Jeans infested with lice, larvae under the skin of an African guest, a portrait of Mao Zedong showing through at night on a Chinese carpet, swastikas hidden in the construction of houses, chewing gum with crushed glass - this is an incomplete list of Soviet urban legends about dangerous things. The book by well-known folklorists and anthropologists A. Arkhipova (RANEPA, Russian State University for the Humanities, NES) and A. Kirzyuk (RANGHiGS) is the first anthropological and folklore study dedicated to the fears of the Soviet people. Many of them found expression in texts and practices obscure to our contemporary: in the 1930s, people looked for Trotsky’s profile on a matchbox, and in the 1970s, rumors were passed about treats poisoned by Americans. The book tells why such fears arose, how they turned into rumors and urban legends, how they influenced the behavior of the Soviet people and sometimes gave rise to large-scale moral panics. The study is based on survey data, interviews