ABSTRACT
One of the troubles vexing scholarship on the USSR, especially during the Cold War, has been the purism that informs accounts of socialist realities, built up through implicit contrasts. The chapters in this book are especially diverse in the multiplicity of ways they approach material life across the region - they therefore collectively open room, for instance, to discuss not only what fell apart when the Soviet state dissolved, but also what has worked well in Russian and Soviet material life, when and for whom? It is customary, even patriotic, for ordinary Americans to assume that all in Russia is grim. Before the Cold War intensified, American visitors to the USSR more often expressed appreciation for luxuries as cognac and aesthetic triumphs as Montazh, but such perspectives receded after the Second World War. Moreover, while more contingently, the USSR suffered nearly inconceivable damage to its infrastructure during the Second World War.
