Some hardships in the Soviet Union

See ‘The Soviet Century’ Review: Fragments of Communism: Banned publications, everyday hardships, a subjugated workforce: revisiting life in the U.S.S.R. by Joshua Rubenstein. He reviews the book "The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World" by Karl Schlögel. Excerpts:

"Mr. Schlögel doesn’t mention the avoyska—a “just in case” knitted bag—that Soviet citizens routinely carried with them on the chance they would happen upon tomatoes or melons for sale on a street corner (something I used to see for myself on my visits to the Soviet Union in the 1980s). He does note that when urban dwellers lined up for goods—not only at bazaars but at the entrances to subway stations, where people sold loaves of bread and articles of clothing—they often did so without knowing what everyone else was waiting for and just assumed it would be for something they needed."

"Among much else, we learn about life in a typical communal apartment, where several families had to share a space that was now divided into single rooms for each multigenerational family. As late as the 1970s, 40% of Moscow’s population “enjoyed” such accommodations, with all of its inevitable tensions, petty disputes and invasions of privacy. We learn about the system of door bells: “Ring once for Occupant A, twice for Occupant B and so forth.” And about the lavatory as a semipublic space. “A toilet for over thirty people . . . was not untypical,” Mr. Schlögel writes. A gallery of toilet seats would hang on the lavatory wall."

"when the special archive of banned books and periodicals was finally made available to researchers during the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in 1987, it included “300,000 book titles, 560,000 journals, and a million newspapers”?"

"the “enormous concentration of human energy” required for the building of (for example) the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, or the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Plant, was inconceivable without the violence that controlled and subjugated the workforce. “Elegance and barbarism,” he writes, “were intertwined."