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Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991
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.
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.
752 pages, Hardcover
First published January 29, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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February 17, 2026‘Are you out of your mind? They don’t shoot people these days’, says a young man at the outset of Mark Smith’s new book. But he was wrong. His girlfriend had indeed heard gunfire in the next street, as soldiers fired at demonstrators breaking into the Party headquarters in Novocherkassk in protest against food shortages. It was June 1962, a decade after Stalin’s death.
Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev had been trying to curb Stalin’s legacy of terror and improve the lot of ordinary people. Mark Smith believes this ambition never had a chance of success. In the Soviet Union terror was fundamental to the system. Violence, like that at Novocherkassk, continued until the end. Lenin had been as determined as his successors to create a totalitarian state. Stalin may have taken things too far, but he was not an aberration. The secret police was an intrinsic part of the system, not an optional add-on. The Soviet system was incapable of making the political and economic reforms that could have saved it. When Gorbachev made the attempt in 1988-89 he doomed the system and did himself out of a job.
In 2018 Smith set out to turn these thoughts into a solid, scholarly book. He was well qualified. He had spent years working and studying in Russia, had a Russian wife, knew many Russians, had a vivid feeling for the quirks of the culture, both high and low, and had a job researching Russian history in Cambridge. Then disaster struck. First there was Covid, which prevented him from returning to Russia to do his research on the spot. Then his wife died. He was paralysed by grief. And in February 2022, a few weeks later, Putin invaded Ukraine.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Rodric Braithwaite was British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91).
Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev had been trying to curb Stalin’s legacy of terror and improve the lot of ordinary people. Mark Smith believes this ambition never had a chance of success. In the Soviet Union terror was fundamental to the system. Violence, like that at Novocherkassk, continued until the end. Lenin had been as determined as his successors to create a totalitarian state. Stalin may have taken things too far, but he was not an aberration. The secret police was an intrinsic part of the system, not an optional add-on. The Soviet system was incapable of making the political and economic reforms that could have saved it. When Gorbachev made the attempt in 1988-89 he doomed the system and did himself out of a job.
In 2018 Smith set out to turn these thoughts into a solid, scholarly book. He was well qualified. He had spent years working and studying in Russia, had a Russian wife, knew many Russians, had a vivid feeling for the quirks of the culture, both high and low, and had a job researching Russian history in Cambridge. Then disaster struck. First there was Covid, which prevented him from returning to Russia to do his research on the spot. Then his wife died. He was paralysed by grief. And in February 2022, a few weeks later, Putin invaded Ukraine.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Rodric Braithwaite was British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91).
May 21, 2026
An interesting premise but the author seems to forget it in the middle of the book and it reads as a straight history of the Soviet Union.
May 9, 2026
One of, if not the, best book I've read on the second half of the Soviet Union. Beautifully written.
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April 30, 2026This was a tough one to get through. It felt very dense and academic, almost like reading a textbook. There’s a lot of information, but it’s not presented in a very engaging way. I kept losing focus because it didn’t feel like a story, more like a long lecture.
May 18, 2026
I ploughed through the first three chapters, before deciding that it was too much like hard work and too boring. Even if it may be the best book on its topic, I concluded that I wasn't sufficiently interested to carry on reading.
May 31, 2026
Written by an academic historian. I am not sure whether it is written for fellow academics or the general reader. But if you manage to get through some of the over academic writing it is worth persisting with. It makes a sobering background to Putin's Russia.
February 5, 2026
An intensive insight not the life of the soviet system. It for bounces around time wise .it certainly gives an into the in life of so many people behind the iron curtsin.
February 19, 2026
Intriguing account of Soviet cultures.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews