In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

Olga Shevchenko is Associate professor of Sociology at the Williams College, Williamstown. She holds a MA from the Central European University of Warsaw, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has a postdoctoral fellowship at the harriman Institute for Advanced Studies of the Former Soviet Union, Columbia University.