An Epic History of the Soviet Everyday

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, Karl Schlögel, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Princeton University Press, 928 pp., $39.95, March 2023

Schlögel variously calls his book an archaeology, an exhibition, and a museum of the Soviet “lifeworld.” Its focus on the things of everyday life makes it, in his view, not an “encyclopedia of banalities” (a phrase used by the Russian historian Natalia Lebina about her own history of everyday life) but rather “an encyclopedia of fundamentals.” Just about everything memorable and (to a Westerner) odd about Soviet everyday life is there: the endless queues, the communal apartments and the horrors of the shared kitchens and lavatory, the flea markets, the missing telephone directories, the kitchen table around which friends would sit late into the night talking about what Russians saw as fundamentals (not things, but the deep questions of life). One of my favorite sections deals with the stores uncompromisingly labeled “Food” (Produkty), “Meat,” “Bread,” and “Fish” (leaving out “Milk,” for some reason), with their skimpy array of goods, surly salespeople, and, of course, the usual elaborate system of queuing.

Schlögel gives due space to intercity train journeys, when on overnight trips you shared a small compartment with strangers with whom, convention dictated, you often had long midnight conversations. He notes the absence, until the very end of the Soviet period, of plastic wrapping and celebrates the rectangles of tough brown paper that were carelessly slapped on top of the sausage or whatever you were buying as the “apotheosis of materiality.”

Indeed, in post-Soviet retrospect, as Russia becomes clogged like the rest of the world with “vast quantities of plastic,” that brown paper does acquire virtue. That does not apply, however, to the basement lavatories without toilet paper at the Lenin Library in Moscow, whose awful smell, combined with that of the cigarettes that could be smoked only in that noisome space, wafted all the way up to the library’s elite First Hall. Almost the only thing Schlögel leaves out—probably because he was never a foreign exchange student at Moscow State University—is the sobachka and other curiosities of student life such as the loudspeakers in each room broadcasting a single radio channel that (at least in theory) could never be turned off.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing at the end of the 1980s, its citizens became obsessed with the idea of wanting to live a “normal” life. This seemed to mean a Western life with more consumer goods and fewer bureaucratic roadblocks, but it was a curious comment on their attitude to habits of Soviet life that had been around for decades. The Soviet equivalent of German Ostalgie developed quickly, however, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the realization that, without its empire and status as a Cold War superpower, Russia had lost the world’s respect. The simplicity and predictability of life in Soviet times is often fondly remembered by the older generation, with the Brezhnev era—stigmatized as boring at the time—now representing stability, a functioning welfare state, lots of leisure, and comparative social equality.

It is impossible for a longtime fellow inhabitant of Western foreigners’ spaces not to have a few quibbles. First, with regard to revolutionary name coinages, “Roi” may sometimes have been understood as an acronym of “Revolyutsiya, Oktyabr, Internatsional” (Revolution, October, International), as Schlögel claims, but the most famous of Soviet Rois—Roy Medvedev, twin brother of Zhores—got his name from the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy, resident in Moscow in the 1920s as a Comintern member and part of Joseph Stalin’s brain trust. Second (a point to the English translator, Rodney Livingstone), “House on the Moskva” is completely wrong for the great gray edifice on the river, now sometimes called “House on the Embankment,” after Yury Trifonov’s eponymous novel, but known to decades of Muscovites as the “House of Government” (Dom pravitel’stva), the title of Yuri Slezkine’s wonderful 2017 biography-of-a-building.

Schlögel’s book, first published in German in 2017, was written too early for him to have cited Slezkine’s book or, more importantly, to reference the war that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But that conflict does cast its shadow, since, as Schlögel tells us, he was inspired “to take one more look at the [Soviet] empire that had disappeared” by the outrage at Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Had he been writing six years later, he could have added some interesting twists to the stories of the great Soviet industrial construction projects that are the focus of chapter 2 (“Highway of Enthusiasts”). Azovstal in Mariupol, for example, was one of the great Soviet iron-and-steel projects of the early 1930s; in 2022, it was the site of stubborn resistance to Russian incursion by the Azov Brigade, born in 2014 as an ultranationalist, neo-Nazi paramilitary group but since incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard. DniproHES, the famous hydroelectric scheme that preceded Azovstal by a few years, is accorded a whole chapter, ending with it being blown up by the retreating Soviets to stop it falling into German hands in August 1941. In the spring of 2023, Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovka, sixth and last of the run of Dnipro River dams that began with DniproHES, was blown up either intentionally or accidentally as the Ukrainians launched their long-awaited counteroffensive.

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DniproHES is given its Ukrainian name rather than the Russian one (Dneproges) by which it was known at the time and in the history books, but that is an exception in this book, whose perspective, for all the author’s passionate support of the Ukrainian cause in the current war, remains generally Russian and Moscow-centric. Schlögel admits this straightforwardly: Such Russo-centrism was the product of an “academic socialization” that he and the rest of his cohort of Western historians (including this reviewer) shared, and it imposed “a limitation of our competence that cannot be easily rectified.”

Post-colonial reappraisal, in other words, will have to be left to a younger generation. Although the term “empire” is used, both in the first chapter of the book (“Shards of Empire”) and its last sentence (on the ephemerality of “all the might of empire”), the substance of empire, and the power disparities that are at its heart, are not of real interest to Schlögel. When he writes of empire, he is writing of the expansive domain of Soviet life forms, of a Soviet way of life.

The fact that this way of life is now dead is crucial to the emotional tenor of the book. The Soviet Century is not exactly a work of nostalgia, but rather a latter-day equivalent of Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves’s 1929 evocation of an England destroyed by World War I, in which affection for and repudiation of a lost world are inextricably intertwined. Gulag and the various mechanisms of Soviet repression are a presence throughout Schlögel’s book, as well as the specific subject of two chapters. At the end of the book, he makes the extraordinary suggestion that Lubyanka—the complex of buildings in central Moscow built to house the Soviet secret police—should be turned into a “Musée imaginaire of Soviet civilization.”

This is saying goodbye to all that with a vengeance. Schlögel is so intent on vacuuming up the shards of the Soviet empire that he overlooks the fact that Lubyanka in 2023 is not an empty place in search of a function. Rather, it is the buzzing corporate headquarters of the FSB (Federal Security Service), the Russian Federation’s successor to the Soviet KGB, whose current responsibilities include foreign espionage, border security, domestic security, organized crime, antiterrorism, cyberoperations, and intelligence aspects of the “special operation” (war) in Ukraine. Russia, like it or not, has a 21st-century life, in which Soviet and post-Soviet elements are presumably combining to produce new patterns. But an author can’t do everything, even in 900-plus pages, and in any case, the present is not a historian’s territory. We’ll have to wait a few decades for some new Schlögel to come along and tell us about the life forms, as he dubs them, that emerged in Russia (and, for that matter, Ukraine) in the wake of the fall.