Introduction: what was late socialism? / Neringa Klumbytė and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova -- Plutonium enriched: making bombs and middle-classes / Kate Brown -- A middle class without capitalism? socialist ideology and post-collectivist discourse in the late Soviet era / Anna Paretskaya -- "Cultural wars" in the closed city of Soviet Ukraine, 1959-82 / Sergei I. Zhuk -- Soviet ethical citizenship: morality, the state, and laughter in late Soviet Lithuania / Neringa Klumbytė -- Pluralizing practices in late-socialist Moscow: Russian alternative practitioners reclaim and redefine individualism / Larisa Honey -- Football in the era of "changing stagnation": the case of Spartak Moscow / Robert Edelman -- Beyond the genres of stagnation: reading the allure of I. Grekova's "The hotel manager" / Benjamin M. Sutcliffe -- Raped with politburon: bawdy humor and disempowerment in Yuz Aleshkovsky's prose / Olga Livshin -- Afterword: postcard from Berlin: rethinking the juncture of late socialism and late liberalism in Europe / Dominic Boyer.