An obvious surge of nostalgia for the Soviet past, like nothing else, indicates that this past is rapidly rolling back, becoming history. The external, event side of this story is well known, but the history of the everyday life of ordinary people has been studied very badly, it is offensively little known. Natalia Kozlova's book is the result of painstaking research in the collection of the People's Archive, created fifteen years ago. From the many diary entries made by quite ordinary people, the author chose several autobiographies of small ranks of careerists who made heroic efforts to, like chips, stay in the eddies of the great history of the Soviet country.