Books by Karl Schlögel
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.
