Indeed, survival often depended on an individual’s ability to undermine the state’s centralized distribution system through speculation and blat (reciprocal relationships involving goods and favors). Fitzpatrick emphasizes the ubiquity of shortages and how this led to a national obsession with obtaining and hoarding consumer goods. Overall, Fitzpatrick’s arguments are persuasive and compelling, presenting a complex portrait of Stalinism through the daily experiences of those who lived it.Ĭonsumption is a major theme in this work. Third, state surveillance taught Soviet citizens to distrust Soviet officials creating an environment of mutual suspicion that resulted in the mass terror of 1937-38. priests, kulaks, and political prisoners) to conceal their past identities in order to rejoin Soviet society. Second, the state’s obsession with social origin and status prompted marginalized people (e.g. First, chronic shortages in housing and consumer products generated alternative strategies for acquiring scarce goods. Fitzpatrick presents three major arguments to support this claim. Covering a wide array of subjects, including bureaucracy, consumption, utopianism, family life, and the Great Purge, she argues that “Stalin’s Revolution” forced ordinary Russians to adopt new attitudes and practices that ensured survival in the face of scarcity and repression. Shelia Fitzpatrick’s work provides a detailed exploration of daily urban life in Stalinist Russia.

On Stalin's Team by Sheila Fitzpatrick