Table Of ContentDAILY LIFE IN
T HE SOVIET
U N I ON
The Greenwood Press "Daily Life Through History" Series
The Age of Charlemagne The Holocaust
John J. Butt Eve Nussbaum Soumerai and
Carol D. Schulz
The Age of Sail
Dorothy Denneen Volo and The Inca Empire
James M. Volo Michael A. Malpass
The American Revolution Maya Civilization
Dorothy Denneen Volo and Robert J. Sharer
James M. Volo
Medieval Europe
The Ancient Egyptians Jeffrey L. Singman
Bob Brier and Hoyt Hobbs
The Nineteenth Century American
The Ancient Greeks Frontier
Robert Garland Mary Ellen Jones
Ancient Mesopotamia The Old Colonial Frontier
Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat James M. Volo and
Dorothy Denneen Volo
The Ancient Romans
David Matz Renaissance Italy
Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen
The Aztecs: People of the Sun and
Earth The Spanish Inquisition
David Carrasco with Scott Sessions James M. Anderson
Chaucer's England Traditional China: The Tang Dynasty
Jeffrey L. Singman and Will McLean Charles Benn
Civil War America The United States, 1920-1939:
Dorothy Denneen Volo and Decades of Promise and Pain
James M. Volo David E. Kyvig
Colonial New England The United States, 1940-1959: Shifting
Claudia Durst Johnson Worlds
Eugenia Kaledin
Early Modern Japan
Louis G. Perez The United States, 1960-1990:
Decades of Discord
18th-Century England
Myron A. Marty
Kirstin Olsen
Victorian England
Elizabethan England
Sally Mitchell
Jeffrey L. Singman
World War I
Neil M. Heyman
DAILY LIFE IN
T HE S O V I ET
U N I ON
KATHERINE B. EATON
The Greenwood Press "Daily Life Through History" Series
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Eaton, Katherine Bliss.
Daily life in the Soviet Union / Katherine B. Eaton.
p. cm. — (The Greenwood Press "Daily life through history" series,
ISSN 1080-4749)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-313-31628-7 (alk. paper)
1. Soviet Union—Social life and customs. 2. Soviet Union—History. I. Title.
II. Series.
DK266.4.E17 2004
947.084—dc22 2004012486
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2004 by Katherine B. Eaton
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004012486
ISBN: 0-313-31628-7
ISSN: 1080-4749
First published in 2004
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www. greenwood .com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Copyright Acknowledgments
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the
following:
Extracts from Katherine Bliss Eaton, ed. Enemies of the People: The Destruction of
Literary, Theater, and Film Arts in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Evanston, IL: North
western University Press, 2002, and Victor Terras, translator.
Copyright © 2001 from Censorship: A World Encyclopedia by Derek Jones. Repro
duced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Recipe for Russian Kulich courtesy of Fleischmann's Yeast, a division of Burns
Philp Food, Inc.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials
in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and
publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowl
edgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their
apologies for any omissions.
For Henry, Stephen, and Jonathan Eaton
There are secrets galore in the Soviet Union, but the principal
and most carefully guarded state secret is the daily life of the
Soviet people.
—Vladimir Voinovich
contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Transliteration xiii
Brief Chronology of Russia and the Soviet Union in the
Twentieth Century XV
Maps xix
1. The Soviet Union, 1917-1991 1
2. Ethnic Groups and Nationalities 37
3. Government and Law 55
4. The Military 79
5. Economy, Class Structure, Food, Clothing, and Shopping 107
6. Rural Life 131
7. Housing 153
8. Health Care and Health Problems 175
9. Education 209
10. The Arts 235
viii Contents
11. Mass Media, Leisure, and Popular Culture 257
12. Religion 281
Glossary 303
For Further Reading 313
Index 317
preface
The idea of "daily life" implies an orderly routine in a stable environment,
the ability to go about one's business confident that life is reasonably pre
dictable, that the ground rules of one's society and upbringing will hold
and not suddenly, horribly, evaporate. The Soviet period, which lasted 73
years, was a time of repeated seismic shifts in people's everyday lives.
Add to that the sheer size of the Soviet empire, with its scores of ethnic
groups, nationalities, cultures, and languages; its variety of religions; and
the wide gaps in the lifestyles of different social classes. How, in a book on
"daily life," do we include mass starvation, terror, war deaths, executions,
and imprisonment of innocent people for decades on end, among all social
classes and nationalities? At the same time, millions of people lived out
their lives relatively undisturbed; millions more survived terrors and kept
on going, perhaps even finding joy in their existence.
In this book I have focused on the day-to-day experiences of average
people, mainly those who lived and worked in Russia's cities and on
farms. But I have not ignored other regions. Similarly, although this book
is not about USSR concentration camps or dispossessed families, no chap
ter overlooks the dark side of Soviet existence. For many Soviet citizens,
terror was a distant backdrop against which they played out their ordi
nary lives, but for many others, it was the very fabric of life itself.
In describing the conditions of Soviet reality, whether ghastly or hum
drum, I found works of literature especially useful. Because artists so tren
chantly communicate the texture of life, I have frequently drawn upon the
words of fine Soviet authors to illustrate a point. In most cases, those
words were banned from publication in their time.
