Exit Stalin

An extraordinarily atmospheric and powerful history of the world's largest country and its decline and fall. With Stalin's death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place, but one which became more predictable for its citizens and one which made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country that the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s. Mark Smith's remarkable book recreates the day-to-day life of this vast state, the largest ever to exist. What was day-to-day 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, who on the whole embraced its values, understood its goals and were proud to be part of such a vastly ambitious and progressive project. The violence, coercion and incompetence that underlay the USSR--and which by the late 1980s would doom it--has to be understood alongside the support it always had from many of its citizens. And this in turn is the crucial issue for understanding the Russia of the 21st century.