The Soviet Century

Product Information

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'.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. Lewin retains much of his earlier historical analysis. Stalin and Stalinism, constructed during 1928–39, represented a sharp break with Lenin and Bolshevism of the period up to 1924. Lenin’s final period of active politics, 1921–23, was an honest attempt by a flexible and honest communist to come to terms with the realities of a gradual transition to building socialism. It was also a crucial and wide-ranging battle between Lenin and Stalin for the future direction of policy. In opposition to Lenin’s model, Stalin sought to control the party and state to implement a dictatorial forced pattern of modernisation. Lenin’s death and the incompetent politics of the old Bolsheviks enabled Stalin to win power and crush Bolshevism.But far the most popular answer has always been a name rather than an analysis. Stalin is what went wrong. If only Lenin had not died in 1924, he would have steered the Soviet Union towards something like a socialist democracy - a one-party state, certainly, but one where free opinions competed and only a handful of genuine counter-revolutionary terrorists would have to be put behind barbed wire. 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. The Soviet Century is not exactly a narrative but a selection of themes in Soviet history which can now be re-interpreted in the light of the new archive material. Lewin is scornful of Western interpretations and equally scathing about Russian post-Soviet attitudes. 'Not content with looting and squandering the nation's wealth, the "reformers" mounted a frontal assault on the past, directed at its culture, identity and vitality. This was no critical approach to the past; it was sheer ignorance.' The Five-Year Plans were not really plans in any meaningful sense. Stalin had no conception of the likely results of his policies. Once underway, he reacted rather than led, proceeding in fits and starts. The planners were constantly taken by surprise and had to reissue targets and prices on a continual basis. The Soviet economy was out of control, in a condition of extreme disequilibrium, suffering from shortages, semi-completed projects, hidden inflation, poor quality, and low labour productivity. The consequences for the Soviet Union were severe and long-term. This was so not only in relation to the restoration of the economy. There was also a vast administrative structure, a privileged bureaucracy that stood above and to a large extent against society. Not surprisingly the political élite sought to repress freedom of expression and any signs of critical, democratic activity.

Why, then, a lot of characterizations of Stalin are not sourced? Why is Stalin attributed a quote that potentially doesn't exist? It's baffling to me that citations are that weak in a source that is recommended by academics. There are loads of instances where Lewin says something like "Historians seem agreed" and "In a very gloomy letter" and "In a handwritten note" without attribution of the source. At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps. If the past is a foreign country, The Soviet Century is a unique travelogue from one of the world’s most innovative observers of urban space and material culture. Karl Schlögel’s scholarly Baedeker is the culmination of a lifetime of study, travel, and thought. It guides us across nothing less than a continental empire and a century of upheaval. But Schlögel’s greatest accomplishment is to connect stunningly eclectic new detail to the big picture, allowing us to see and feel a lost civilization anew.”—Michael David-Fox, Georgetown UniversityAt times it is dense with statistical read-outs that would have been better communicated with charts or graphs with accompanying commentary. Additionally, I found the writing style to be overly complex, parenthetical, and oddly self-referential. 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] magnum opus. . . . This invaluable study casts a lost world in a new light."— Publishers Weekly (Starred review) 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. The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Khrushchev And De-Stalinization