EVERYDAY STALINISM: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times--Soviet Russia in the 1930s.

By Sheila Fitzpatrick. Univ. of Chicago Press. 288 pp. $27.50

Communism is too dull, the humorist Fran Lebowitz once remarked, and fascism is too interesting. But it was the gray Soviet communists who made the most spectacular break with the past, founding a regime that lasted nearly three-quarters of a century, three generations, holding together the last of the multinational empires into the 1990s. No state, no matter how ruthless or tyrannical, could manage such longevity without popular support or at least complicity. In Everyday Stalinism, Fitzpatrick, a professor of modern Russian history at the University of Chicago, examines how ordinary people came to terms with the Stalinist system at its sinister peak in the 1930s.

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