With his Archaeology of Communism, the great historian of Eastern Europe, Karl Schlögel, invites us to reassess the Soviet world. We always knew a lot about how "the system" worked, far less about the routines of life in extraordinary times. But every empire has its sound, its smell, its rhythm, which lives on even after the empire has ceased to exist. Thus, a hundred years after the revolution of 1917 and a quarter of a century after the end of the Soviet Union, the panorama of a unique empire emerges, without which we cannot understand "the time afterwards" in which we live today.