The book is an analysis of the dilemmas confronting the communist party after Stalin's death in 1953. It focuses on how ordinary citizens received and reacted to the policy of the party and the state. It is also the history of people who, driven by disillusion, despair and anger, either withdrew from the public sphere and thus demonstrated passive resistance to the regime or, on the contrary, chose to demonstrate actively in prisoners' rebellions and workers' unrest.

ERIK KULAVIG is Head of the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is co-editor of Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union, Soviet Civilization between Past and Present, and author of Russian Nationalism, 1986-92 and Propaganda and Everyday Life in Russia, 1924-36.