An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union. 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 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. Drawing on Schlögel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.
Author(s): Karl Schlögel, Rodney Livingstone | Translator
Edition: 1
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 929
Tags: History: Modern: 20th Century: General; History: Russia And The Former Soviet Union; History: Social History
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction: Archaeology of a Vanished World
I. Shards of Empire
1. Barakholka in Izmailovsky Park, Bazaar in Petrograd
2. The Soviet World as Museum
3. Return to the Scene: Petrograd 1917
4. The Philosophy Steamer and the Splitting of Russian Culture
II. Highway of Enthusiasts
5. USSR in Construction: The Power of Images
6. DniproHES: America on the Dnieper
7. Magnitogorsk: The Pyramids of the Twentieth Century
8. Black and White: The Photographer’s Eye
9. Excursion to the White Sea Canal
10. Landscape after the Battle
III. Soviet Sign-Worlds
11. The Writing on the Wall
12. Decorations and Medals: Chest Badges
13. Body Language: Tattoos
14. Moscow Graffiti: In the Beginning Was Futurism
15. Names Are Not Just Hot Air
IV. The Life of Things
16. Wrapping Paper, Packaging
17. The Fate of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: The Organisation of Knowledge amid the Tumult of History
18. Galleries of Private Possessions: The China Elephant on the Shelf
19. The Piano in the Palace of Culture
20. Rubbish: A Phenomenology of Cleanliness
21. Krasnaya Moskva: Chanel in Soviet-Speak
22. Stalin’s Cookbook: Images of the Good Life in the Soviet Age
V. Oases of Freedom
23. Geologists’ Field Work and Other Breathing Spaces
24. Dacha: Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard in the Twentieth Century
25. Health Resorts for Workers: The Sanatorium as a Historical Locus
VI. Interiors
26. Doorbells: Nameplates and Signals
27. Kommunalka, or Where the Soviet People Were Tempered
28. The Interior as a Battlefield
29. Hostel/Obshchezhitie: Soviet Melting Pot
30. Tent Cities, World of Barracks: Finding One’s Way in ‘Russia in Flux’
31. Palm Trees in the Civil War
32. The Soviet Staircase: Towards an Analysis of Anonymous and Anomic Spaces
33. Ilya Kabakov’s Installation: The Toilet as a Civilising Space
34. The ‘Moscow Kitchen’, or the Rebirth of Civil Society
VII. Landscapes, Public Spaces
35. Gorky Park: A Garden for the New Human Being
36. Diorama: View of a Landscape with Heroes
37. ‘Zhilmassiv’, or the Sublime Vistas of the Prefab Mountains
38. Russkaya Glubinka—the Country beyond the Big Cities
VIII. Big Data
39. Spetskhran: Catalogue of Forbidden Books
40. Diagrams of Progress, Diagrams of Catastrophes
IX. Rituals
41. The Border at Brest—Rites of Passage
42. Choreographies of Power: Parades on Red Square and Elsewhere
43. A ‘Temple of Modernity’: The Crematorium
44. ZAGS, or the Rituals of Everyday Life
45. Queues as a Soviet Chronotope
46. ‘Think of the Parties We Had . . .’
X. Bodies
47. Fizkultura: Soviets as Athletes
48. Clothes for the New Human Being, or Christian Dior’s Return to Red Square
49. Manly Grace: Nureyev’s Gesture
XI. Kolyma: The Pole of Cold
XII. The Solovetsky Special Camp—Laboratory of Extremes: Monastery Island as Concentration Camp
XIII. Corridors of Power
50. K. in the Labyrinth of Everyday Soviet Reality
51. The ‘House on the Moskva’: Machine for Living, Trap for People, Gated Community
52. The Aura of the Telephone and the Absence of the Phone Book
XIV. The Noise of Time
53. The Bells Fall Silent
54. Levitan’s Voice
55. Back in the USSR: Sound Traces
XV. Alien Territory, Contact Zones, In-Between Worlds
56. ‘The Little Oasis of the Diplomatic Colony’
57. The Journalists’ Ghetto: The View from Outside, Fixation with the Centre
58. Beryozka Shops: ‘Oases of Affluence’
59. Genius of the Collector: George Costakis and the Rediscovery of Soviet Avant-Garde Art
XVI. The Railroads of Empire: Time Travel Back into the Russian Twentieth Century
XVII. Red Cube: The Lenin Mausoleum as Keystone
XVIII. The Lubyanka Project: Design for a Musée Imaginaire of Soviet Civilisation
Acknowledgements
Notes
Selected Reading
Index
