Investigations of Stalin's regime have usually concentrated on events in Moscow, Leningrad, and some of the rapidly developing industrial centres of the Soviet Union. In contrast, Kees Boterbloem provides an unprecedented look at the lives of Russians in a typical province which has remained largely unnoticed in Soviet, post-Soviet, and Western studies of these years even though developments in this province are emblematic of those in the Soviet Union as a whole during Stalin's time.