Studying what people thought and felt inside the Soviet Union remains a challenge for historians. For a long time, opinions of courageous dissidents figured as the only “genuine voices” piercing the blanket of ideological language that covered Soviet society. Today, this society appears to have been more fragmented and complicated than anybody in the West imagined at the time. Sociological studies of mass public consciousness in the USSR during the 1960s gave the first glimpse of this complexity. The façade of conformism concealed sharp differences of opinions and attitudes, stemming from highly diverse experiences. From the time Soviet citizens learned to read, they disagreed passionately with one another. This important book by Denis Kozlov demonstrates that the same also happened when readers in post-Stalin Russia learned how to express their diversity through literature and language.
The language of justice, democracy, and legality, along with state violence and traumatic memory, is...