As I have shown in my recent book, Cold War Liberation, the cadres who staffed these institutions remained critical to Soviet international allies in Africa. 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. Its like reading the works of a Roman author, like Juvenal or Tacitus, decrying the follies and crimes of an Empire they so are extricable a part of. The criticism and cynicism in the dissident view of the Soviet Union, within the Soviet Union was also one of the great achievements of the Soviet Union. Even here, the enormous human toll involved in Soviet modernization should not, Schlögel suggests, be seen in isolation. Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners, 1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal. Schlögel does not push the point this far, but it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life. Perhaps what makes the crimes of the Soviet Union so difficult for those of us raised in the West to comprehend is the egalitarianism with which they were carried out. As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant. Complicată existență, chinuite popoare în tot fostul imperiu rusesc - milioane de morți pe altarul ego-urilor și al ideologiilor paranoice.

Soviet Russia is my jam. I’ve been reading about it for over ten years and am totally captivated by the politics and impact it had around the world. And the period spanning the revolution to Stalin’s death? Don’t even get me started on that. That’s the sweetest plum. 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 Schlögel, 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. An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet UnionThe 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 Schlogel, 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.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.Drawing on Schlogel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlogel – eBook Details Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

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:

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 I was excited to read this book because I love learning about life in the Soviet Union. I think it was a fascinating period of modern history that is often portrayed with caricatures and the premise of this book felt novel to me: approach the Soviet Union like a fallen civilization, and explore different facets of life within it to show what everyday life was like for normal citizens. The wealth of this book cannot be sufficiently explored within the limits of a review. Gibbonian in scale, it is a veritable cornucopia of jewels. “In Russia, radical changes and catastrophic experiences occur in their pure form,” Schlögel states. Reading his chronicle of this massive churn in all its sensory whimsies, we gain fresh insights into the lost world of the Soviet Union."—Prasenjit Chowdhury, Hindustan Times Contrary to the beliefs of the Old Bolsheviks, who were convinced the new Soviet person would be peace-loving, hard-working, intelligent, healthy, and proletarian, or the polemics of Alexander Zinoviev, who believed Homo Sovieticus to be a shiftless and nasty species, given over to drink, larceny, and laziness, many of the new Soviet people ended up being as acquisitive, bourgeois, and small-minded as the citizens of any modernized society. Contra Marx, who believed that communism would arise as a solution to the problems of advanced capitalism, in practice, communism simply proved to be the most effective way for large agrarian countries to catch up with the industrialized states of Western Europe and North America. Once the modernization process was complete, communism lapsed into crisis. 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.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. It took me a couple of weeks to read this weighty volume, and even longer to convince myself to sit down and write this review. Why? Because, like many of my fellow Ukrainians, I now tend to instinctively recoil from anything related to the Soviet Union and/or Russia. The sensation is probably similar to the anti-German sentiment that prevailed in Britain during and immediately after the Blitz. An obvious knee-jerk reaction, but hard to contain when Ukrainians are being murdered daily in their hundreds by the invaders. I would see quite a few examples of Soviethenge during the course of the following year, most of which I spent living in the Mari capital of Yoshkar-Ola and travelling through the republics of the Middle Volga. There were the obvious things—Lenin busts in old toolsheds, abandoned factories with red-star gates rotting quietly in the fields, palaces of culture named after people and dates that had lost all meaning—but the USSR also lived on in the fabric of the cities, the dams on the Volga, the fact that when you turned on the boiler there was gas, and when you flipped a switch a light went on. In that part of the country, modernity had arrived with the Bolsheviks. It was impossible to go about one’s daily life without interacting with Soviet infrastructure in one form or another. Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” ( novy sovetsky chelovek ). But, as he puts it,

Also, I kinda feel like the son of a Wehrmacht soldier should show a little more humility to the people his father's generation tried to exterminate off the face of the Earth, but that's just me. Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman.In a work of remarkable range and quality, Karl Schlögel explores the everyday life and material culture of the Soviet Union in ways that show the communist experiment in a compellingly fresh light. One of the most innovative books on Soviet history to appear since the state’s collapse in 1991."—Tony Barber, Financial Times 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. But I often forget that the richness of Russian culture doesn’t end when Khrushchev took over, and especially now that Soviet Russia is dead (in a way) and its archives are open (in a way), it’s the perfect opportunity for a skilled historian to offer some perspective on that era. That’s where Karl Schlogel’s Soviet Century: An Archeology of a Lost World comes in. The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it. Nor does he provide much of an account of the USSR’s policy toward religions beyond Christianity. It is hard to gain precise figures, but some estimates suggest that by the time of the 1979 census, as many as one in six Soviet citizens was Muslim, and yet The Soviet Century mentions the words “Muslim” and “Islam” a combined total of six times. His chapter on “the country beyond the big cities” is about the depopulation of the villages and the categorical failure of Soviet agriculture—a central topic in Soviet history, and one that deserves more space than he gives it—but it does not mention that the countryside in many parts of the USSR was also overwhelmingly non-Russian. As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.” 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.

German historian and journalist Schlögel casts a discerning eye on the things that surrounded the Soviet Union and its people. A superb blend of social history and material culture, essential for students of 20th-century geopolitics. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. If the past is a foreign country, The Soviet Century is a unique travelogue from one of the world’s most innovative observers of urban space and material culture. Karl Schlögel’s scholarly Baedeker is the culmination of a lifetime of study, travel, and thought. It guides us across nothing less than a continental empire and a century of upheaval. But Schlögel’s greatest accomplishment is to connect stunningly eclectic new detail to the big picture, allowing us to see and feel a lost civilization anew.”—Michael David-Fox, Georgetown University Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them.Fiecare capitol e o călătorie fascinantă: poliție secretă, artă, revoluție, mega șantiere (Magnitogorsk și altele) închisori/gropi comune, natură schimbată/modelată/distrusă fără limite, inginerie de vârf cu prețul a mii de vieți, educația foștilor țărani mutați forțat în orașe muncitorești/industriale, cum erau locuințele, prietenia cu americanii în primii ani staliniști când au avut nevoie de ingineri/tehnică/educație, cum se trăia în orașele create artificial cu popi, hoți, prostituate, intelectuali și criminali condamnați la muncă silnică, cum se mânca și primele cărți care i-au învățat un minim de civilizație, cum au trecut de la refolosit sticla și hârtia maro de împachetat la a arunca peste tot gunoi și plastic…sărmanele păduri, râuri, lacuri🥲*inclusiv în orașe aveau gropi cu deșeuri nucleare…cum pe rând toți care deveneau “elite” și torționari temporari cădeau după o perioadă și-și găseau sfârșitul în urma unor procese ridicole🤦🏻‍♀️ A work of deep scholarship and significant breadth about a relatively brief period of recent history when it seemed that there might be an alternative economic system to capitalism."—Joseph Brady, Society 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. A detailed examination of the relics of ordinary communist life. Perfect for dipping into."—Fred Studemann, Financial Times You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.