Here reliance on new materials – archives, memoirs, autobiographies or documentary publications – is an objective in itself 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."— Financial Times 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 Se centra en algunos aspectos mientras obvia otros difíciles de justificar. Si la estructura no me gustó, las omisiones resultan estridentes. ¿La Segunda Guerra Mundial? Se la salta. ¿Brezhnev? No merece mención especial (no es que no se hable de Brezhnev sino que, mientras que otros personajes menores merecen una biografía propia, Brezhnev, que gobernó el país durante 18 años, no). ¿Gorbachov? Pasaba por allí. Estas omisiones dan una información incompleta de la URSS (aunque no sesgaba pues, como digo, intenta en todo momento ser neutral).

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 Supplement In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War. Also missing from The Soviet Century is any information at all on one of the most significant elements of the system’s history, i.e. its impact on the outside world and international relations. Of the revolutionary Comintern era in the time of European revolution, to the role the Soviet Union played in the anti-colonial revolutions of the 60s and 70s, we learn nothing. This is a history of the Soviet Union as it might have been seen through the eyes of an apparatchik in some Moscow ministry, not through the eyes of the outside world. Andropov was well aware of the weaknesses corroding the Soviet Union from within; he hatched ambitious reform plans, including real elections to party posts. Lewin excitedly claims that this implied replacing the existing party with a new one which, 'still in power but planning reforms, could have served to steer the country during the difficult transition to a new model'. This book seems like a clear-eyed investigation of Soviet history. The author goes into a lot of the complexities and makes sense of them. For example the phenomenon of how the living standards were improving in the 1970's and 80's, but in an unsustainable way, so the population who remember it with nostalgia are half-right.In Lewin (and Lenin)'s perspective, the bolshevik party was in danger of losing its identity and being consumed if it got too involved in bureaucratic administration following the end of the civil war. Rapid urbanization and mass growth in administrative infrastructure, coupled with the large influx of uneducated party members without any strong attachment to the revolutionary struggle, was a powerful social process that undermined the position of the party. 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. 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. The inefficient (from a capitalist perspective) elements of the system were an important part of the social safety blanket for the wider population. The de-facto welfarist elements of the productive system were therefore held firmly in place by the most conservative elements of the apparatus. These conservatives were often themselves former Stalinists who were happy to accept ossification as the price of stability and social peace. When the next wave of political reform finally came with perestroika in the mid 1980s, it lifted the lid not on the potential for violent revolution, but on the dead air a moribund social contract. D. The question which he wrestles with at length, of whether the state was controlled by the party or the party became a tool of the managerial strata of the institutions owned by the state (which is to say, all institutions of any significance in the entire country) seems to have an urgency for Lewin that he cannot convince the reader (at least this reader) merit such urgency.

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. During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 1936 and 1938 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Cold WarEmpecemos por el principio. No cabe duda de que el autor sabe de qué está hablando. Es un experto en el tema, ha buceado en las fuentes originales y, además, intenta en todo momento ser neutral. Como bien dice, nuestra visión de la Unión Soviética está viciada en buena parte por la propaganda pro/anti soviética. Es perfectamente compatible criticar los horrendos crímenes del estalinismo y, al mismo tiempo, dar cuenta de que el régimen se volvió bastante más humano de Kruchev en adelante. 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 On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology. The author dug deep in the secret archives, once available after the cold war, disregarding the bureaucracy propaganda and the imperialist slander. Then divided the book in three parts: 1) the USSR from the '30s to Stalin's celebrated death, 2) from the post war and 50's to the collapse of the soviet state and, 3) a wide vision of the Soviet society as a whole.

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 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 Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police. Stalin’s victory was thus not inevitable, but it is explicable. It was, in Lewin’s words, ‘not a direct outgrowth of Bolshevism but rather an autonomous and parallel phenomenon and, at the same time, its gravedigger’. ( The Making of the Soviet System, London 1985, p.9) Thus gone were the traditions of debate and discussion in which even Lenin had to struggle to convince comrades through argument. Factionalism was normal and healthy in Lenin’s Bolshevism, it was always perceived as a threat and sabotage in Stalin’s Bolshevism. Lewin does not equate Stalinism solely with Stalin’s personality. There were, he makes clear, broader factors at play: ‘Economic, social, and cultural phenomena have to be introduced into the analysis, even if the object of study is a powerful and arbitrary destructive despot.’ ( The Making of the Soviet System, p.288) At the same time, Lewin was well aware of the personal element: ‘Stalin was less burdened with either theoretical or moral scruples … he was a master-builder of bureaucratic structures, and this it was that determined his conceptions and his methods.’ ( Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, p.517) Some reread Marx, concluding that all would have been well if Lenin had not been so selective about the great man's message. Many others conclude that the attempt to build Marxist socialism in Europe's least industrialised society was doomed from the start. A few think that Lenin was to blame for what he did to the Bolshevik party before the revolution: forging it into a conspiracy whose natural style of government could only be dictatorship.I was pretty surprised that there's no citation of this speech since all of the writings and speeches of Stalin are published somewhere. If it's a quote from an archive, I would still expect a citation. But this quote also stands out because Lewin extrapolates a lot of Stalin's character traits from it. It's mentioned over and over again so I decided to try and find it myself. By the fortune of me speaking in Russian, I've tried to google something akin to "speech Stalin Sverdlov Party University 1924". As it turns out, it's not a speech, but a series of lectures called "Foundations of Leninism", that Stalin gave at the aforementioned university in 1924. These lectures do not contain the said quote. If it's a thing from memoirs, why not mention who wrote the memoir or whatever the source might be? How should the reader verify that the quote even exists if it's ungooglable and basically impossible to verify?