When the communist regime collapsed, Soviet citizens experienced a paradox difficult to explain: until then, they had taken for granted that the system was immutable, eternal—yet its collapse did not surprise them. How could they live with such contradictory feelings? Alexei Yurchak, a student in St. Petersburg during this period of traumatic change, tells us with rich detail what that late socialism was like, without falling into idealization or the schematism that prevailed in the nineties.