Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991
Tells the history of a Soviet society largely without protest, without violent repression, without dramatic events, and without sudden economic shifts ... Smith builds up, through short sentences and character sketches, a picture of an entire culture, a way of life ... The density of information in the book means speculation and theorisation are avoided ... Late Soviet life was made as predictable as possible, partly in reaction to Stalinism ... It is certainly not Smith’s intention, but one can imagine some, especially young, readers finding this all rather seductive ... But Exit Stalin also forces the question: would you accept the price? The intellectuals in the psychiatric hospitals? The killings on the border?
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Mark B. Smith introduces to a wider readership the notion that there was once a distinctive Soviet 'civilization' with its own customs, values, cuisine, consumer products, jokes, pop stars, mass culture, welfare system and even rights ... Exit Stalin is uneven. Events are recounted in short, staccato sentences – 'Tensions were high. Moods were brittle' – that do not gel with the more meandering prose elsewhere. Overstretched metaphors sometimes mar the clarity of the argument ... The narrative can feel disjointed in places, its flow interrupted as Mark B. Smith loops back to rehearse an individual’s biography. Yet readers will surely enjoy discovering this vanished Soviet world, and perhaps even be prompted to go off in search of the film classics that the author describes with affection and insight.
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Mark B Smith, a Cambridge historian, has written a fascinating chronicle of the Soviet Union ... No single volume can adequately explain the Soviet state’s collapse, but Exit Stalin is a valiant attempt. Smith provides a teeming, collage-like picture of how ordinary Soviet citizens withstood repression and food scarcities yet clung hopefully to the 1917 revolution’s promise of a better life ... Smoothly readable ... Though marred at times by a surfeit of information, Exit Stalin offers a superb history of the rise and fall of a utopian state and its dangerously deluded ideology.
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