How the Soviet Union lived and died
- March 30, 2026
- Caroline Eden
- Themes: History
The Soviet Union was a society defined by the constant tension between revolutionary promise and everyday hardship.
Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, Mark B. Smith, Allen Lane, £40
Statues to the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin come and go. In Georgia, the country of his birth, several have appeared during the current electoral dominance of the Georgian Dream party, founded by the shadowy billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. Last year, across the border in Russia, a Stalin bas-relief was unveiled at Moscow’s Taganskaya station, a replica of an earlier one completed in 1950, which was later removed during the period of de-Stalinization following his death in 1953.
These statues came to mind as I began reading Exit Stalin by Cambridge historian Mark B. Smith, author of Property of Communists and The Russia Anxiety. After Stalin’s death, genuine efforts were made to bring about the egalitarian society that the Russian Revolution had pledged. That these pursuits would be unsuccessful would not become clear to western audiences until the 1980s. Throughout this stimulating and panoramic book, Smith tells the stories of those who lived through this period, and how the defeat of the Soviet worldview played out.
Smith reveals how the chronic shortages, absurd management and incompetence that weakened the USSR – and set it on the path to full collapse in the late 1980s – have to be understood alongside the beliefs it generated in many of its citizens. A collective acceptance and faith, despite the hardships. As Smith states, the Soviet constitution of 1936 ‘claimed that citizens had three types of rights: “political” (the right to vote), “social” (like the right to a job) and “personal” (including a version of habeas corpus)’. Though in reality, the system was powered by often wishful thinking, even down to the treatment of major life events such as birth, serious illness and death.
Unsurprisingly, women were often the worst off. Take the right to abortion. Russia was the first country to legalise abortion in 1920, but the abortion law was repealed in 1936 (around the same time women made up almost half of the industrial workforce) and abortion remained illegal until 1955. In addition to working, women also had to make do in the kitchen and home in an economy of shortages, and for all citizens, any free time often looked much like work: mending things and doing DIY, or queuing up and trying to source consumer items.
Even death had a ‘DIY’ element to it, as Smith explains: ‘The crowd in the apartment courtyard, the truck used to carry the coffin. It bore the imprint of super-fast modernisation, peasant migration and the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the USSR.’ As for the unwell, treatment was likely delivered at home and painkillers and anaesthetics were in relatively short supply by the early 1980s. Managing pain ‘was sometimes barely possible’. Bizarrely, it was common practice in Soviet medicine to not inform cancer patients about the seriousness of their disease: ‘The premise was that knowledge of a terminal diagnosis harmed the standard of life of a patient and reduced their lifespan further.’
The Soviet people’s search to create meaning in the decades after Stalin’s death – at his dacha just outside Moscow, following a stroke – is central to Smith’s story, and how during the last three or four decades of Soviet life, a distinctive civilisation emerged, ‘a civilisation in the sense of a complex, urbanized society’.
But what was Soviet civilisation? And how are its peculiarities best described? Smith breaks it down into six main categories: there is the notion of periodisation, based on the idea that there were many Soviet Unions and several crucial dates that triggered transformations, namely Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s epoch-defining Secret Speech of 1956. Then, personhood (Khrushchev’s emphasis on the significance of the individual during the Thaw), normality (by Soviet standards), culture, decolonisation and revolution. Smith adds that each of these categories ‘rests on a paradox of some kind – the endless revolution, the decolonised empire – and that unresolved paradoxes sustained Soviet civilisation rather than undermined it’.
The Soviet Union was a revolutionary civilisation from start to finish. It came into being as the result of a revolutionary seizure of power; to be followed by decades of fast and erratic change across all elements of society, from social, cultural, economic and the political to everyday life: ‘Soviet history can reasonably be interpreted as a sequence of attempts to complete the revolution, to carry it through to a conclusion.’ What then happened in 1990 and 1991, when the fall of the Soviet Union occurred, was that these categories became indistinct and weakened. This was an era that Smith describes as ‘part carnival, part horror movie… All areas of life, and all forms of social relationships, were destabilised’.
Another figure at the heart of this book is Nikita Khrushchev. As Smith puts it: ‘No one observed, participated in and created more of those revolutionary futures than Khrushchev, Stalin’s heir and nemesis.’
The details of his rise to power, and his personal life, are fascinating. His father, Sergei, worked seasonally in the emerging industrial centre of Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine). Nikita established himself as an apprentice fitter and became a skilled metalworker. His wife succumbed to typhus, leaving him in the role of a single father to two small children, then, later, he became a true politico: ‘The thrill of politics went to his head, kept him up late and got him up early.’ He was, Smith writes, ‘short and fat, addicted to politics, ambitious for advancement, afraid of being liquidated, disturbed by Stalinism, committed to Leninism…’ As chair of Party and government in Moscow city, and region, he was in charge of an office where lists of potential arrests were hashed out.
When overseeing the Moscow Metro (with Lazar Kaganovich in overall charge) we learn that three of Khrushchev’s key interests were combined in his duties: ‘politics, Marxism and construction… allowing him to make a mark on the ultimate socialist metropolis’. During an anti-decoration drive, when he was keen to crackdown on the excesses of the past, he ordered the opulent mosaics by Vladimir Favorsky that decorated the VDNKh Moscow Metro station to be covered with coats of thick green paint.
Smith also shares intriguing insights into Leonid Brezhnev. As leader, he made use of property and possessions that were far superior to those available to Khrushchev. Brezhnev, we learn, ‘loved to spend his spare time clad in swimming trunks or carrying a gun’ and he did so at a house on the Crimean coast that had actually been built in 1955 for Khrushchev (whose much shorter holidays were spent at a less fancy house nearby).
As Smith states: ‘Brezhnev’s political order – developed socialism – was actually another future of 1917. It was the latest instalment of the revolution, guided by revolutionary texts and teachings: a revolutionary iteration in which equality remained hardwired into mentalities if not practices, and where stability, private life and nomenklatura corruption played a growing part.’
In the end, by the late 1980s, Gorbachev’s reforms finished Soviet civilisation. Its sense of revolutionary stages collapsed, and its legitimacy died. Normality was a condition of longterm validity and ‘Soviet civilisation could not survive the end of Soviet normality’.
Despite the vast complexities and scope of Exit Stalin, Smith manages to fully immerse the reader throughout (though it does require focus). Smith elegantly acknowledges the scale of his undertaking as the author of such a work: ‘I accepted that no single book, including mine, could adequately serve as an overarching explanation for the Soviet collapse (Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse perhaps gets the closest, in part by eschewing an easy verdict).’ He also says that Exit Stalin ‘presents a version of Soviet civilisation that cannot be decoded as a “system”, but whose multiple, changing realities were contingent, overlapping and experienced differently’. What is clear, even within the first few pages, is that this is a landmark work on Russian history, one like no other, and a gold mine filled with emotional power and unknown stories.