Complicată existență, chinuite popoare în tot fostul imperiu rusesc - milioane de morți pe altarul ego-urilor și al ideologiilor paranoice.

It took me a couple of weeks to read this weighty volume, and even longer to convince myself to sit down and write this review. Why? Because, like many of my fellow Ukrainians, I now tend to instinctively recoil from anything related to the Soviet Union and/or Russia. The sensation is probably similar to the anti-German sentiment that prevailed in Britain during and immediately after the Blitz. An obvious knee-jerk reaction, but hard to contain when Ukrainians are being murdered daily in their hundreds by the invaders. This is a glorious bitter sweet homage to the tragi-comedy that was so much a part of the Soviet Union. From one of its enemies we find heartfelt sentiment of beauty and kindness of a life lived intertwined with the fate of that civilization. An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century , Karl Schlogel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization.A museum of-and travel guide to-the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police.Drawing on Schlogel’s decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, and featuring more than eighty illustrations, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World by Karl Schlogel – eBook Details This is an interesting idea (though it would be more interesting if it were provable in one way or another), but it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like. This is to say that perhaps it was not exhaustion, but the dynamism of a new revolutionary generation that could take the modernization of the Soviet Union for granted. The tragedy of that generation lies in how unequipped they were to survive in the capitalist world they sought to join. Its like reading the works of a Roman author, like Juvenal or Tacitus, decrying the follies and crimes of an Empire they so are extricable a part of. The criticism and cynicism in the dissident view of the Soviet Union, within the Soviet Union was also one of the great achievements of the Soviet Union.PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Soviet_Century_-_Karl_Schlogel_Schlogel.pdf, The_Soviet_Century_-_Karl_Schlogel_Schlogel.epub The wealth of this book cannot be sufficiently explored within the limits of a review. Gibbonian in scale, it is a veritable cornucopia of jewels. “In Russia, radical changes and catastrophic experiences occur in their pure form,” Schlögel states. Reading his chronicle of this massive churn in all its sensory whimsies, we gain fresh insights into the lost world of the Soviet Union."—Prasenjit Chowdhury, Hindustan Times An impressively evocative look at material life in the USSR, from gulags and the planned economy to Red Moscow perfume and the Soviet toilet — a “lost civilisation” of utopian fantasy and unbridled terror."— Financial Times During the interwar period, Moscow transformed from a largely commercial town of winding, narrow streets, dotted with churches and merchant villas, into a model socialist capital. The city was to boast new infrastructure, open public spaces for the workers and apartment buildings for the Soviet elite. By 1957, with the construction of the last of Stalinist skyscrapers – known as the Seven Sisters – the city’s new skyline was complete. Also, I kinda feel like the son of a Wehrmacht soldier should show a little more humility to the people his father's generation tried to exterminate off the face of the Earth, but that's just me.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The main strength of 'The Soviet Century' is that it covers countless seemingly insignificant aspects of Soviet life that nevertheless speak volumes: from cookbooks and new 'red calendars' to perfumes, prison tattoos and Beriozka hard-currency stores, from which ordinary Soviet citizens were barred. (I was the first Soviet journalist to expose such shops when I was reporting for Krokodil magazine in the late 1980s). A work of deep scholarship and significant breadth about a relatively brief period of recent history when it seemed that there might be an alternative economic system to capitalism."—Joseph Brady, Society But I often forget that the richness of Russian culture doesn’t end when Khrushchev took over, and especially now that Soviet Russia is dead (in a way) and its archives are open (in a way), it’s the perfect opportunity for a skilled historian to offer some perspective on that era. That’s where Karl Schlogel’s Soviet Century: An Archeology of a Lost World comes in. The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization.

To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards. This urban metamorphosis was essential to showcasing the Socialist experiment to foreign visitors. Right from the start, journalists, diplomats, intellectuals, anti-colonial activists and professionals came to experience, challenge and participate in the creation of the new state. The symbolic centre of the Soviet universe

A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police.Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” ( novy sovetsky chelovek ). But, as he puts it, Soviet Russia is my jam. I’ve been reading about it for over ten years and am totally captivated by the politics and impact it had around the world. And the period spanning the revolution to Stalin’s death? Don’t even get me started on that. That’s the sweetest plum. Contrary to the beliefs of the Old Bolsheviks, who were convinced the new Soviet person would be peace-loving, hard-working, intelligent, healthy, and proletarian, or the polemics of Alexander Zinoviev, who believed Homo Sovieticus to be a shiftless and nasty species, given over to drink, larceny, and laziness, many of the new Soviet people ended up being as acquisitive, bourgeois, and small-minded as the citizens of any modernized society. Contra Marx, who believed that communism would arise as a solution to the problems of advanced capitalism, in practice, communism simply proved to be the most effective way for large agrarian countries to catch up with the industrialized states of Western Europe and North America. Once the modernization process was complete, communism lapsed into crisis. A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Centuryexplores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police. If the past is a foreign country, The Soviet Century is a unique travelogue from one of the world’s most innovative observers of urban space and material culture. Karl Schlögel’s scholarly Baedeker is the culmination of a lifetime of study, travel, and thought. It guides us across nothing less than a continental empire and a century of upheaval. But Schlögel’s greatest accomplishment is to connect stunningly eclectic new detail to the big picture, allowing us to see and feel a lost civilization anew.”—Michael David-Fox, Georgetown University