Barbara Alpern Engel is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck is visiting fellow at the Center for Russian, Central, and East European Studies, Rutgers University.

• Introduction, Living Someone Else's Life, Taking Advantage of New Opportunities, Daughter of a Village Priest, Overcoming an "Incorrect" Birth, A Life in a Peasant Village, From Peasant to Journalist, Under a Sword of Damocles, Four Years as a Frontline Physician, Afterword: Evaluating the Soviet Experience, On Choices, Methods, and Silences