The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World

An insightful and wide-ranging examination of the culture of Russia during its Soviet period. The author, a gifted German historian, provides the reader with his take on a range of the many small and large points that added up to a distinctive style of life--and too often death--in the USSR.This is a book that might scare off some readers due to its bulk. I would advise those who might be hesitant, to purchase the book then read it by chapters over a period of time. Do not think you can plow through this in one sitting. To my mind, its many chapters are interesting and usually self-contained in terms of coverage.If you are at all interested in the Soviet experiment and/or might want to better understand why present day Russia is still so difficult, this is a book to be bought and read and enjoyed.

This book is not so much a narrative history as it is a guide to "Sovietness", and the social, material, and cultural elements that composed it. It is sociology. The book is arranged by each of those topics, for example, the history of the "Moscow Kitchen" or "Prefab Mountains."Make sure you know what you're getting into before buying.

I’d give this book a zero if I could. It is impressive how a book this long can say almost nothing. For the author’s sake I hope this reads better in German because the English is stilted and boring.

Books like The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, by Karl Schlögel offer a window into a past that threatens to be misrepresented. Schlögel is professor emeritus of Eastern European History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt. The book is based largely on events, sites, or direct reports witnessed by Schlögel himself over decades of travel through the Soviet Union and shortly after its fall.Wide CoverageThis tome, weighing in at over eight hundred pages, is encyclopedic in scope. Rather than offering a chronology of events or a travel narrative, the book is a collection of chapters on topics related to physical artifacts or locations. He talks about the way museums preserved history in the Soviet Union, but also about the great industrial city, Magnitogorsk. He describes the dam on the Dnieper, the building of the enormous White Sea Canal, as well as the movement of tattoo culture from the prisons to the rest of the population. There are dozens of chapters of varying length on widely assorted topics. While no book can really offer a comprehensive account of the culture of an empire, the seemingly unscientific mishmash of topics Schlögel offers in more carefully curated sections is broad enough and unsystematic enough to provide a sense of what life was like.The impression from The Soviet Century is that in general, the world is better for the Soviet Union having disappeared. Although it seems to be trying to raise its head in resurrected form through Putin’s expansionist Russia, we should recognize that most ghosts deserve to be vanquished.Memories of an EmpireReading this volume, even as one who remembers the Cold War, the dynamism of the Soviet efforts to thrive, expand, and industrialize is truly impressive. They built cities where there were no cities. Through force of will—often without sufficient engineering knowledge or skill—they constructed an infrastructure from nothing. The sheer scope of the Soviet accomplishments is worthy of a great deal of admiration. Schlögel makes it clear that there really was much to be impressed at in the former USSR.However, Schlögel also makes it quite evident that the seeming miracle of Soviet accomplishment came a great cost to many. Peasants were forced to leave their farms and young adults became unskilled labor at some of the great works. Industrial safety measures lagged significantly behind other industrial nations, so that miles of canal and feet of dam constructed often came at the cost of multiple lives. Decisions were made by bureaucrats without regard to the real costs, especially to the people and to the environment. The successes of the Soviet Union in many areas were real, but the costs were astronomical to the average citizen. Schlögel describes the former Soviet Union with brutal realism.Complementary to Other HistoriesThe Soviet Century is the sort of volume that pairs well with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Not only does it have the heft of Russian literature, but it also fills in much of the background that Solzhenitsyn describes. While The Gulag Archipelago gives a jarring portrait of life within the prison, The Soviet Union fills in many of the puzzle pieces around that massive literary work.This is obviously the sort of volume that must be digested over time. The book is structured in a way that it can readily be used as a reference. However, the translation provides a text that is very readable, even if every page is not thrilling. This is an important work, though it will never be a bestseller, because it tells stories and records memories that the world needs to never forget. Such realistic portraits of the accomplishments and costs of Communism will only become more significant as time passes, collective memory fades, and historical revisionism rewrites misery into cheerful acceptance for the greater good.NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review. This is an edited version of a review originally posted at Ethics and Culture.

Schlögel's book is a paean to a country which no longer exists, and which stands as a unique empire and culture which spanned the course of the 20th century. This massive tone (well over 800 pages) discusses the operations of the country with a great deal of breadth, but the scope is so wide there's little room for breadth - or for much in the way of personal interviews which would humanise much of the contents. Still, a worthwhile project.

Details about nearly every aspect of life in the USSR. "Simple" things, such as toilets, that would usually not come to mind, are covered. The author understands incentives very well and provides a rich, detailed history.

As a former Ambassador to a USSR component and an academic, I expected this book to be 'basic". I was mistaken. In fact, it is a brilliant distillation of memorable social aspects of the USSR. One of the five best books ever written in English (translated in this case from German) on the Soviet empire writ large.

Looks good.

An uncritical homage to the soviet union.