Using the term "private life" to refer both to intimate interpersonal ties and individual interests, Field (history, Adrian College) explores how Muscovites during the Khruschev era sought to live their private lives in the face of overcrowded living conditions and the insistence of government and Communist Party officials that private lives must be lived in accordance with "a communist morality" that connected every aspect of the personal to the social. Over the course of the work he discusses the history and institutional implementation of communist morality, living conditions and the absence of physical privacy, contending discourse about romantic love, attempts to regulate sexuality, divorce, and child rearing. In the end, he finds that the official ideology of personal life propagated by officials was by turns ignored, adopted only selectively, and reshaped to suit the idiosyncratic wishes of individuals. Annotation 2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
