How Best to Look at Russian History
Key takeaways
- One recent example is Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017), about the private lives of Bolshevik elites who shared an apartment building.
- Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, Mark B.
- Smith’s Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, released in January, has much in common with these other titles.
Many history books about Russia and the Soviet Union published in recent years are microhistories: scholarship that looks at the past as through a microscope, prioritizing the minutiae of everyday life over wars, government changes, economic cycles, and other large-scale events.
One recent example is Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017), about the private lives of Bolshevik elites who shared an apartment building. Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (2023) puts the material in materialism, exploring Soviet existence by way of ordinary household items like wrapping paper and Krasnaya Moskva perfume bottles. More recently still, The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-lived Victory over Totalitarianism (2025) by Mikhail Zygar covered the Soviet Union’s final years through hundreds of interviews, including one with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Many history books about Russia and the Soviet Union published in recent years are microhistories: scholarship that looks at the past as through a microscope, prioritizing the minutiae of everyday life over wars, government changes, economic cycles, and other large-scale events.