Description

This is a groundbreaking account of every day life under Stalin, compiled by a number one expert on contemporary Russian history. Concentrating on the urban populace, Fitzpatrick represents an environment of overcrowding, privation, endless lines, and damaged houses, where the program's guarantees of future socialist plethora called hollowly. We read of the government bureaucracy that frequently transformed life right into a problem, and of how regular people attempted to bypass it. We also study of the key police, whose continuous monitoring was endemic at the moment, and the waves of horror, such as the Great Purges of 1937, which occasionally forged culture into chaos.