It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless lines, and broken homes, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollowly. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned life into a nightmare, and of the ways ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it. We also read of the secret police, whose constant surveillance was endemic to this society, and the waves of terror, like the Great Purges of 1937, which periodically cast this society into turmoil. Drawing on extensive research in Soviet archives only recently opened to historians, Everyday Stalinism is a true and compelling story about ordinary people trying to live normal lives under extraordinary circumstances.