‘The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World’
By Karl Schlögel
Princeton University Press, 906 pages

Is it possible to write a history of the Soviet Union without also writing a biography of Josef Stalin? Karl Schlögel devotes about 100 pages to Stalin and to Stalinism and its aftermath, but these pages hardly constitute a biography.

But then this is archeology, not biography, or even history. Stalin might as well be Ozymandias, a broken statue of a man who thought he was commanding an empire in perpetuity. His legacy is a ruin that is kind of rebuke to biography since, in the end, what he thought he had established has disintegrated.

Stalin’s demise, as Mr. Schlögel demonstrates, has resulted in the demolition of totalitarian history, in which the Soviet Union is depicted in his museums as a narrative of progress, omitting the Civil War of the 1920s, the famine of the 1930s, forced collectivization and repression of nationalities, as well as the murder of millions.

The wreckage of the Soviet century is even more widespread: The Stalinist museums, Mr.  Schlögel argues, are “more than just mere indoctrination and propaganda institutions, they are also the meeting point of traditions that have more in common with the nineteenth century, with the belief in the ‘spirit of Enlightenment’ and the ‘betterment of humanity, through education and culture’ than with the utopian project of communism.”

Put that way, biographies of Stalin need to be rewritten to show how history was writing him even as he deluded himself that he was making it, and that his biography was a deciding factor. 

Reading Mr. Schlögel is sort of like encountering an out-of-biography and out-of-history experience. We are at an archeological site, and his chapter headings are like the artifacts we have to carefully brush off to begin piecing together the past of a lost world, as his subtitle suggests.

So the table of contents has sections such as “Soviet Sign-Worlds,” which include subsections on “Chest Badges” and “Body Language: Tattoos,” and “Moscow Graffiti.” Other sections deal with wrapping paper and doorbells. Here’s a good one: “The Soviet Staircase: Towards an Analysis of Anonymous and Anomic Spaces.”

Mr. Schlögel is, however, interested in more than material culture and what it shows about the creation and destruction of the Soviet Union.  Cutting across this archeological dig are treatments of the Russian Empire before the Bolsheviks, World Wars I and II, and The Great Terror, including the gulags. 

The author of several studies of the Soviet Union, Mr. Schlögel nonetheless insists it had not been his intention to “provide a balance sheet, a sort of final account of Russia or of the Soviet Union.” Then Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, and that forced the author to “take one more look at the empire that had disappeared.”

Since “The Soviet Century” is not a historical narrative or biography, the question of Putin remains in doubt. This book will not tell you if he is, as has often been suggested, a Soviet agent unreconciled to the fall of the empire he served, or a new phenomenon that cannot be adequately explained in terms of the past.

But there are tantalizing passages that suggest the difficulty a Putin biographer confronts: “Two decades on from the end of the Soviet Empire, the question of what we are to understand by the reunited ‘Russian world’ remains quite unresolved.”

However repressive Mr. Putin’s regime, internal conversations and tensions abound, Mr. Schlögel points out, even with state-controlled television and coercive “cultural apparatuses.” The nation is not Mr. Putin’s in the sense that it once was Stalin’s.

In fact, Mr. Schlögel clearly wonders about Mr. Putin’s “new ideological mobilisation against an enemy without which the Putin regime evidently cannot survive.”

That is as close as Mr. Schlögel comes to a prediction. He does not say so, but the import of this book, as it is measured against current events, suggests that war is the only option for a leader who otherwise has nothing to offer his people. If that is so, then Mr. Putin’s grasp on power is shaky indeed. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Essays in Biography.”