Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Karl Schlögel. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023. 928 pp.

Review by Andrew Pendakis

18 December 2025

Knowledge about the Soviet Union is so thin in the West that even the most ordinary evocations of life there surprise us. A Black Sea summer holiday, the food on offer at a workplace stolovaya, the variety of jams and preserves likely to be found in a Soviet fridge: these facts are unfamiliar and thus immediately arouse suspicion. This is in part because the concept of totalitarianism—derived first from the works of James Burnham, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell, and later used copiously in the canonical Cold War histories of people like Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest and so on—reduces communism as a form of life to the spectacular yet monotonous trope of oppression. It is not only complexity and detail that the concept of totalitarianism represses, but space itself as the vessel of difference. Where space exists under totalitarianism it is restricted to generic sites of discipline and punishment—barracks, schools, workplaces (never museums, beaches, or parks)—or relegated to the domain of the figurative through the metonym of the prison.   

Though he does not explicitly locate his book in this context, Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World does away with the worst abuses of totalitarianism as an idea by reimagining the Soviet Union as a fully-formed “lifeworld”—an ever-changing (and internally divided) spatiohistorical totality that though certainly characterized by repression, unfreedom, and so on is never identical with these predicates for the simple reason that it is infinite (p. 1). Toilets and telephones, knickknacks and staircases, cookbooks, pianos, and railway stations—even the “greyish-brown” wrapping paper used to bundle books or vegetables—all emerge as objects with Soviet accents, each entitled in theory to serve as a metonym for the system as a whole (p. 198). This is a project aimed at totality but not completeness, an “histoire totale” composed of scattered fragments rather than interlocking puzzle pieces (p. 3).

Broadly speaking, Schlögel’s work belongs to the revisionist—or postrevisionist—tradition of Soviet historiography. Like Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lynne Viola, Stephen Kotkin, Moshe Lewin, and others, Schlögel expands his field of inquiry far beyond the classical space of the political. This is a domain characterized by institutionalized ideologies, jurisprudence and policing, the intentions or failures of ruling elites, foreign policy, and the occasional decisive turning point or event. Like them, he focuses instead on horizontal or bottom-up social dynamics, extrapolitical forms of power, and the paravisible rhythms of everyday life. What separates Schlögel from a Fitzpatrick or Kotkin, however, is his obessive attention to space. No historian that I know of has described with greater precision or sensory detail the lifeworld of communism. Though we can certainly point to a broader spatial turn within socialism studies—in the writings of Svetlana Boym, Alexei Yurchak, Victor Buchli, Alexey Golubev and others—Schlögel’s work, while attentive to the lived meanings and uses of space, approaches its subject with an almost-documentary precision, as if history might be recovered from the surfaces of things themselves. This is history without events—or in the shapeless gaps between them—that shares with Georges Perec, as well as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, an interest in “what happens when nothing happens.”[1]

The influence of Walter Benjamin can be seen everywhere. From him, Schlögel learns to read spaces as texts and to treat objects like mysterious historical mirrors—strange microcosms that are as singular and contradictory as the age they reflect. He takes from Benjamin, too, the the insistence on seeing the world from the perspective of the abandoned or marginalized, the use of collection and montage as ways of ordering material, and, above all, a kind of diffuse melancholy that has as much to do with the nature of his object—a uniquely tragic, now-vanished Soviet lifeworld—as it does Benjamin’s own baroque philosphy of the ruin, one in which brokenness and mourning stand nearer to the essence of history than wholeness or health.

There are other debts here as well. From Bakhtin, he channels the idea of the chronotope—the notion that time and space are woven together and that every location embodies particular forms of experience that go beyond the merely private or personal. In Schlögel’s hands, this becomes the insight that certain Soviet spaces contain temporalities all their own: the clockless time of the weekend dacha; the suspended, anticipatory time of the queue; the exhausting modernism of the Stalinist factory or labor camp. From Alexander Rodchenko (and to some extent Viktor Shklovsky), he inherits the desire to approach objects from oblique angles and to view them from as many sides as possible with an eye “to see[ing] things anew” (p. 116). And from Marx, he draws a sensitivity to the way living labor is absorbed into what it creates, and how, once completed, infrastructure and buildings obscure the stories, exertions, and processes—indeed the very lifeworlds—that produced them. Here Schlögel is at his best: bringing to life the tent cities, barracks, and other temporary settlements that sprang up around the steelworks at Magnitogorsk and along the vast White Sea Canal—fleeting architectures of human effort and exhaustion, that produced, almost ex nihlio, the great “pyramids” of communism, structures the solidity and massiveness of which seemed to promise an order that would never end (p. 99).

There is a certain poignance added here by the fact that many of the places described so vividly by Schlögel are ones he himself once visited—places now accesible only in memory or long-forgotten photographs. The work is in no way a travelogue: Schlögel’s own personal or private encounters with these places only rarely poke through. The entire book, however, while extremely critical of the USSR, has about it the feel of a person trying to assemble from memory the face of someone who has died, and who, despite it all, was oddly loved. That the text can have this feel without ever veering into apology or nostalgia is one of its many beautiful secrets.

[1] Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), p. 3.