This most recent book by Karl Schlögel is an impressive historical account of the life-worlds of Soviet citizens and of their lingering traces in contemporary Russia. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Vanished World, the direct rendering of the German title, is not yet available in English, but a translation is planned.

Despite running to over 900 pages, here is what the book is not: it is not a history of the CPSU, Soviet institutions, the economy, the military, or the foreign and global politics of the USSR, although necessary elements of all these appear in the background, from the Civil War to the present. What forms the center of Schlögel's narrative is the effects of these distinct phases, dominant institutions, and accompanying human tragedies on individuals, communities, and society at large in everyday life. There is the forced collectivization and its accompanying human catastrophes; the Stalin purges of the 1930's followed by the nation's role in WWII, which constituted two more tragedies. Schlögel provides a vivid account of industrialization (the Dneprogress project, Magnitogorsk) as well as of the rise of the GULAG economy, from its beginning in the conquest of the north (the Belomorcanal) to its becoming yet another human tragedy. Against this background, the Cold War begins to feel almost like an era of stability, the rise of the country to global prominence in technology and space, a highpoint of Soviet achievement and source of pride to this day. For the stable but leaden times of the Brezhnev years, Schlögel focuses on growing, even if unfulfilled, consumer expectations; and for the transition period under Gorbachev on the rapid changes that brought about the end of Soviet history.

In nineteen eclectic, yet closely interlocking chapters of revealing moments, influential institutions, collective practices, everyday objects, and significant locales, the book presents layers of events, processes, and their material artifacts sedimented over each other: truly an archaeological dig, as the subtitle indicates, and for Schlögel a world that represented a “civilization sui generis” (18). An Annales school spirit undergirds the book, broadly speaking. Fernand Braudel's longue durée and the slow-moving undercurrents of Marc Bloch's histoire totale are clearly present, as are Lucien Febvres's mentalités, extrapolated from detailed histoires événementielles. Looking back over the Soviet century from the vantage point of today also reveals Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire with their roots in a collective memory that still seeks its rightful place in the present.

Although it reads at times like a collection of essays, Schlögel thinks of his material instead as a “parcours” of historical stations, chosen and organized for the reader in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, attempting to show rather than to tell, with the technique of literary montage an essential structuring principle (22). The book further suggests Benjamin's thinking on history as taken from his comments on Paul Klee's iconic monoprint of the “Angel of History.” Schlögel has the paradise that never was firmly in mind while emphasizing the storm that was and persistently blew from paradise, piling up debris into the catastrophe that Soviet history has turned out to be. Undeniably, this was the storm of progress that swept a backwards, agrarian country, barely out of serfdom, into industrial modernity at tremendous speed. Yet in contrast to Benjamin's “single catastrophe” that history is, Schlögel takes its scattered debris as the raw material for his archeologically-minded inquiries.

The key to succeeding in such an approach to historiography lies in the writer's intuition for the right spots to dig. It is here that Schlögel's encyclopedic knowledge, developed over decades of contact with the Soviet Union and its peoples, shines. Born in 1948, he has been traveling to what once was called the eastern bloc since the 1960s, thus drawing on extensive personal experience besides life-long academic engagement with his subject. Not last among his influences he acknowledges Sheila Fitzpatrick and Svetlana Boym, especially the latter's cultural-historical approach, where art, media, and memory are central categories. The Soviet Century, moreover, epitomizes key tenets of Schlögel's own historical method: the linkage of specific times and places, as evidenced in earlier titles of his, such as, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics (German 2003; English 2016); Petersburg, Laboratory of Modernity 1909–1921 (German 2002); Moscow 1937 (German 2008; English 2013); or Decisions in Kiev: Ukrainian Lessons (German 2015), to name just four.

The table of contents reveals the account's breadth, ambition, and interconnections. “Splinters of the Empire,” the first chapter, opens with observations on the barakholky that popped up everywhere in the immediate post-Soviet days of the early 1990's. Schlögel notices that a similar sellout of the material artifacts of a preceding epoch and regime had already happened in the 1920s, and links such sales also to his final chapter that suggests establishing a musée imaginaire in the Lubianka (22), a lieu de mémoire par excellence from which the storms of history often blew most fiercely. The building could be made available for a display of the rubble of the Soviet Empire now that it has come fully into view.

Schlögel's themes span the gamut from “Splinters of the Empire” to the “Chaussee of the Enthusiasts” (the early Soviet industrialization projects), “Soviet Semiotics” (medals, tattoos, graffiti), and “The Life of Objects” (on packaging, waste, and the surprising ubiquity of pianos in private and public spaces, perfumery, and cookbooks). He looks at “Spaces of Freedom” (the dacha culture, for instance, and the sanatorium) and the phenomenology of “Interior Spaces,” (including the toilet, the no-man's land of the staircase, the pod΄ezd, and the kitchen). In “Landscapes and Public Spaces,” the civilizing role of the Soviet “park of culture and leisure” is analyzed, its role in turning peasants into Soviet citizens, lost over time as the early rural flight began to slow down and a new normalcy of urban life established itself. But the square miles of high-rises, the zhilmassivy, also find their place here, as does the russkaia glubina, the vast expanses of the country beyond the cities. “Rituals” is another theme, with accounts of the grand parades and the “choreography of power,” and the waste of time waiting in line as a “Soviet chronotope.” In “Bodies,” the Soviet citizen as athlete appears, but the chapter also encompasses fashion, the Dom Modelei, and the clothing for the new man. Temperature is a theme, describing Kolyma and “Solovki, Laboratory of Extremes.” “Corridors of Power” addresses both the ever-present signage of pereryv and na remont as well as an account of the “House on the Moskva,” while the “Main Arteries of the Empire” emphasizes the importance of the railroad, the magistrali as the backbone of power, the economy, and human connections. Keen on sensory aspects of history, atmospherics, design, and symbolism, Schlögel concludes his panorama with “Red Cube,” the Lenin Mausoleum as the keystone of Soviet history but proposes the Lubianka as the ultimate space of its post-mortem grand display.

In sum, Schlögel's is a fascinating account of a vanishing world that is both thick-description and analysis. His skillful narrative conveys a sense of the near mythical dimension of Soviet history, captured in the telling detail of everyday life. There is a touch of awe, arising from the insight that, once started, a socialist revolution in a backward country the size the USSR would have only violence and cruelty—but genuine enthusiasm, too—as the means by which to achieve its goals, with the loss from sight of individual human value its inevitable corollary. Realizing the persistence of this legacy in some Soviet and even tsarist “deep structures” and appreciating a sense of how they, as “post-imperial phantom pains” (17) continue to motivate Russian politics today is a key takeaway from Schlögel's enterprise.