The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World

by Karl Schlögel Narrated by Ciaran Saward

Overview

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union 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. 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 Schlögel'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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/14/2022

In this magnum opus, Schlögel (Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland), professor emeritus of Eastern European history at the European University Viadrina, surveys the “Soviet lifeworld,” from megaprojects like the 1920s Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (where “elegance and barbarism were intertwined”) to WWII medals that are up for sale at a contemporary flea market. Drawing on several decades of research and travel in the U.S.S.R., Schlögel explains the nuances of Five-Year-Plans that reorganized the Soviet economy; describes workers’ sanatoriums and state-run wedding palaces; remarks on famous denizens like fashion designer Nadezdha Lamanova, who “turned fashion à la russe into a brand”; documents the recycling of churches and church bells into construction materials; and disparages the era’s “brutal violence” while visiting the ruins of forced labor camps along the river Kolyma. Though Schlögel’s thoughts on “the physical and moral decline of the megamachine” and other ruminations can veer toward the esoteric, this vast and vivid montage stresses the era’s cultural validity and eschews the tendency of recent histories to view the epoch strictly through a Cold War lens, with the West as winner-take-all. “The dissolution of empires is always something of a happy catastrophe,” the author writes. This invaluable study casts a lost world in a new light. (Mar.)

Financial Times

"An impressively evocative look at material life in the USSR, from gulags and the planned economy to Red Moscow perfume and the Soviet toilet — a “lost civilisation” of utopian fantasy and unbridled terror."

From the Publisher

A Financial Times Best Summer Book

"A Financial Times Best Book of the Year- History"

"A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year"

A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year

Library Journal

★ 01/20/2023

In this book, historian Schlögel (emeritus, Eastern European history, European Univ. Viadrina Frankfurt-Oder; Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland) represents a pinnacle in Soviet studies, a subject once teeming with scholars and non-academic specialists. The subtitle's reference to archaeology is directed at the largely material remains of a forgotten world, the experience of daily life in the Soviet Union. There are 60 chapters, with topics ranging from the cultural significance of urban flea markets to the profound impact of the locomotive on Soviet life. The book includes mentions of sports culture and classical ballet, but its greatest strength lies in the short biographies of exceptional people, such as fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova, radio broadcaster Yuri Levitan, and soldier Eduard Berzin. Many subjects imply a certain affection towards the Soviet life, yet Schlögel unflinchingly exposes the crimes of Stalinism at Kolyma and the Solovki special camp (SLON), later called the Solovki special prison. VERDICT A splendid book. Avoiding the usual fare of power and the Communist Party, the author reveals the pervasive political character of Soviet life.—Zachary Irwin

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2022-11-11
German historian and journalist Schlögel casts a discerning eye on the things that surrounded the Soviet Union and its people.

Who knew that, apart from his experiments with dogs, Ivan Pavlov wrote a preface concerning nutrition for a bestselling Soviet cookbook? That’s one of just many oddments Schlögel assembles in this utterly absorbing tour through the material goods that defined the Soviet era, from pulpy wrapping paper to the medals veterans wore, from canned goods to perfume and tchotchkes and everything in between. All were on display immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed, as the author notes empathetically: “Things that had previously been carefully stored and preserved until the end of people’s lives—distinctions, work records, diplomas and even medals—all find themselves up for sale in the flea market once material needs have become sufficiently pressing and the sense of reverence has evaporated.” Sometimes people got rid of these things less for financial need than to discard a failed system, but even so, there’s a nostalgia at work in a marketplace that has shifted from the streets to shopping malls and department stores that could be anywhere in the world. Schlögel is particularly fascinated by old signs for such things as the butcher shop, which may have had the barest range of offerings, something that “is hard to describe…when you come from a world where there are always dozens of different sorts of meat and sausage.” If there was an abundance of anything in the Soviet Union, it was of aspirational rhetoric: A fascinating case is the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which argued that alphabetical order was a feeble artifact of the ruling class of old, to be swept aside for a new way of arranging knowledge. (Alphabetical order was eventually restored.) More ominous, as Schlögel unveils, was its editors’ insistence that there's no such thing as “objective facts,” a foreshadowing of today’s post-truth world.

A superb blend of social history and material culture, essential for students of 20th-century geopolitics.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176733884
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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