Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History Emerita at California State University, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (2022). She is writing a history of the worldly travels of the Russian Orthodox text, The Way of the Pilgrim.

Deborah A. Field was a Professor of History at Adrian College for 21 years and is now a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, interested in gender and everyday life. She is the author of Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia (2007).

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a Professor of History at West Chester University. Her research explores how ordinary people navigated the traumas of the twentieth century. Her most recent book is Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip (2024).

An Introduction for Students and Instructors 1. Empire and Modernization 2. Alternative Visions on the Eve of War and Revolution 3. Constructing the Socialist Order 4. Making a New World and New People 5. Revolution from Above 6. Making Sense of Stalinism: Enthusiasm and Terror 7. The Great Fatherland War and the Origins of the Cold War 8. Cold War, Culture, and Everyday Life 9. Paradoxes of the Thaw 10. An Era of Stagnation? 11. Gorbachev and the Truth Paradox 12. Legacies of the Soviet Union: Russia since 1991