close and detailed analysis of the letters' language, structure and style reveals the subjective universe of their authors and the function of letters both in the personal life of their writers and in the Soviet system overall. Particular attention is paid to letters that employ confessionary narratives. The eschatological trajectory of other Soviet autobiographical texts, which chart the inevitable progress from an unenlightened state to ideological conviction, is reversed in these letters, leading the reader from a happy Soviet life to a point of confusion and ideological doubt. While the crises, which are at the heart of these letters, reveal the difficulties of young people in making sense of the Soviet world around them, they also demonstrate the extent to which young people's norms, values and language were infused by Bolshevik thought. The process of letter writing was thus both an affirmation of the system and a testimony to its failings.

The study of the ‘Chechen problem’ from the civil war period to the aftermath of the 20th Congress of the CPSU highlights a major topic in recent historiography of the Soviet period: the resistance to the regime. The various ways in which the Chechens resisted sovietisation over several decades provide a fine illustration of the highly complex notion of ‘social resistance’ in the Soviet Union. In the Chechen case, the manifestation and expression of resistance were rooted either in deeply ingrained social identities, community and tradition or in national and universal strategies of popular collective action. But the ‘Chechen problem’ also provides a good example of the different reactions and policies of the Soviet state when faced with this kind of ‘multi-dimensional’ resistance. These policies changed and evolved over the years: armed operations aimed at the ‘eradication of Chechen banditry’ in the 1920s and 1930s, total deportation in 1944 and, after 1956, the removal of most of the limitations imposed on the ‘punished’ national group.

From the 1950s to 1970s the West German public sphere underwent a rapid politicisation which was part of the ongoing socio-cultural democratisation of the Federal Republic. This article examines the role of the mass media and journalistic elites in bringing about this change. It analyses how and when political coverage in the media evolved from an instrument of consensus to a forum of conflict. Arguing that generational shifts in journalism were crucial to this process, two generations, termed the ‘45ers’ and the ‘68ers’, are described in regard to their professional ethos and their attitudes toward democracy, mass culture, German traditions and Western models.

This article examines the history of the relationship between insurance and civil society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It tests the conventional narrative that this relationship followed an anticlimactic course, marked by the burgeoning of self-organised mutual societies in the nineteenth century and the decline and marginalisation of this sector of civil society owing to the rise of corporate insurance companies and statutory social insurance in the twentieth century. The article offers first a comparative analysis of nineteenth-century mutual insurance in different European countries (Britain, Germany, France and Switzerland), calling attention to limitations to the democratic and self-organised character of mutual associations. The second part of the article concentrates on a case study of twentieth-century corporate insurance in Switzerland, examining how life insurance companies dealt with customers and their personal data. The study indicates that insurance corporations adopted norms of extended privacy protection in the 1980s, a process that reflected new legal demands, customer claims and policies of civil rights organisations. The conclusion summarises the contradictory effects of insurance on the history of civil society and discusses the implications for the concept of civil society.

Iris Borowy and Wolf D. Gruner eds., Facing Illness in Troubled Times: Health in Europe in the Interwar Years 1918–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 424 pp., €64.00 (hb), ISBN 363119486.

Horst H. Freyhofer The Nuremberg Medical Trial: The Holocaust and the Origin of the Nuremberg Medical Code, Studies in Modern European History 53 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 209 pp., €30.00 (pb), ISBN 0820467979.

Ulrike Lindner Gesundheitspolitik in der Nachkriegszeit. Großbritannien und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Vergleich, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London 57 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), 581 pp., €64.00 (hb), ISBN 3486200143.

Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 256 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 0472113607.

Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 192 pp., $24.50 (pb), ISBN 0231134541.

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0674011031.

Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Blackening Europe. The Afro-American Presence (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 314 pp., £18.99 (pb), ISBN 0-415-94399X.