Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

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