Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991
Smith treats the post-Stalin Soviet Union as a working civilisation with its own logic, covering housing, law, consumption and belief rather than counting down to collapse.
Housing, law, consumption and belief across four decades, treated as the workings of a civilisation with its own internal logic rather than as symptoms of a system waiting to fail. Smith disaggregates the Soviet eras instead of running them together, and the result makes the period imaginable as somewhere people actually lived.
Recommended by 1 Person
Tyler Cowen
I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was. This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history. It makes the time and place imaginable.
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