Schlögel K. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. — 929 p.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.Preface
Introduction: Archaeology of a Vanished World
Shards of Empire
Barakholka in Izmailovsky Park, Bazaar in Petrograd
The Soviet World as Museum
Return to the Scene: Petrograd
The Philosophy Steamer and the Splitting of Russian Culture
Highway of Enthusiasts
USSR in Construction: The Power of Images
DniproHES: America on the Dnieper
Magnitogorsk: The Pyramids of the Twentieth Century
Black and White: The Photographer’s Eye
Excursion to the White Sea Canal
Landscape after the Battle
Soviet Sign-Worlds
The Writing on the Wall
Decorations and Medals: Chest Badges
Body Language: Tattoos
Moscow Graffiti: In the Beginning Was Futurism
Names Are Not Just Hot Air
The Life of Things
Wrapping Paper, Packaging
The Fate of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: The Organisation of Knowledge amid the Tumult of History
Galleries of Private Possessions: The China Elephant on the Shelf
The Piano in the Palace of Culture
Rubbish: A Phenomenology of Cleanliness
Krasnaya Moskva: Chanel in Soviet-Speak
Stalin’s Cookbook: Images of the Good Life in the Soviet Age
Oases of Freedom
Geologists’ Field Work and Other Breathing Spaces
Dacha: Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard in the Twentieth Century
Health Resorts for Workers: The Sanatorium as a Historical Locus
Interiors
Doorbells: Nameplates and Signals
Kommunalka, or Where the Soviet People Were Tempered
The Interior as a Battlefield
Hostel/Obshchezhitie: Soviet Melting Pot
Tent Cities, World of Barracks: Finding One’s Way in ‘Russia in Flux’
Palm Trees in the Civil War
The Soviet Staircase: Towards an Analysis of Anonymous and Anomic Spaces
Ilya Kabakov’s Installation: The Toilet as a Civilising Space
The ‘Moscow Kitchen’, or the Rebirth of Civil Society
Landscapes, Public Spaces
Gorky Park: A Garden for the New Human Being
Diorama: View of a Landscape with Heroes
‘Zhilmassiv’, or the Sublime Vistas of the Prefab Mountains
Russkaya Glubinka—the Country beyond the Big Cities
Big Data
Spetskhran: Catalogue of Forbidden Books
Diagrams of Progress, Diagrams of Catastrophes
Rituals
The Border at Brest—Rites of Passage
Choreographies of Power: Parades on Red Square and Elsewhere
A ‘Temple of Modernity’: The Crematorium
ZAGS, or the Rituals of Everyday Life
Queues as a Soviet Chronotope
‘Think of the Parties We Had ’
Bodies
Fizkultura: Soviets as Athletes
Clothes for the New Human Being, or Christian Dior’s Return to Red Square
Manly Grace: Nureyev’s Gesture
Kolyma: The Pole of Cold
The Solovetsky Special Camp—Laboratory of Extremes: Monastery Island as Concentration Camp
Corridors of Power
K in the Labyrinth of Everyday Soviet Reality
The ‘House on the Moskva’: Machine for Living, Trap for People, Gated Community
The Aura of the Telephone and the Absence of the Phone Book
The Noise of Time
The Bells Fall Silent
Levitan’s Voice
Back in the USSR: Sound Traces
Alien Territory, Contact Zones, In-Between Worlds
‘The Little Oasis of the Diplomatic Colony’
The Journalists’ Ghetto: The View from Outside, Fixation with the Centre
Beryozka Shops: ‘Oases of Affluence’
Genius of the Collector: George Costakis and the Rediscovery of Soviet Avant-Garde Art
The Railroads of Empire: Time Travel Back into the Russian Twentieth Century
Red Cube: The Lenin Mausoleum as Keystone
The Lubyanka Project: Design for a Musée Imaginaire of Soviet Civilisation
Acknowledgements
Notes
Selected Reading
Index