Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991

Summary

To those of us in the West, the Soviet Union is synonymous with Stalinism. The common view of the USSR is of a brutal regime that squelched dissent and oversaw a drab, terrified society. Yet as Cambridge historian Mark B. Smith demonstrates in Exit Stalin, after the death of the murderous Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union was at a crossroads. Would it break from the dictator’s reign or continue his campaign of violence and fear?

The answer was both. The USSR remained harsh and authoritarian, yet it also earnestly sought to fulfill the Russian Revolution’s promise of an egalitarian, progressive future. Smith shows how vacation resorts, Pioneer camps, and new opportunities for private life coexisted with corruption scandals, KGB surveillance, and censorship. Re-creating the everyday rhythms of the country, he takes us into the Soviet Union’s culture, including TV shows and films that were little-known in the West. Ordinary citizens navigated the contradictions of existence under Khrushchev and his successors, building lives within a system they often accepted, believed in, or could not imagine abandoning. The result was the emergence of a distinctive and functioning civilization, a far cry from the vicious dictatorship of the West’s imagination.

A brilliantly original narrative of ordinary life in the late Soviet Union, Exit Stalin also presents a new account of its end, showing how a series of unexpected decisions unraveled the entire project. Ultimately, Smith reveals that the shortages, coercion, and incompetence that underlaid the USSR—and that by the late 1980s would doom it—have to be understood alongside the acceptance it always had from most of its citizens. And this reality, in turn, is crucial for understanding Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century.

“The most insightful and accurate cultural history of the Soviet Union that I have encountered, and a very good read, to boot.”—Jack F. Matlock, Jr., author of Autopsy on an Empire