Discussions about how people lived in the USSR have been ongoing since the collapse of the Union. However, debates between those nostalgic for the Soviet reality and staunch supporters of reforms rarely take on a reasoned form. In his book, Dmitry Travin attempts to correct this and gathers a large amount of factual material testifying to the bygone era: from letters, diaries, memoirs, and anecdotes to economic statistics and scientific works. At the center of his research is the life of an ordinary Soviet person: how they worked and studied, rested and shopped, interacted with official ideology, and dreamed of traveling abroad. The author seeks answers to the most important questions for post-Soviet consciousness: why do we both long for the Soviet past and curse it simultaneously? What in it was determined by the social system, and what existed independently of it? Which part of the Soviet "heritage" should be forever abandoned, and which should be taken with us into the future? Dmitry Travin is a Candidate of Economic Sciences, a specialist in economic history and historical sociology, and from 2008 until April 2024, he was the scientific director of the Modernization Studies Center at the European University at Saint Petersburg.