The Soviet Crisis Was Predictable. Its Outcome Was Not.
The Soviet collapse in 1991 was so sudden and comprehensive that it came to seem inevitable. New work by historians of the USSR asks whether the system’s crisis could have ended in reform of its structures rather than disintegration.
Until 1991, the USSR was central to the development of global politics, but it now represents a lost world. Mark Smith’s book, Exit Stalin, is an attempt to recreate that Soviet world with a focus on everyday life. (David Turnley / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images)
Until 1991, it was impossible to be on the Left and not have an opinion about the Soviet Union. Moscow was, remarks Mark Smith in his new history of the post–Joseph Stalin Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the center of half the world. That world’s fate seemed to hang on the changing relationship of the United States and the USSR.
Today, the USSR is gone. Its once biggest components, Russia and Ukraine, are fighting each other. China and other countries loom larger in the questions we ask about the future of the world.
The USSR represents a world that the Left, for good or ill, has lost. Smith’s book is an attempt to recreate that Soviet world with a focus on everyday life. Toward that end, he calls it “a history in fragments.”
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