Remembering the Soviet Century
There are generations rising who do not remember the Cold War. They do not remember the more than vague concern that we would one day find intercontinental ballistic missiles flying in our direction with little to protect us from dying a fiery death.
I don’t have memories of bomb drills, because by the time I was a kid everyone had figured out that being under a desk was pretty much pointless. However, I do remember the Berlin Wall coming down. I remember interminable negotiations between Reagan (and later Bush) and Gorbachev, until the Soviet Union finally collapsed.
Most people that are even only a few years younger than me will struggle to understand the tensions in movies like War Games, Miracle, or classics like Rocky IV. Frightening to those of us who are aware of the existential threat the Soviet Union was against the US, many young people feel like maybe the USSR wasn’t that bad after all. There is a strange tendency to romanticize Communism and argue that it was probably better than Capitalism, or at least it would have been if the US hadn’t intentionally tried to subvert it.
Books like The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, by Karl Schlögel offer a window into a past that threatens to be misrepresented. Schlögel is professor emeritus of Eastern European History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt. The book is based largely on events, sites, or direct reports witnessed by Schlögel himself over decades of travel through the Soviet Union and shortly after its fall.
Wide Coverage
This tome, weighing in at over eight hundred pages, is encyclopedic in scope. Rather than offering a chronology of events or a travel narrative, the book is a collection of chapters on topics related to physical artifacts or locations. He talks about the way museums preserved history in the Soviet Union, but also about the great industrial city, Magnitogorsk. He describes the dam on the Dnieper, the building of the enormous White Sea Canal, as well as the movement of tattoo culture from the prisons to the rest of the population. There are dozens of chapters of varying length on widely assorted topics. While no book can really offer a comprehensive account of the culture of an empire, the seemingly unscientific mishmash of topics Schlögel offers in more carefully curated sections is broad enough and unsystematic enough to provide a sense of what life was like.
The impression from The Soviet Century is that in general, the world is better for the Soviet Union having disappeared. Although it seems to be trying to raise its head in resurrected form through Putin’s expansionist Russia, we should recognize that most ghosts deserve to be vanquished.
Memories of an Empire
Reading this volume, even as one who remembers the Cold War, the dynamism of the Soviet efforts to thrive, expand, and industrialize is truly impressive. They built cities where there were no cities. Through force of will—often without sufficient engineering knowledge or skill—they constructed an infrastructure from nothing. The sheer scope of the Soviet accomplishments is worthy of a great deal of admiration. Schlögel makes it clear that there really was much to be impressed at in the former USSR.
However, Schlögel also makes it quite evident that the seeming miracle of Soviet accomplishment came a great cost to many. Peasants were forced to leave their farms and young adults became unskilled labor at some of the great works. Industrial safety measures lagged significantly behind other industrial nations, so that miles of canal and feet of dam constructed often came at the cost of multiple lives. Decisions were made by bureaucrats without regard to the real costs, especially to the people and to the environment. The successes of the Soviet Union in many areas were real, but the costs were astronomical to the average citizen. Schlögel describes the former Soviet Union with brutal realism.
Complementary to Other Histories
The Soviet Century is the sort of volume that pairs well with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Not only does it have the heft of Russian literature, but it also fills in much of the background that Solzhenitsyn describes. While The Gulag Archipelago gives a jarring portrait of life within the prison, The Soviet Union fills in many of the puzzle pieces around that massive literary work.
This is obviously a text that must be digested over time. The book is structured in a way that it can readily be used as a reference. However, the translation provides a text that is very readable, even if every page is not thrilling. This is an important work, though it will never be a bestseller, because it tells stories and records memories that the world needs to never forget. Such realistic portraits of the accomplishments and costs of Communism will only become more significant as time passes, collective memory fades, and historical revisionism rewrites misery into cheerful acceptance for the greater good.
NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.