The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World
by Karl Schlögel
The Soviet Century is a quirky book by German historian Karl Schlögel, who first visited the country in 1966 and knows (knew) it well. He is effectively trying to set up an “exhibition or museum of Soviet civilization” in book form. Not surprisingly for a book that aspires to be a museum, it’s long: 819 pages. It’s really a book to dip into, reading and looking at the photos and illustrations. For example, there is a ground plan of Lubyanka, the KGB prison by Yury Tregubov, who spent 2.5 years there after being kidnapped from West Berlin in 1947. Or there’s a section on Dalstroy, which ran the worst of the gulags, and Schlögel will take you to the literature about it, like Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov.
“The story of the Soviet Union’s collapse has come to the forefront again as we try to understand Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “What came to an end was not history itself, but an empire whose time had run out,” writes Karl Schlögel, the German historian, in his newly translated book, The Soviet Century. Schlögel first visited the Soviet Union in 1966 and has travelled all around. It’s a quirky book, a huge and highly knowledgeable catalogue of the Soviet Union’s various parts—from flea markets to the gulag at Kolyma.”
Notable Nonfiction of Early 2023, recommended by Sophie Roell, editor of Five Books
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