The stories of these eight Russian women offer an extremely rare perspective into personal life in the Soviet era. Some were from the poor peasantry and working class, groups in whose name the revolution was carried out and who sometimes gained unprecedented opportunities after the revolution. Others, born to "misfortune" as the daughters of nobles

Barbara Alpern Engel is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck is visiting fellow at the Center for Russian, Central, and East European Studies, Rutgers University.

Acknowledgments, Glossary, Introduction, Living Someone Else's Life, Taking Advantage of New Opportunities, Daughter of a Village Priest, Overcoming an "Incorrect" Birth, A Life in a Peasant Village, From Peasant to Journalist, Under a Sword of Damocles, Four Years as a Frontline Physician, Afterword: Evaluating the Soviet Experience, On Choices, Methods, and Silences, Selected Bibliography, Index