Gabor Rittersporn’s book is the distillation of several decades of exhaustive archival work by one of the Soviet field’s most prodigious writers. Deftly edited by Carmine Storella, the book bears the classic hallmarks of its author’s style. It is sweeping, for one thing, and goes head on at large questions about the Soviet “system.” More to the point, Rittersporn’s book reflects its author’s bent of mind—part history, part psycho-social analysis, part storytelling. Rittersporn is a master storyteller. In chapter after chapter, he unfolds tales and anecdotes of the personal experiences of Soviet citizens and officials during the Stalinist era, mostly during the 1930s. Rittersporn has put together this dense description of daily life in Stalin’s Soviet Union from diverse sources, including police records, diaries, court proceedings, letters, newspapers, and official complaints. Taken together, these stories make up what Rittersporn aptly calls an “archeology of daily life” (3). And like any good archeology, the point is not just to dig up individual artifacts, but to try to understand their meaning. This Rittersporn does through clever, at times even convoluted, interpretive extrapolations of his storytelling. Rittersporn is not interested in just describing daily life in the Soviet Union. He sees in the stories he tells the key to understanding how the daily practices and activities of the population affected—constrained, channeled, thwarted—the political processes of the Soviet state and ruling party. It is the “politics of social practices” that interests the author (3).

A little under 400 pages, the book is divided into nine chapters, at least five of which are reworked versions of previously published essays. The chapters are subdivided into three sections of three chapters each, each section corresponding to the three themes of the title—anguish, anxiety, and folkways. As Rittersporn explains, section one explores the “unacknowledged anguish” shared by officials and citizens alike that state and party policies produced. As Rittersporn notes, the Stalinist system was plagued by its own dysfunctionality, by its gross inefficiency, abuses of power, intrigues, the need to cover up failure, the massive discrepancy between what was planned and promised, and the misery of everyday life. In a state and society in which officials, even high officials, could not afford to recognize systemic failures, the only way to understand those failures was to blame them on hidden and dark forces—saboteurs, infiltrators, spies, and oppositionists intent on destroying the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union (Chapter 1). This was the logic of a dysfunctional system that Rittersporn believes explains the spiraling and pervasive accumulation of suspicion, the regime’s spy mania, the constant hunt for wreckers, and the inexorable logic of political violence against supposed enemies (Chapter 2). It was the dysfunctional logic of the “system” that produced an atmosphere of what Rittersporn calls the “omnipresent conspiracy”: a cult of conspiracy pervaded popular imagination as well as official political culture. It is irrelevant, argues Rittersporn, whether the populace accepted the official line about who was the enemy (Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and so forth), or whether they saw the culprits as the country’s leaders, or their own neighbors. Suspicion is what the system produced. Likewise, political and police officials (even high-level officials, including the Great Leader, himself), saw conspiracy everywhere, to the point that the establishment “feared its own shadow” (80). It was the logic of omnipresent conspiracy that drove the system nearly to devour itself in the paroxysm of violence of the late 1930s (Chapter 3).

Section 2, the part that deals with “anger,” examines the reaction among groups, especially the youth, to the glaring discrepancy between the reality of daily life and the promises and propaganda of the regime about building socialism. As Rittersporn explains, people expressed their frustration about daily life through complaints and daily tactics of avoidance or deviation, which officials interpreted as hostile, and this, of course, fueled the syndrome of suspicion. Eventually, officials came to understand that complaining and daily tactics of deviance were just a part of the system, while citizens eventually channeled their anger into resignation, and finally into disillusionment. Anger did not connote opposition, claims the author, since it contained a still burning ember of belief in revolutionary ideals. It was the disillusionment, according to Rittersporn, not the anger, that finally doomed the Soviet experiment.

The last part, “folkways,” treats the way that citizens adapted to the realities of Soviet life, retreating into traditional and non-traditional coping mechanisms. These included drinking, of course, but also the appearance of very Soviet counter-cultural associations, especially of youth groups, that engaged in rowdiness and hooliganism, mockery of official symbols and personality cults, as well as groups devoted to sexual licentiousness, secret and non-secret religious societies, and even suicide clubs. Anecdotes, crude limericks, and cynical jokes, of course, played a significant role in this carnivalesque turning of the system on its head. In an interesting twist, in Chapter 8, Rittersporn also includes illegal economic activity—entrepreneurship—as part of these folkways. This chapter provides a thoughtful and refreshing perspective on what has traditionally been the domain of economic historians.

There is a certain frustration in reading this book. The three sections of the study are distinctly laid out in the introduction, but the first three chapters, in particular, tend to overlap, without a clear delineation of topics or materials, and all seem to revolve back around to the terror of 1937 and 1938. Such overlap could very likely result from the origins of these chapters as distinct essays. They also differ considerably in analytical approach, perhaps another consequence of being written at different times. Chapter 1, for example, seems almost devoid of human agency, of leaders making decisions within specific circumstances, and for particular reasons. In this chapter, the terror seems to arise from the contradictions of the Soviet “system,” in which all were trapped—citizens, police, party and state officials, and even Stalin. Suspicion begat suspicion in ever-widening circles until the “system” spun out of control in a self-destructive frenzy of violence. This psycho-social analysis carries a certain logic until one reads suddenly the sentence, on page 33: “When the Politbiuro halted the purges at the end of 1938, it blamed the indiscriminate arrests on enemies who had wormed their way into the political police.” This sudden introduction of human agency jars with the impersonal analysis that characterizes the rest of the chapter.

Rittersporn waits until Chapter 3 to introduce historical agency in explaining the purges. In that chapter, he focuses primarily on the argument of internal threat, that leaders unleashed violent purging out of fear. That fear arose from a series of events: the murder of the Leningrad party secretary in December 1934, the promulgation of a liberal constitution in 1936, and worries about a potential backlash in elections to the newly created Supreme Soviet in 1938. One may agree or disagree with this argument, but at least the chapter offers a recognizable historical explanation, one that relates circumstances to perceptions and actions. This is a different kind of writing and analysis than in the first chapter.

One other frustration arises from the relatively short shrift given to the post-Stalin era. Rittersporn acknowledges that most of the book focuses on the Stalinist era. Still, he makes several forays into the periods of the 1960s through the 1980s, claiming that the trends established in the prewar period had long lasting effects on the whole of the Soviet experience. These jumps into the future are intriguing, but sketchy. In Chapter 6, for example, the author attempts to draw connections between the counter cultures of the 1930s and those of the Brezhnev era, but this comes only in the last several pages of the chapter. In the same vein, Rittersporn consciously eschews any attempt to discuss the distinguishing features of Stalinism. In the introduction, he dismisses such a project as an “elusive terminological problem” (10). One might agree that it is fruitless to try to capture the essence of Stalinism in a single line definition, but it should be the task of a historian to periodize and distinguish change over time. The Brezhnev era was not the Stalin era, nor was the Stalin era the same as the 1920s, despite the many continuities within Bolshevik and Soviet culture. Rittersporn is a prolific and always provocative writer, and we may hope that he will pursue a companion volume that addresses the issue of Stalinism within the whole arc of Soviet historical experience.

The frustrations in reading this book are far outweighed by the richness of the text and the sheer volume of stories. The writing echoes the synthetic approach of Moshe Lewin’s, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the History of Interwar Russia. This, I believe, is not coincidental, since the two were close in intellectual temperament, thinking, and in personal interactions, especially in the last years of Lewin’s life. Rittersporn’s book is more focused than Lewin’s scattered series of essays, but it follows in the same vein. Rittersporn’s book is also richer in detail, of course, due to archival access available only since the 1990s. There are few histories that lay open what it was like to live in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. This book does that, one story at a time.