Many history books about Russia and the Soviet Union published in recent years are microhistories: scholarship that looks at the past as through a microscope, prioritizing the minutiae of everyday life over wars, government changes, economic cycles, and other large-scale events. One recent example is Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017), about the private lives of Bolshevik elites who shared an apartment building. Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century: