12 December 2025
Teresa Cherfas reviews The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlögel, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Princeton University Press, 928pp, 14 March 2023, ISBN: 9780691183749, $39.95/£35
Karl Schlögel’s magisterial study of the archaeological site that once was the Soviet Union begins where it ended – at the ‘barakholka’ or flea market that sprung up in the late Soviet period in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park – an almost literal iteration of Trotsky’s ‘ash heap of history’. For a small rental, market traders sold for a song the detritus of empire. It was a place of poignancy and treasure and embraced the furthest corners of Soviet influence: Soviet propaganda posters pushing literacy in the languages (and alphabets) of Soviet Central Asia; Chinese woven silk portraits of Lenin and Stalin; Vietnamese lacquer caskets brought back as souvenirs by Soviet diplomats and controllers in fraternal countries; colourful rugs and carpets from Armenia and Georgia; cobalt blue and gold porcelain tea sets from the famous pre-revolutionary Lomonosov Porcelain Factory; beautifully illustrated Soviet children’s books and fairy tales; Great Patriotic War medals and certificates, ribbons and badges of excellence for Soviet workers; as well as entire family photo albums, perhaps the last vestige sacrificed in exchange for a currency that was losing its value with every day that passed.
In the first part of The Soviet Century, titled: “Shards of Empire”, Schlögel explores the artifacts that remain of the Soviet Century – starting in Izmailovksy Park and moving on to its museums, its house-museums, and most tellingly, perhaps, its regional museums, often housed on the estates and within the walls of Russia’s discarded aristocracy.
But if that sets the scene for a material culture, it’s in the sections to come that Schlögel blindsides with his erudition and breadth of scholarship, and his own personal experience, bringing together all the elements that make this such an exhilarating read: the stark contrast between the newness, the excitement, the sheer magnitude and bravado of the Soviet Experiment, and the plight of the ordinary and not-so-ordinary Soviet people, the ruthlessness of the Party leadership, who used all means to achieve their goals, and the enthusiasm and excellence of so many pioneers in their fields, some true-believers, others very much not. His approach is multi-disciplinary, drawing on social history, anthropology, demography, meteorology and geography, statistics, sociology, and comparative history studies of the USSR. His sources are myriad and multi-lingual, his bibliography covers the most contemporary of studies and delves back into the textbook volumes of Soviet Studies (Moshe Lewin’s, for example, whose own take on The Soviet Century was published in 2003).
Originally published in German in 2017, it won the 2018 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for non-fiction. At over 900 pages, the English translation is, put simply, a tour de force. I could only read it in a supine position propped up on my knees, but that said, I couldn’t wait to lie down and pick it up again. It is a revelation, both familiar and strange, offering a way of understanding the Soviet century in a new light.
Karl Schlögel first visited the Soviet Union in 1966, returning again and again, and experiencing “a major portion of Soviet history of its late period”. The Soviet Century is the culmination of his life’s work. It describes the mundane and the stratospheric in a sweep that takes in the art of the queue and the innovation of the crematorium in a godless state – the first Soviet crematorium was built in the church of Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery, and drew on the expertise of a German pioneer, who later went on to design the crematorium used at Auschwitz – Soviet wrapping paper, the role of the Diorama, the “aura of the telephone and the absence of a phone book”, the dacha, the kommunalka, the significance of palm trees in the Civil War, the “railroads of empire” and of course the grand designs of Soviet achievements.
In a section titled “Highway of Enthusiasts”, Schlögel writes about the massive projects that were the cornerstone of Soviet industrialisation – DniproHES, Magnitogorsk, the White Sea Canal, never forgetting the human and ecological cost of it all. He paints a picture of what the Soviets inherited: a total lack of joined-up infrastructure, a largely illiterate and peasant population, and the urgent task to produce the energy necessary to power the industrialisation that would pull Russia into the twentieth century and make it the second most powerful country in the world, war-ready within one short decade. Lenin’s famous statement: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” was the motivating slogan.
What is shocking and new in this section is the way in which Schlögel grounds his analysis of this brutal period of Soviet history in the context of pioneering and back-breaking projects enacted in America earlier in the century, which saw the exploitation of an itinerant and mostly unskilled labour force of lumberjacks, who made the railways that crossed the continent, produced the steel that fed breakneck construction and Henry Ford’s Model T, and were exposed to the vicissitudes of a challenge they accepted out of desperation and adventure in Depression-era America.
Schlögel writes about the American experts who came to work on DniproHES and Magnitogorsk, who turned a blind eye to the nature of the Soviet workforce. The Soviet workers lived in barracks and lean-tos, with dormitory beds and poor rations in all weathers whilst special cabins were built for the Americans who could not live without plumbed-in hot showers. Schlögel describes the ideological spin that the Party gave to these endeavours:
The construction site at the magnet mountain was one of the battlefields on which peasant Russia would be destroyed and forged anew. In this battle, there were commanders and field marshals on the ‘labour front’; the general staff of the ‘battle for steel’ was located in the people’s commissariat of Sergio Ordzhonikidze, shock brigades and the war against ‘spies and parasites’. Even the steppes had to be ‘beaten down’. The whole country became the backdrop to ‘this front’ on which ‘heroes were born’ and ‘enemies were smashed’. News bulletins from the ‘economic front’ were like those of war reporters.
The use of forced labour was never denied. In fact it was, in Schlögel’s view, “aestheticised” by artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, who contributed photo-reportages to the 1930s magazine, The USSR in Construction. Schlögel accesses the ideology that sold these achievements to the new Soviet nation, through the propaganda images of the time.
In a much later part, devoted to “Interiors”, Schlögel contextualises the shift in domestic spaces, from peasant huts to urban makeshift barracks and tent cities on the outskirts of towns, from the communal apartment (kommunalka) – where members of the old-style Russian intelligentsia had to share their living space with people who’d never had an indoor lavatory and were irreconcilably uncouth or ‘beskulturniye’ – to the safe space of the ‘Moscow kitchen’, when Khrushchev’s housing programme provided single family accommodation for the first time to millions of Soviet citizens.
As well as exploring the tangible, historical world of the now vanished Soviet Union, what Schlögel does so well in The Soviet Century is to evoke the sensory memory: the smells; the sounds; the touch of it. There’s a chapter about “Red Moscow”. Distilled from Schlögel’s earlier work The Scent of Empire, it traces the origins of the perfume that wafted through the air on gala nights at the Bolshoi Theatre and was the go-to gift for Soviet women rediscovering glamour in the years of the Great Terror. An entire section is devoted to “The Noise of Time”, in Mandelstam’s phrase. In a chapter called “The Bells Fall Silent”, Schlögel notes: “It is difficult to describe in words sound worlds whose instruments and musical scores were largely destroyed during the twentieth century.” Drawing on A. N. Olovyanishnikov’s standard work History of Bells and the Bell Founder’s Art (1912), Schlögel transports his readers back to the soundscape of ‘Holy Russia’, when the Ivan Veliky Bell Tower in the Moscow Kremlin sounded at Easter:
At its first stroke, an answer echoes back from the Strastnoy monastery, and then, as if in response to a conductor’s baton, the bells of all forty times forty Moscow churches ring out. (…) Solemnly, a broad wave of sound arises, spreads out and rolls down from the Kremlin Hill over the Moskva River and far out into the surrounding countryside.
The Bolshevik destruction of the churches replaced the sound of bells with the factory siren and the soundscape of machinery; the bronze reliefs of the facade of the Lenin Library are made from torn down church bells.
A section called Kolyma: the Pole of Cold is visceral in its descriptions of the physical conditions that pertained:
… the absence of those who can no longer speak is not the only explanation for the strange absence of the cold dimension from discussions of ‘Stalinism’. (…) It leads us to the limits – or rather the heart – not of a climatic region but of a political order that was preparing to sacrifice everything for what it regarded as progress, including the human beings robbed of all protection. (…) Cold leads us to the capital of the Dalstroy empire (…), a territory larger than the whole of Western Europe. Its unique wealth of mineral resources had been known since Tsarist times but exploiting them meant introducing a new regime of unprecedented brutality.
Focusing on the figure of Eduard Berzin, Schlögel describes how a stellar career brought him to head up the Dalstroy project and saw his dramatic fall from grace just seven years later, when he was purged in 1938. Whilst never losing sight of the unprecedented and brutal human cost wrought by Berzin and his like, Schlögel contexualises him and others of his generation:
The conquest of the extreme North and the Far East represented something like a frontier to a generation that now saw its opportunity to rescue an entire continent from historical irrelevance and carry out its mission civilisatrice, just as the most energetic and ruthless pioneers of the European colonial powers had done in Africa and Asia. It was an age of fantasy projects without precise calculation, carried out by adventurers and managerial figures in mid-career, working in a society that had lost all possibilities of self-defence and provided unlimited human resources. They had the necessary abilities and were on their way to becoming the pioneers of construction, transcontinental and global actors.
The Soviet Century covers such an astonishing range of experiences from across the Soviet Empire, some terrifying, others veering on the nostalgic, but never wallowing, and all deeply informative. It is surprising that the English edition, published five years after the original German, has not been changed to reflect the impact that Putin’s full-scale war on Ukraine has had on Russia. Schlögel makes references to growing access to the internet obviating the need for books and encyclopedias. This misplaced optimism in the flow of history is most noticeable in the final chapter, in which Schlögel, inspired by André Malraux, describes his own Musée Imaginaire of Soviet Civilisation in what he calls “The Lubyanka Project”. Housed in the labyrinthine rooms and corridors of the infamous headquarters of the KGB and its predecessors, Schlögel’s imaginary museum would transform it
“into a forum of the open society (…) What was formerly a labyrinth of terror would be opened up and accessible. The site of interrogation would become a place for conversations. A place in which people fell silent would become one where names and voices are returned to the dead.”
The human rights organisation Memorial won the Nobel Peace Prize for beginning that process, but was crushed by the hand of Putin, graduate of the KGB.
Schlögel ends his exploration of the Soviet century on the most poignant note, quoting from Alexander Wat, the Polish poet arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and held in detention in Moscow. In his posthumous ‘spoken diary’ My Century, Wat recollects a prisoners’ exercise circuit on the roof of the Lubyanka:
Sometime before Easter we were taken up to the roof – I don’t know why – it was the first time in daylight as well. Darkness was falling, dusk. But the sky and the air – the early spring easily overtook its victims there, for we were its victims. My feelings grew keener. I felt the early spring around me and I could also hear music. They were playing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on the radio for Easter – can you imagine? It was just coming to an end, but it reached my section of the roof….If the human voice, man-made instruments, and the human soul can create, even once in all of history, such harmony, beauty, truth, and power in such unity of inspiration – if this exists, then how ephemeral, what a nonentity all the might of empire must be.
Schlögel would appear to be a true-believer, if ever there were one, in the ephemeral nature of empire, but arguably it is that, which makes this the most exhilarating and, ultimately, humane of books.
