What makes Russians Russian? Is it a special national character, or their common emotional or intellectual spirit? Ries helps us get rid of these slippery essentialist commonplaces with her interpretative anthropological study of Muscovites' everyday private talk around 1990. Her effort is outstanding in both description and theory: Few have undertaken to describe and analyze Russian (or Eastern European) urban everyday discourse from the anthropological perspective, as she does (though recent macro-studies and studies of public discourse are more numerous). At the same time, she creates and defends a thesis of everyday talk as a vital medium of social value creation and maintenance – as it constructs “Russianness,” in her example.