Hello,
Most of the books I have come across have been focused on the political side of the USSR such as an analysis of the communist party, the leaders or the fall of the iron curtain etc.
I'm trying to find nonfiction books (or textbooks) discussing what everyday life was like for the 'proletariat' or memoirs by people who actually lived within the Soviet Union who can tell me of their experiences.
Are there any books you'd recommend focused in this way?
Thank you!
PS. I'm also interested in other European communist block nations. If you know of any books not focused on the Soviet Union please share them, I'll likely move onto them after the USSR. (I'll move to Asia/Cuba later).
A few good ones to start with: for the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick has two works: Everyday Stalinism, which covers city life, and Stalin's Peasants, which covers rural life. I'd recommend starting with the former. Karl Schloegel's Moscow, 1937 is a massive work that focuses, naturally enough, on Moscow in the late 1930s. It has political sections but also sections covering such topics as art deco, jazz and movies in the Soviet Union. Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain likewise details life in the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk, and how its population learned to "speak Soviet".
For the late Soviet period, probably the best author to check out is Svetlana Alexievich. She has published a slew of books drawn from oral histories of regular Soviet people covering different aspects of Soviet history: Unwomanly Face of War deals with women's roles in World War II (a more general history of ordinary soldiers experiences in the war would be Catherine Merridale's Ivan's War), Voices from Chernobyl deals with survivors of the meltdown, Boys in Zinc (sometimes horribly translated as "Zinky Boys") deals with the war in Afghanistan, and Second-hand Time deals with the Soviet dissolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alexei Yurchak's Everything War Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation is something of an anthropological/sociological study, but goes into detail about how Soviet life was structured around different and conflicting understandings of ideals and concepts (often within the same people) in the 1970s and 1980s.