The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World

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Karl Schlögel has created a rich and fascinating mosaic of Soviet culture focusing on the manifold sensory qualities and experiences of everyday life. His insatiable curiosity leads him to wide panoramas and meaningful closeups of a culture that lives on in histories, memories, and appropriations.”—Joes Segal, The Wende Museum

Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.” This labor served two purposes. The first was to do the actual work of building blast furnaces and digging canals. The second was to produce the gold used to pay for American technology and expertise, either by growing grain sold on global markets, or by entering the mines of the Kolyma gold fields. Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way: IN SEPTEMBER 2019, SHORTLY AFTER arriving in Russia, I found myself tramping through the woods outside a small village on the edge of the Mari Taiga. My wife and I were visiting a friend at his country house, and he had offered to take us to a deposit of green clay nearby that was supposedly good for exfoliation. My wife is keen on exfoliation, and keen on nature in general, so we set off on a path that took us around the village’s small but very deep lake. When we came to the place where it drained into a river, we found a large concrete pillar rising from the slough. I asked our friend what it was. He told me, rather drily, that it was “Soviethenge.” A museum of-and travel guide to-the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police.Before you rush in to correct me that it was not the Soviet Union but Russia that brutally invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, let me assure you that this isn't a Freudian (or any other) slip on my part. My 'mistake' is deliberate - having spent 35 years of my life in that very 'USSR' I have good reason to assert that modern Russia is a logical successor and a legitimate heir of the Soviet Union, differing only in its somewhat diminished territory as well as its official name. The Soviet urban environment shaped daily interactions between the USSR and the outside world – both on an elite and an ordinary level. From the staircases and communal toilets to the athletes’ parades and balletic performances it hosted, the cityscape remains as something to be deciphered. As Schlögel puts it: If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The area of central Moscow – within walking distance of the Kremlin – housed all key Soviet institutions responsible for foreign policy decision making. These included the headquarters of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the villa of the Soviet Solidarity Committee. This is an interesting idea (though it would be more interesting if it were provable in one way or another), but it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like. This is to say that perhaps it was not exhaustion, but the dynamism of a new revolutionary generation that could take the modernization of the Soviet Union for granted. The tragedy of that generation lies in how unequipped they were to survive in the capitalist world they sought to join.

His focus is not on the foreign relations or domestic crises of Soviet rule but on outward appearances: the look, the smell, the sounds of everyday life. Based on decades of research and an intimate knowledge of history and culture, ‘The Soviet Century’ is a fascinating chronicle of a not-so-distant era."—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schloegel, one of the world's leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization. Schlögel – assisted by his excellent translator, Rodney Livingstone – is an eloquent writer and a captivating travel guide around this Soviet “lost world”."—Stephen Lovell, Times Literary SupplementThe legacy of the USSR was also present in more ephemeral and surprising ways. I had gone to Yoshkar-Ola because I wanted to get to know my wife’s family, which meant immersing myself in the world of the Mari. The Mari have inhabited the Middle Volga lands since long before the arrival of the Tatars and the Slavs, and the language they speak exists in the form that it does today because of the Soviet Union’s complex and ambivalent policy toward minority cultures. Two of the Mari dialects, Meadow and Hill Mari, were given official status as national languages, meaning that they, alongside Russian, were a medium in which newspapers, school curricula, and literature were produced during the Soviet period. The most prominent of Yoshkar-Ola’s many Soviet-era statues is not of Lenin, but of the Mari writer Sergei Chavain, executed during Stalin’s Great Purge and rehabilitated during the Khrushchev thaw. A murdered poet cast in bronze, a concrete pillar in a swamp: Soviethenge comes in many different forms.

This is a glorious bitter sweet homage to the tragi-comedy that was so much a part of the Soviet Union. From one of its enemies we find heartfelt sentiment of beauty and kindness of a life lived intertwined with the fate of that civilization.

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Who else could have a whole chapter on Soviet-era doorknobs? This is a fascinating book about the material loose ends, the pamphlets, the clothes, the non-existent phone books, the shop signs, the chest medals, and the bric-a-brac — among many other items — of the Soviet Union. . . . This is in my view one of the better books for understanding the Soviet Union."—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution The Soviet Century is a great monument to the vanished Soviet world. Rich, witty, and entertaining, the book offers a comprehensive textual museum that is all the more important because no such real-life museum exists in Russia or elsewhere, and I doubt that it will be created anytime soon. The more difficult it is to go to the White Sea Canal, the Lenin Mausoleum, or a Russian dacha, the more enjoyable is this book.”—Alexander Etkind, Central European University The main strength of 'The Soviet Century' is that it covers countless seemingly insignificant aspects of Soviet life that nevertheless speak volumes: from cookbooks and new 'red calendars' to perfumes, prison tattoos and Beriozka hard-currency stores, from which ordinary Soviet citizens were barred. (I was the first Soviet journalist to expose such shops when I was reporting for Krokodil magazine in the late 1980s).