Everyday Stalinism

Her range of sources is enormous. It includes, inter alia, advertisements, standard personnel questionnaires, movie scenes, and song lyrics. From these as well as diaries, memoirs, letters, newspaper articles, and travelers' accounts, she extracts telling details about the symbolic significance of uniforms and domestically produced champagne, markers of privilege such as chauffeur driven cars, dachas, and travel allowances, and the crucial role that patronage played in acquiring them. The types of individuals we meet along the way include not only the party elite, pampered Stakhanovites and intellectuals, but also conmen and domestic servants.[5]

Fitzpatrick covers a broad range of topics to provide the reader with an understanding of how Stalinism impacted the lives of a wide variety of individuals in the Soviet Union. These include: the inner workings of the Communist party and the expectations placed on members; a contrast of the relative comfort in the lives of party members compared with the poverty and constant depravations the average Soviet citizen faced; the omnipresent state propaganda of building a "radiant future"; the psychological impact of Stalinism on privileged insiders, the average individual, and those the party labeled as outsiders and enemies; the system of popular surveillance and denunciation, created and encouraged by the party to enforce communist ideology and practice; the experience of living through or dying in one of the greatest periods of oppression and mass murder in history.^[5][6] Some topics are covered lightly or excluded from Fitzpatrick's coverage of everyday life; the areas of work and occupations, education, and those of friendship and romance are examples. Regarding work and everyday life, Fitzpatrick states "I am interested in the experiences and practices that were common to the urban population as a whole, not just parts of it. This is why work, a part of everyday life that varies greatly from one occupational group to another, is not a central topic in this study."^[a][7][5][8]

The contrast between the propaganda of abundance and the reality of want form the key theme of the first part of the book. From the start, building socialism in the Soviet Union theoretically meant creating a new classless egalitarian society that was able to produce an abundance of consumer goods as well as support robust industrial production. In reality, it produced a different, but even more rigid hierarchical society which was eventually even less able to support its citizens with consumer goods than what it replaced. The new hierarchy became the new class system and an individual's position within it and their relations to others determined their access to goods. Far from being a production-oriented society, the Stalinist Soviet Union became a prime example of a society forced to focus primarily on obtaining the necessities of life.^[9] Fitzpatrick documents the fantasy of the urban Potemkin village that the Soviet government attempted to portray, with the reality of rationing, rampant speculation, shops closed due to the lack of goods, and lengthy queues at those that were open, all of which formed the struggle average citizens faced trying to obtain the essentials of daily life. The strategies people used to survive and the system of blat, essentially the ability to access black markets and the underground economy, are shown to be the alternatives forced upon people to survive. This is all contrasted with the favoritism and relative abundance available to the Soviet elite and those they favored, completing a picture of the different castes within the supposedly classless society.^[5][8][10]

Writing in Social History, Sarah Davies states:

She shows how the chronic housing shortages of the 1930s gave rise to a number of practices, including fictive marriages, renting out corners of rooms, and continuing to live with spouses after a divorce. Because of the shortages of goods, both official and unofficial rationing were a constant feature of the decade. Speculation emerged as a way of coping with the inefficiencies of the official distribution system. The 'second economy' was a vital element of Stalinism. Blat (the use of contacts to exchange goods and services) was cultivated, and 'friends' became very important for survival. This was summed up pithily in a contemporary saying: 'One must have not 100 roubles, but a hundred friends.' ... In this society status mattered more than money. Like blat, patronage was ubiquitous, as people lower down the hierarchy relied on the support and protection of those higher up in order to obtain goods in short supply and to secure privileges.^[7]

Having set the stage and introduced the life of the average urban dweller, Fitzpatrick introduces more elements of urban life in the following chapters.

In a 1999 review in Russian History, Oksana Fedotova wrote that "[t]his new book by Sheila Fitzpatrick is an outstanding contribution to the existing body of research into the Soviet past. Extensive use of archival material, combined with a wide range of published sources, and highlighted by references to the contemporary press cuttings, reveal an absorbing picture of everyday life under Stalinism. Against a rich variety of locations that stretched from workers' barracks and communal kitchens to the apartments of senior officials and closed access stores, there unfolds before our eyes an impressive array of characters. Bosses and outcasts, patrons and clients, activists and absconding husbands, elite wives and homeless children, are depicted in a multitude of activities and relationships that characterized the turbulent life of 1930s Russia."^[12]

Writing in the

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