Why do some state building efforts succeed when others fail? Using newly available archival sources, this book presents a new explanation for the rise and subsequent collapse of the Soviet state. The study explains how personal networks and elite identity served as informal sources of power that influenced state strength. Reconstructing the State also offers new interpretations of how the weak Bolshevik state extended its reach to a vast rural and multi-ethnic periphery as well as the dynamics of the center-regional conflict in the 1930s that culminated in the Great Terror.