Author Description

"On Living Through Soviet Russia analyses, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated at a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendants of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class or religious minorities. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together and of housing; the secrecy of sexuality; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms such as growing vegetables at weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven decades of state socialism."--BOOK JACKET.