Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Most popular books about the Stalin era feature the big names and a firm narrative shape: Robert Conquest's _The Great Terror_; Alan Bullock's _Hitler and Stalin_. Some books yield their revelations at a glance, like the stunning _The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia_. But scholar Sheila Fitzpatrick is famous for letting the common people and the facts speak for themselves, in all their complexity. Her new book on Soviet life in the 1930s--based on research in newly opened archives--does for urbanites what her Heldt Prizewinning _Stalin's Peasants_ did for rural victims. The many witnesses in this fascinating horror story cast doubt on Stalin's notorious 1935 slogan "Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful." A comment made by a victim of Ivan the Terrible would be more apt: "We Russians don't need to eat; we eat one another and this satisfies us." Famine, caused by bad weather and worse policies, plagued the decade, and life became a chronic struggle to wrest crumbs from an incompetent bureaucracy. Stalin's sly methods of deflecting blame from the state onto allegedly disloyal citizens provoked orgies of denunciation (which could backfire on denouncers). A mad starch factory director forbade comrades to get shaves or haircuts at home--it would have been disloyal to the factory's hairdresser. One kid, Pavlik Morozov, reported his father for grain hoarding in 1937, was murdered by relatives, and became a national hero to kids. Andrei Sakharov's future spouse Elena Bonner was shocked at her 9-year-old brother's response to his father's arrest: "Look what these enemies of the people are like--_some of them even pretend to be fathers_." The celebrated Moscow Children's Theater put on _The Squealer_, a drama strikingly like Elia Kazan's _On the Waterfront_. Fitzpatrick gives a sense of what it really was like to live under the satanic circus master Stalin: it was beyond Kafka, and it was bloody hard work. _--Tim Appelo_