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

Sobre el libro Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991 de Mark B. Smith publicado por Random UK al 2026:

With Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place. Yet it also became one that was more predictable for its citizens, and made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s. Exit Stalin is filled with extraordinary stories about those who lived in the USSR and the distinctive and functioning civilisation that they built. Mark B. Smith’s original and evocative book recreates the day-to-day life of this vast state, the largest ever to exist. What was life like in a country which made such absolute claims for the future, which claimed to be on its way to creating a people’s utopia and which, like the USA, owned enough atomic weapons to end human life on Earth? Exit Stalin is filled with extraordinary stories about those who lived in the USSR and the distinctive and functioning civilisation that they built. Many of them embraced its values, understood its goals and could not imagine life outside such a vastly ambitious and progressive project. The shortages, coercion and incompetence that underlay the USSR – and which by the late 1980s would doom it – have to be understood alongside the acceptance it always had from many of its citizens. And this in turn is a crucial issue for understanding Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century.