ABSTRACT
While influential and widely praised, Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s has been criticized in many respects. Fitzpatrick was criticized for ignoring work and class in her analysis of life in the Soviet Union. She incorporated class into her later writing, saying she did not intend to create a general theory of Soviet daily life but, rather, to discuss the effect of modernization on private life. Fitzpatrick has not directly responded to any of the comments made about Everyday Stalinism, her reaction can be traced through interviews and her subsequent work. First, she states that she aimed to write a nontheoretical work, in which the evidence would speak for itself, rather than to represent a theory. She has offered a more traditional class-oriented analysis in her later works, and has demonstrated that she has always taken class seriously throughout her career.
