REVIEW: THE SOVIET CENTURY

The Arts

May 22

If you expected a coffee table with lavish visuals, The Soviet Century is not it. Instead, author Karl Schlogel delivers a masterful, detailed and fascinating look at what Soviet life was like on the ground.

It’s a Whole Earth Catalog filled with Soviet-era curiosities and oddities that can give you on-the-ground, front row insight into life in the USSR. Tattoos, housing, food, clothing, libraries, Beryozka shops, the Gulag, Krasnaya Moskva (the “Chanel” perfume of the USSR), personal name trends — this book covers an intriguing smorgasbord of topics.

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World

How many pages? 928 Pages
Who wrote it? German historian Karl Schlögel
Who published it & when? Princeton University Press; March 2023
Where can I get it? Available from Amazon and other fine bookstores

There is a chapter on personal name trends. Did you know that revolutionary concepts found their way into personal names? Istmat was apparently a popular name after the Bolshevik Revolution. Derived from istorichesky materialism (historical materialism), these parents were obviously committed Communists. How about Remark, another Soviet child’s name: an abbreviation of Revolyutsionny Marksizm (Revolutionary Marxism)!

I never thought of practicalities like the toilet situation in a shared, overcrowded, communal apartment which may have housed only one family in pre-revolutionary days in Moscow or St Petersburg. Almost encyclopedic in its approach, The Soviet Century provides insight into what daily life was like in the USSR.

A timely chapter in The Soviet Century is the description of Crimea’s role in the Soviet imagination. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, of course, targeted the Crimean Tatars — the indigenous people of the region — and was almost successful in annihilating them. While many of us are familiar with the Nakba of the Palestinians, the Shoah of the European Jews or the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee People — most of us are not familiar with the Sürgün of the Crimean Tatars.

What was the the Sürgün? In 3 days in May 1944, Stalin loaded every Crimean Tatar man, woman, and child onto cattle trains and shipped them off to rural Uzbekistan. Half died en route or shortly thereafter. Top NKVD and later KGB officials then obtained choice properties in Crimea for their holiday homes. Imagine the FBI and Secret Service kicking out Santa Barbarans in California, shipping them off to a remote part of the Nevada desert, and then moving in to premium properties in Oprah or Harry & Meghan’s neighborhood! Not long after clearing Crimea of its Tatars in a cruel deportation, Stalin convened Roosevelt and Churchill on the Crimean coast at Yalta to discuss what postwar Europe would look like.

Crimea administratively became part of Ukraine in the 1950s and then left the Soviet Union as an autonomous region of Ukraine when the 1991 breakup occurred. The Crimean Riviera was a fond part of the Communist Party nomenklatura’s childhoods and holidays. And, yes, the occasional Stakhanovite — a hero of socialist labor who exceeded the quotas set for them by Moscow — also enjoyed a summer holiday at one of its many resorts.

This explains in part why Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man himself, sought to reclaim Crimea for Russia in 2014. Yes, Crimea offers excellent Black Sea access for naval vessels and trade — but also warm water, beautiful scenery, and sunshine for R&R!

Stalin’s own dacha was not in Crimea but further east on the Abkhazian coast. Schlogel’s book is filled with little gems — he includes an architect’s drawing from memory of Stalin’s dacha (photos were forbidden) and mentions that the likeness to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania was no coincidence.

While life in Russia and the former Soviet Union has certainly changed since 1991, much of the built environment and life pattern remains the same for many. Schlogel’s 3 inch-thick The Soviet Century is helpful to appreciate how Soviet life was organized — and understand better how life in today’s Russia compares. If you want a coffee table book of Soviet architecture, I’d probably suggest Taschen’s “CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed” by Frédéric Chaubin or the quirkier compilation “Soviet Bus Stops” by photographer Christopher Herwig.