In twelve essays, leading scholars shed light on the everyday life of Soviet people in the years 1929 to 1953. The book is addressed to a broad public, but also offers interesting insights for specialists.

Life in Stalin's Soviet Union covers a wide range of topics. The authors deal with different social groups in the countryside and in the cities. Kees Boterbloem, the editor, starts with an essay about peasants in collective farms, upheaval in the villages, and signs of protest and resistance against collectivization. Frances Bernstein, James Heinzen, and David Shearer focus on groups that have received little attention in research so far: the disabled people, the (local) officials of the Soviet bureaucracy, the socially marginalized and the “criminals.” Kenneth Slepyan describes the everyday life of Red Army soldiers during the “Great Patriotic War.”

Other important aspects of everyday culture include food consumption (Elena A. Osokina), housing and urbanization (Heather D. DeHaan), education (Larry E. Holmes), gender and sexuality (Randall Amy), festivals and celebrations (Karen Petrone), and religion (Gregory L. Freeze). Golfo Alexopoulos dedicates her chapter to the large-scale camp system, the Gulag.

Several anthologies have already been published on the everyday history of Stalinism. In this book, the individual chapters are very well coordinated. As a result, the study as a whole shows convincingly how the topics are interconnected and how strongly different social groups interacted under Stalinism. This interlocking in particular reveals the strength of this collaborative work.

For example, Frances Bernstein states that “Stalinism itself was the Soviet Union's chief disabling condition” (116). The large number of disabled people was produced by industrialization and collectivization, which drove the unskilled peasants to the machines in factories, and by socialist competition, which put production above work safety and led to many industrial accidents. The Gulag camps were another place where many people became disabled. The local officials, in turn, decided who was classified as disabled in the first place. Through these syntheses of individual essays, an impressive picture of Stalinism emerges.

It is a broad picture, but not a complete one. The book concentrates on the Slavic population of the Soviet Union. A book with 250 pages cannot, of course, cover all aspects of everyday life comprehensively. The Soviet Union, a multi-ethnic empire with over a hundred nationalities, is not discussed (or only marginally as in the chapter on sexuality and gender). This explicitly formulated limitation is justified, but the argument is not: “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians formed the great majority of the Soviet population under Stalin, so their story is in some ways the story of the Soviet Union as a whole under Stalin” (5). The history of urbanization or religion, to name just two examples, would have to be written quite differently with regard to the nomads or Islam. Even in a centralized state like the Soviet Union, in which the Slavs dominated politically and culturally, the differences especially in everyday life remained great in the large empire between the Pamir Mountains and the Baltic Sea. The history of everyday life of the Slavic population cannot be the history of the everyday life of the entire Soviet Union.

The book sets the time frame from 1929 to 1953 and follows the periodization of Stalinism that is common in research. It starts in 1929, when “Stalin established his absolute rule” (1), and ends with his death. On the question of finer periodization within this framework, the book does not give a single answer and thus reveals differences in the everyday life of various social groups, especially between the rural and urban populations. It is not only a book about life, but also about death in Stalin's Soviet Union. Death hit the peasants mainly in the years of the famine in 1929 to 1933, while the urban citizens were more affected by the mass arrests and terror of the years 1937 and 1938. Twenty-seven million people died in the “Great Patriotic War.” The year 1941 marked a sharp break in the everyday life of all Soviet people.

The changes implemented and experienced during the war period are traced for various topics. The shift in religious policy, the promotion of Orthodoxy and the reopening of churches, had domestic and foreign policy functions. It served to mobilize the home population and to appease western Allies. The changes in sexual norms and practices were also due to wartime conditions, when men and women entered the Red Army and were away from their partners.

The focus of the book, however, is on the 1930s. The war period and especially the post-war period are treated subordinately. For the Gulag, the fundamental restructuring of the camp system during and after the war remains unnoticed. Here, a brief overview on new research on “filtration” of returning Soviet prisoners of war, deported forced laborers and Soviet people who lived under German occupation would have been welcome.

Overall, the book summarizes very well the current state of research on everyday life under Stalinism. It essentially reflects the results of the extremely dynamic North American scientific community in this field and works on the basis of archival documents and other sources that have become accessible since the 1990s. Aimed at a broad audience, the essays have very few footnotes, and some have none at all, but the book has a bibliography.

The study analyzes the relationship of the individual to the regime and the possibilities of personal autonomy. It understands Soviet people as acting subjects and shows their actions in a wide and interconnected range of topics. The result is a highly recommendable book on everyday life under Stalinism.