ABSTRACT
In Everyday Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick defines the "everyday" as "everyday interactions that in some way involve the state". Everyday Stalinism is a prime example of post-1991 research. Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union that year, researchers benefited from a wealth of additional sources, and from the reduced pressure to write politicized history. Fitzpatrick's interest in an all-encompassing "everyday" experience, away from a focus on work, the family, or gender, has inspired other scholars to take the sphere of "ordinary life" as a topic with serious ramifications within totalitarianism. Some scholars who were prominent during the Cold War, such as the historian John Lewis Gaddis, have sought to move beyond the struggle between the totalitarian model and revisionism, in a movement that has been called "post-revisionist". The "post-revisionist challenge" to revisionism was thought to involve a move from social history, which is relatively innocent of overt theory, to theory-driven cultural history.
