Annotation: Jochen Hellbeck’s book gives us a new view of “Soviet man.” Hellbeck’s study allows readers to see that, behind this seemingly empty ideological formula, there exist a multitude of discursive practices and biographical strategies with which the Soviet people attempted to endow their lives with meaning that corresponded to the historical imperatives of the Stalin era. The immediate subject of this study is the genre of the diary, which made it possible to transform the ideological criteria of the time into a factor in the psychological construction of one's own personality. The heroes of Hellbeck’s book – peasants and representatives of the urban intelligentsia who fled to the city, working in rural areas as teachers, engineers and writers – used the diary as a tool of self-observation and self-education, transforming existing cultural models into a horizon of internal development, making history a part of their ego identity.