The history of the USSR is often measured in tens and hundreds of millions of tragic and violent deaths - from hunger, repression, wars, as well as the catastrophic costs of the social and economic policies of the Soviet regime. But the huge number of victims of the Soviet experiment was surrounded by an even more immense death: we are talking about millions and millions of people who died from old age, disease and accidents. The book by historian and anthropologist Anna Sokolova is an analysis of state policy regarding death and burial, as well as the bizarre metamorphoses of funeral culture in major cities of the USSR. This topic has long been overshadowed by studies of political repression and war, as well as work on traditional village funeral culture. While these aspects of Soviet mortality have been well studied, the question of what the death and funeral of an ordinary Soviet citizen represented in material and symbolic dimensions has been little studied. Meanwhile, it is very important for understanding who the “new Soviet man” proclaimed by the revolution was (or was supposed to become). An analysis of transformations in the sphere of funeral culture sheds light on another question: was the experience of radical reform of society in the USSR absolutely unique or, despite all its radicalism, was it part of a large-scale modernization transition to industrial societies? Anna Sokolova - Candidate of Historical Sciences, researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, teacher of the program “History of Soviet Civilization” at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and Social Sciences.