The Soviet Century

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The last section was the most interesting, as it was a general high-level discussion of the overall "meaning" of the Soviet Union, which included interesting arguments such as the idea that the USSR was a "no-party state", where the communist party was totally toothless and irrelevant, and where even the leaders of the state were unable to really control the vast bureaucratic machine that ran day-to-day life. 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)

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. Stalin implemented a series of Five-Year Plans to spur economic growth and transformation in the Soviet Union. The first Five-Year Plan focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization. Subsequent Five-Year Plans focused on the production of armaments and military build-up. Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.A detailed examination of the relics of ordinary communist life. Perfect for dipping into."—Fred Studemann, 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."— Financial Times After reading it I feel like things might have gone quite differently had it not been for Stalin as an individual. For example there seem to have been several people who led various things after his time, where they seem to have been energetic and brave reformers, and what they achieved was to un-Stalinize things. So if those same people had inherited a less horrific situation then they probably could have achieved a lot more with the same energy.Probably no other Western historian of the USSR combines Moshe Lewin’s personal experience of living with Russians from Stalin’s day—as a young wartime soldier—to the post-communist era, with so profound a familiarity with the archives and the literature of the Soviet era. His reflections on the ‘Soviet Century’ are an important contribution to emancipating Soviet history from the ideological heritage of the last century and should be essential reading for all who wish to understand it. Eric Hobsbawm Khrushchev’s tenure spanned the tensest years of the Cold War. He instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 by installing nuclear weapons just 90 miles from Florida’s coast in Cuba. 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

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 Fascinating. . . . The scholarship of the work is evident throughout, but 'The Soviet Century' is both more powerful and more subtle than a typical work of scholarship. At its heart, it’s a gigantic, heartfelt elegy, one of the most stunning tributes ever paid to the Soviet Union."—Steve Donoghue, Big Canoe News This becomes clearer if we refer to one of his later declarations to ‘future cadres’, students at the Sverdlov Party University. Here he basically explained that ‘for us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or if they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres’.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. I really do have to commend Moshe Lewin for providing an accurate and not demonizing the USSR in his book, The Soviet Century, however you clearly saw his acrimony for Stalin in many of the opening chapters. Lewin only lived in the USSR for a few years during WWII before returning to Poland and emigrating to France. So while he didn't see first-hand most of the Stalin-ism atrocities, he did focus heavily on them during the first half of Soviet Century.