N. Lebina, Sovetskaia povsednevnost’: normy i anomalii. Ot voennogo kommunizma k bol’shomu stiliu (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015).

A new book by Natalia B. Lebina is an expanded edition of her monograph Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii, 1920–1930‑e gody [Everyday life of the Soviet city: norms and anomalies, 1920s—1930s] (Saint-Petersburg: Neva: Letnii sad, 1999) and contains an analysis of the impact of state policy on the shaping of the Soviet everyday life in the period from the War Communism to Stalin’s years. The monograph includes a preface, three parts (each one has three chapters), a conclusion, notes, a name index, and some photographs of 1920s—1930s.

The first part of the book deals with the retail system under Bolsheviks. In the second part the author describes the codes of conduct of the citizens in their free time and the attempts of the state to regulate the gender relations and even the intimacies. The third part contains an analysis of such forms of deviant behavior as drinking, drug abuse, suicide and prostitution.

The author comes to a conclusion that norms and structures of the Soviet everyday life, as they had formed by the moment of Stalin’s death, cannot be seen as to the full extent communist. The norms generated by the planned economy and by the political system of Stalinism coexisted with strict social hierarchy, demonstrative luxury, ‘almost clerical conceptions of morality’ etc. The most serious changes began to show in the second half of the 1930s, with the beginning of the time of mature Stalinism, when many norms were rejected that had formed in the first years after the October Revolution.