What did it actually mean to live in the Soviet Union?Not to rule it, theorize about it, or fight for or against it - but to wake up in it, stand in line for shoes in it, and raise a child in a communal apartment in it. Daily Bread measures seventy-four years of Soviet history, from the collapse of 1917-1921 to the dissolution of 1991, by the ration card, the wage packet, the housing allotment, and the empty shelf rather than by the speeches of the men who ran the state.The picture that emerges does not flatter any single narrative. Literacy climbed from roughly 28 percent to near-universal by the late 1950s, and life expectancy more than doubled. The same decades saw the famines of 1921-22 and 1932-33, rationing that returned four separate times, and a final decade in which more than a thousand basic consumer goods were chronically unavailable. Both stories are true, and this book holds them together.Inside the book: Eight chronological chapters: War Communism, the NEP, collectivization and the First Five-Year Plans, Stalinist "normalcy," the war years, the Khrushchev thaw, the Brezhnev plateau, and the collapse30 sourced charts and figures on bread rations, real wages, housing space, famine mortality, consumer durables, the second economy, and moreDirect quotations from Lenin and other Soviet-era writers, in public-domain translations, so leaders explain their own policies in their own wordsPlain-language treatment of disputed figures: where historians disagree, the range is shown, not hiddenA timeline of key events, a glossary of Soviet economic terms, and a guide to Soviet leaders and their economic goalsGrounded in post-1991 archival scholarship by Davies, Wheatcroft, Harrison, Markevich, and othersFor readers of Russian and Soviet history, economic history, and the Cold War - and anyone who wants the human scale behind the statistics, from the Petrograd bread queue to the perestroika-era shortage.Published by Overmind Publishing.
