This accessible and comprehensive book by Cambridge academic Mark B Smith is the latest in a long list of histories of the Soviet Union.
What sets it apart is that the author depicts the USSR after Stalin as a civilisation, rather than an evil empire or a Cold War menace.
He is not the first to use this approach. American historian Steve Kotkin, in his ground-breaking 1995 book, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, depicted the Stalin years as a distinct socially-engineered construct, not merely a system imposed on a terrorised population.
He argued that Stalin, and Lenin before him, created a new society with its own social structures, where capitalism and private property were abolished and the population actively participated in striving for a higher stage of human development.
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This survived after Stalin’s death, when his successor Nikita Khrushchev accused him of a cult of personality, mass executions of party members, a reign of terror and the deportation of ethnic groups.
Where Stalin sacrificed individuals for the sake of the revolution, fulfilling the goals of the revolution now meant benefiting the people, not sacrificing them.
The gulag stayed open for business and the USSR remained “a police state staffed by empty-eyed men,” but life improved as people moved into new apartment blocks and family cars became available.
If anything, Soviet civilisation morphed into a more durable, coherent social system, with enduring faith in social engineering and Marxism-Leninism promising inevitable progress to a perfect society.
It was still a one-party state but Stalin’s totalitarianism gave way under the Khrushchev thaw to a period of controlled liberalism in arts and literature especially.
This was followed by a period of stagnation and increased political control under Brezhnev and finally, under Gorbachev’s reforms, the failure and breakdown of communist central planning.
Apart from dissidents and political prisoners, the population did not question their lot in life until the final years. The society in which they lived guaranteed work, education and medical services.
They celebrated its successes, and enjoyed a high level of culture. A worker might spend the day in a frantic search for meat and the evening at a sublime orchestral performance.
People came to realise, of course, that life outside the Soviet Union was materially better.
Foreign films and television broadcast from nearby capitalist countries showed well stocked supermarkets and fancy cars. Soviet civilisation was falling behind.
In Moscow, people queued for essential items, and carried string bags for opportunistic shopping, but foreigners breezed in and out well-stocked hard currency stores known as Beriozkas.
Under detente, open confrontation with the United States gave way to negotiations and a less dangerous Cold War. It meant foreign travel became possible, especially for the intelligentsia. This brought its own problems. Cultural groups and sports teams sent to perform abroad sometimes came home missing members who sought political asylum.
Smith relates an anecdote about a Siberian who mistakenly entered a Beriozka and applied for political asylum, thinking he had entered the West.
His authentic account of Soviet life is enlivened by biographical sketches and Smith’s deep understanding of Russian culture and society.
We are introduced to its celebrities, such as the beloved folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, revered dissident Andrei Sakharov, the culture tzar Katrina Furtseva, gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, poet Josef Brodsky and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin.
A popular ditty on Gagarin’s space flight captured the national mood:
“How good it is that our Gagarin
Is no Armenian or Tataran,
No Jew, no Lett or Moldova
But just a simple Soviet man.”
The Soviet Union was made up of 15 republics and scores of nationalities, but Smith acknowledges that his focus is mainly on Russia. He ends on a poignant note and makes a rare confession for a historian.
In 2019 he published a book, The Russia Anxiety, which was a critique of over-blown Russophobia and called for a better understanding of Russian history over the centuries.
[ The Russia Anxiety: Astute look at the West’s ‘fake history’ of RussiaOpens in new window ]
The Russian invasion of Ukraine came as a huge shock to him, and “forced me to re-evaluate my understanding of the Soviet past”.
Just a few weeks earlier, his Russian wife Larisa had died of cancer. “Now the world outside turned pitch black too. I was completely at a loss.”
Grief eviscerated his ability to concentrate on finishing Exit Stalin. When he resumed, he admits he found his confidence in historical explanation had dissolved.
Smith had despaired too when mass demonstrations in 2020-2021 failed to bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union’s relic state, Belarus.
He concludes that “no single book, including mine, could adequately serve as an overarching explanation for the Soviet collapse”.
His dilemma recalls what people said during Gorbachev’s glasnost, when it was daily exposing the dark secrets of Soviet civilisation: the future is certain. It’s the past which is unpredictable.
Conor O’Clery is author of Moscow, December 25, 1991, the Last Day of the Soviet Union.
