The Soviet Century — the path to Putin’s Russia
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
These days, explaining where I grew up to someone such as my London-born goddaughter, I pinpoint Yekaterinburg as the place where the last Russian tsar and his family were murdered in July 1918. In fact, Sverdlovsk, as it was called in Soviet times, was an unremarkable industrial city in the Ural Mountains, which divide Siberia from western Russia.
I had an ordinary childhood. To earn pocket money, I tell my goddaughter, I carried empty milk, kefir and beer bottles to a local recycling depot for a refund. Then I’d buy some lemonade from a vending machine where you rinsed a glass after the previous customer and popped a coin into a slot. I’d get an ice cream too. My goddaughter is appalled to learn that I had just two or three flavours to choose from.
But it isn’t sentimental memories or curiosities like these — incomprehensible to Gen Z — that prompted Karl Schlögel, a historian who has dedicated his life to studying the Soviet Union, to take one more look at that vanished empire. Rather, it was Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 that spurred him to write The Soviet Century, originally published in German in 2018 and now elegantly translated into English by Rodney Livingstone.
While the book excavates the past — a field trip to a “lost world”, as the subtitle has it — it is very much relevant to present and future. As Schlögel writes, the three decades that have elapsed since the end of the USSR have shown just how “painful the process of transforming the former Soviet Union has been, and how the political leadership has exploited post-imperial phantom pains, nostalgic yearnings and fears of the loss of social status to pursue an aggressive policy, not excluding war against neighbouring states, so as to maintain its own power.”
In the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the most difficult thing to comprehend is what goes through the minds of ordinary Russians, like my parents, who went from Stalin to Gorbachev and back — to Putin — in one generation. Part of the answer can be found in The Soviet Century, which presents history in a novel way, showcasing customs and traditions, values and artefacts, that offer many poignant insights and helps readers understand the Russian psyche today.
The 900-page tome is organised like a museum with distinct areas of interest. Readers are invited to follow their own curiosity and explore grandiose constructions, such as the White Sea Canal or the steel city, Magnitogorsk, to peek into the shared kommunalka flats, to flick through the flagship Soviet cookbook, to discover the hidden symbolism of the Soviet tattoo culture and to join ubiquitous queues.
I discovered plenty of gems I knew little about. A chapter on the nearly identical DNA of the iconic Soviet perfume Krasnaya Moskva and Chanel No 5 is delightful. It’s deftly juxtaposed against other pervasive Soviet smells, such as the stench of a train carriage during a three-day journey from Irkutsk to Vladivostok.
Schlögel worked through a colossal amount of information to curate his exhibition with a clarity and objectivity denied to Soviet contemporaries. Take, for example, the baritone voice of Yury Levitan, synonymous for Soviet people with reporting the events of the second world war in a thoughtful, calm manner.
But Levitan also broadcast death sentences during Stalinist purges, delivered in the same neutral tone. He knew some of the condemned personally. It’s not something that Russians would recall today. Schlögel writes that while reading the announcement describing crimes and sentencing of Marshal Tukhachevsky, Levitan suffered a heart attack. He lived on to announce the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953.
I was surprised to read about American engineers and companies working in the late 1920s on construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric station and its 60-metre-high dam in the absence of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow (those were established only in 1934). Lauded as a triumph of technology over nature and of the synthesis of “American pragmatism and Bolshevik passion”, DniproHES was essentially a profitable project for Americans who abhorred communism but were happy to help “reforge” hundreds of thousands of landless Russian and Ukrainian peasants into model Soviet citizens.
The section on Kolyma labour camps in the mineral-rich extreme north of Russia is particularly harrowing. Gold mines, which financed Soviet industrialisation, swallowed up tens of thousands of lives “where horses could not stand a month . . . human beings held out”. Around 18mn citizens were forced through gulags between 1929 and 1953. The monstrosities of the Soviet regime have not been processed by its successor Russian state or its people. Perhaps it goes to show why Russians today fall back into learnt ways of how to stay out of the way of the Kremlin rather than to confront it.
Schlögel wishes he could cover more ground. So do I. I’d have liked to read about the ethnic make-up of the Soviet Union and its Potemkin village façade of equality. I wish the author covered the impact of legalising abortion in 1920 (banned 1936-55) as well as of the subsidised childcare. Still, it’s a fascinating, multi-faceted read that both takes historical stock and zooms in on miniature details.
The author wills Russia to take a path towards openness and reconciliation with its past. Commenting on Solovki, a group of islands in Russia’s far north, where a former monastery was converted to house political prisoners in the 1920s, Schlögel hopes that “Russia’s tourists who have recently spent time in the Balearics and on Cyprus will find their way back to Solovki”. Just five years after the publication of the German edition, this sentence has taken on a rather different meaning.
The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, by Karl Schlögel, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Princeton, $39.95/£35.00, 928 pages
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