Everyday life in Moscow in the Stalin era

23 August 2026

Повседневная жизнь Москвы [Povsednevnaya zhizn Moskvy] or Everyday Life in Moscow is the title of a trilogy written by Georgy Vasilievich Andreevsky, a former employee of the USSR Public Prosecutor's Office who retired in 1995 and then pored over official documents, press clippings, archival material on criminal cases and personal memoirs to get a picture of how ordinary people in the Soviet Union lived.

The first two parts were published in 2008 – one about the years 1920-1930 and one about the years 1930-1940. In 2009, a third volume was published that described life in Moscow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I have often drawn inspiration from the second part to fill the Context pages of this website with examples from the daily lives of the then Soviet citizens. After all, it covers the period in which Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his early manuscripts of The Master and Margarita, and clearly illustrates some of the themes that Bulgakov regularly complained about in his work, his letters and his diary entries. Andreevsky gives striking examples of the daily worries caused by the relentless housing crisis, with Muscovites in the communal apartments having to fight for a place in the kitchen and in the toilet, who constantly argued like consummate Annushkas about the use of the primus stoves and about the laundry hanging to dry in the hallways. Also living with ration cards and the endless queues at the shops for basic products in contrast to the specialised distribution centers for the elite. And of course also public transport and especially the trams, which often caused hellish crowds, and which Bulgakov more than once assigned a bad role in his writings.

I translated this second part into Dutch, English and French. The three versions will be released simultaneously on October 1, 2026, and you can pre-order now at a discount by following the link below.

Click here to order the book in our webshop

Front Cover

Cover