Everyday Stalinism

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin written by a leading authority on modern Russian history. Focusing on the urban population Fitzpatrick shows how living conditions and day-to-day practices changed dramatically with Stalin''s Revolution at the beginning of the 1930s. With the abolition of the market shortages of food clothing and all other consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivized villages major cities soon faced an acute housing crisis--whole families were jammed for decades into tiny single rooms in communal apartments. It was a world of privation overcrowding endless lines and broken homes in which the regime''s promises of future socialist abundance rang hollowly. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned life into a nightmare and of the ways ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it. We also read of the secret police whose constant surveillance was endemic to this society and the waves of terror like the Great Purges of 1937 which periodically cast this society into turmoil. Drawing on extensive research in Soviet archives only recently opened to historians Everyday Stalinism is a true and compelling story about ordinary people trying to live normal lives under extraordinary circumstances.