The Soviet Century by Karl Schlögel: Putin and life in a lost empire of the USSR

Karl Schlögel offers a fascinating overview of the humiliation felt by the Russian president over the fall of the Soviet Union, but a new chapter on Ukraine is needed for context

Putin referred to the collapse of the USSR ‘as the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Karl Schlögel, author of The Soviet Century

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel

Putin referred to the collapse of the USSR ‘as the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Karl Schlögel, author of The Soviet Century

The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel

Putin referred to the collapse of the USSR ‘as the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

JP O’Malley

March 11 2023 02:30 AM

The Soviet Union was born out of an idea to create a worldwide socialist revolution. Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the centrally planned Marxist polity was established in 1922, five years after the 1917 October Revolution, which promised paradise to millions.

In fact, the USSR became the world’s most militarised and ruthless police state. Its aggressive push for modernisation, which often put scientific achievement and mass industrialisation ahead of human dignity, also meant it became a global superpower. Prior to its political and economic collapse in 1991, the USSR had a territory that spanned 11 time zones, covered 22.4 million square kilometres — nearly one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface — and had a population of 286 million.

In Kremlin Winter (2019) Robert Service pointed out why Vladimir Putin still holds Soviet history in such high esteem. Russian humiliation is one reason. This occurred in the mid-1990s in the post-Soviet era, when “Russians [had become] perennial losers,” Service wrote. The British Russophile historian was referring to the territorial downsizing that followed when 15 post-Soviet states — including the likes of Georgia, Estonia, Moldova, Lithuania, and Ukraine — all declared independence.

Former Warsaw Pact countries across central and eastern Europe, meanwhile, looked to the West for security and more prosperity.

“What had come to an end was not history itself, but an empire whose time had run out,” Karl Schlögel writes in The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World. The German historian has spent most of his career writing about the Soviet Union, where he briefly studied during the 1960s. He also stresses how Putin, since the turn of the millennium, has exploited Russia’s loss of social standing in the world for political gain at home, and to instigate wars. First in Chechnya, then Georgia and now in Ukraine.

Schlögel’s book (first published in 2017 and now translated into English by Rodney Livingstone) is more concerned with customs and culture than it is with wars and geopolitics, however. Spanning over 900 pages, it scrupulously examines seven decades of Soviet history by looking at objects, infrastructure, buildings and other remnants from the fallen Soviet empire. Schlögel’s impressive authority on his subject matter and close attention to detail comes from personal experience.

The book is a serious academic undertaking. But it reads in parts like a playful literary travel diary. I was particularly drawn to Schlögel’s inventive descriptions of library reading rooms, war monuments, art galleries and station platforms in places like Kharkiv, Tbilisi, Chișinău and Kyiv.

Schlögel believes you can tell a great deal about a society by studying its culinary tastes, rubbish collection points, doorbells, toilets, staircases, railways, metro stations, workplaces and private living spaces. “People who didn’t grow up in the Soviet Union have no conception of the kommunalka, the communal apartment,” the historian writes. He also notes that by the end of the 1950s, roughly 25 million families in the USSR lived in these shared kommunalkas. Putin was among them.

The Russian president was brought up in a rat-infested kommunalka in 1950s Leningrad. So too was the Nobel-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, although he was born in 1940 and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. From a distance, in exile, Brodsky wrote an essay In a Room and a Half, which delineated the miserable cramped Soviet domestic living conditions in amusing terms. “By the volume of the fart, you can tell who occupies the toilet, you know what he/she had for supper as well as for breakfast,” he wrote.

Karl Schlögel, author of The Soviet Century

Schlögel quotes from Brodsky, and numerous other writers associated with the Soviet Union. Many were imprisoned for speaking truth to power. Osip Mandelstam was a Warsaw-born Jewish Russian poet who vanished into the maze of Soviet work camps and prisons. In 1938, the Soviet government “reported” that he had died of heart failure. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also exiled to the Soviet Gulag, where he spent a decade writing The Gulag Archipelago (1973), became a Nobel prize winner and subsequently became the most infamous Soviet dissident-prisoner of the Cold War era. The peripatetic European man of letters, Joseph Roth, travelled to the Soviet Union as reporter in the 1920s, where he witnessed the disastrous consequences of the newly formed centrally planned economy. The Czech writer Franz Kafka was unknown to Soviet readers until the 1960s, due to a censorship that had endured there nearly four decades after his death. “Kafka’s novel The Castle could be read as the key to the impenetrable, ubiquitous and anonymous power of a totalitarian state,” Schlögel explains.

The author says he was partially inspired to write this book following Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war Russia started in eastern Ukraine that same year. That original German edition was coincidentally published for the centenary anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Video of the Day

This translated version, however, should have included an updated extra chapter, following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year. It would have contextualised the history we read here into a much-needed contemporary context. Especially given the fact that Putin’s obsession with bringing Ukraine to heel largely stems from his psychotic desire to join the former lands of the Soviet Union back together by force. In his state of the nation address in April 2005, Putin referred to collapse of the USSR, in 1991, “as the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Few agree. Not even the most diehard communists or docile Kremlin apologists out there.