The history of the USSR is often measured in tens and hundreds of millions of tragic and violent deaths—from famine, repression, war, and the catastrophic costs of the social and economic policies of the Soviet regime. But the enormous number of victims of the Soviet experiment was surrounded by an even more immeasurable death: millions upon millions of people who died of old age, disease, and accidents. Historian and anthropologist Anna Sokolova's book analyzes state policy regarding death and burial, as well as the bizarre metamorphoses of funeral culture in major Soviet cities. This topic has long remained overlooked by studies of political repression and war, as well as by works on traditional village funeral culture. While these aspects of Soviet mortality have been well-researched, the question of what death and funerals represented, in both material and symbolic dimensions, for the average Soviet citizen has been little studied. Yet, this question is crucial for understanding who the 'new Soviet man' proclaimed by the revolution was (or was intended to be). An analysis of transformations in funeral culture also sheds light on another question: was the experience of radical social reform in the USSR entirely unique, or was it, despite its radicalism, part of a larger modernization transition to industrial societies? Anna Sokolova, PhD in history, is a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a lecturer in the 'History of Soviet Civilization' program at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.