The historian which you really want to examine here is Sheila Fitzpatrick whose works are pretty much the landmark texts for Stalinist society. Being more specific, her Everyday Stalinism covers the broad array of daily life under Stalin in Soviet cities and Stalin's Peasants examines the Soviet countryside. For larger issues of identity and its reconstruction under the auspices of the USSR, her Tear off the Masks is also an interesting read. Fitzpatrick also edited an anthology Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture which examines the nature of life in the 1920s when the Bolshevik experiment was fairy new.

The anthology Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside edited by Christine Kiaer tries to avoid the schematic trap of partitioning out the 1920s and 30s (i.e. Lenin vs. Stalin) into discrete periods and instead examines the period more holistically.

Karl Schlögel's Moscow 1937 is a tour de force cultural and urban history of late Stalinist Moscow and really captures the zeitgeist of the era at a particularly momentous time. Similarly, Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization is a monumental doorstopper of a book that examines how that state made its citizens "think Bolshevik," in the process of mass industrialization. Kotkin's Foucaultianism has been challenged in recent years by the likes of Jeffrey Rossman who has argued in Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor that workers were far more politically active than Kotkin's paradigm would suggest.

Unfortunately, the war years and their immediate aftermath are relatively understudied by social historians. Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation has some material about the post-1949 generation, but not about the period directly. By the same token, Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism deals with the period directly and focuses upon a generation too young to have participated in the war directly, but old enough to incorporate this wartime experience into their mentality.