The Soviet Century

Karl Schlögel, the great historian of Eastern Europe, invites a new assessment of the Soviet world with his archaeology of Communism. We have always known quite a bit about how “the system” functioned, but we know less about the routines of life during unusual times. Every empire has its sound, its smell, its rhythm that still lives on even after the empire has ceased to exist. And thus, a hundred years after the Revolution of 1917 and a quarter of a century after the end of the Soviet Union, there emerges the panorama of a civilization that was more than just a political system and without which “the time after” that we are currently living in can’t be understood. Karl Schlögel explores the terrain, the historical layers of a land marked by wars, revolutions, and civil wars. He allows the early Soviet modern cabaret to be restaged, the battlegrounds of labor and the scorched earth. It’s as if he is right there when the mega-buildings of Communism are dedicated and the mass graves of Stalin’s Great Terror are uncovered. He is equally interested in the parade of power and the rituals of everyday life. He investigates the expansive railway system and the close quarters of the community apartment where generations of Soviets spent their lives. His archaeology lays bare social places that once were part of daily survival—the Moscow cuisine and the lifetimes spent waiting in lines. Places where happiness could be found and small freedoms as well: the cultural park, the dachas, the vacations along the Red Riviera. Karl Schlögel, born in 1948 and now professor emeritus, taught Eastern European history first at the University of Constance and then, from 1995, at the European University Viadrina. He is the author of many significant books on Soviet and Eastern European history as well as an active journalist. In 2016, his book Terror und Traum. Moskau 1937 (Terror and Dream. Moscow 1937) received the prize of the Historischen Kollegs, also known as the German Historian Prize. He wrote The Soviet Century while he was a fellow of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich.