The Soviet Century
Archaeology of a Lost World
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Narrated by:
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Ciaran Saward
About this listen
An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world's leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique lost civilization.
A museum of—and travel guide to—the Soviet past, The Soviet Century explores in evocative detail both the largest and smallest aspects of life in the USSR, from the Gulag, the planned economy, the railway system, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk to cookbooks, military medals, prison camp tattoos, and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow. The book examines iconic aspects of Soviet life, including long queues outside shops, cramped communal apartments, parades, and the Lenin mausoleum, as well as less famous but important parts of the USSR, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the voice of Radio Moscow, graffiti, and even the typical toilet, which became a pervasive social and cultural topic. Throughout, the book shows how Soviet life simultaneously combined utopian fantasies, humdrum routine, and a pervasive terror symbolized by the Lubyanka, then as now the headquarters of the secret police.
Drawing on Schlögel's decades of travel in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, The Soviet Century is vivid, immediate, and grounded in firsthand encounters with the places and objects it describes. The result is an unforgettable account of the Soviet Century.
©2023 Karl Schlögel (P)2023 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Based on a lifetime living in and reporting on Germany and Central Europe, award-winning journalist and author Peter Millar tackles the fascinating and complex story of the people at the heart of our continent. Focussing on nine cities (only six of which are in the Germany of today), he takes us on a zigzag ride back through time via the fall of the Berlin Wall through the horrors of two world wars and the patchwork states of the Middle Ages to the splendour of Charlemagne and the fall of Rome.
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One of the best books I have listened to on here
- By Shaun on 05-17-18
By: Peter Millar
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Germany
- A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000
- By: Helmut Walser Smith
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 20 hrs and 23 mins
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For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined.
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He may understand the past but he does not comprehend the present.
- By Max TN on 06-23-23
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1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
- By: Charles Emerson
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 19 hrs and 53 mins
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Today, 1913 is inevitably viewed through the lens of 1914: as the last year before a war that would shatter the global economic order and tear Europe apart, undermining its global pre-eminence. Our perspectives narrowed by hindsight, the world of that year is reduced to its most frivolous features last summers in grand aristocratic residences or its most destructive ones: the unresolved rivalries of the great European powers, the fear of revolution, violence in the Balkans.
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Good book ruined by bad read
- By GANESHi on 08-02-13
By: Charles Emerson
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Aftermath
- Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
- By: Harald Jähner, Shaun Whiteside - translator
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
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How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust - and features over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.
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Where are the photos?
- By Cassandra on 01-17-22
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A History of Future Cities
- By: Daniel Brook
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 13 hrs
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A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?
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Engaging and Memorable
- By Marcus Vorwaller on 04-15-14
By: Daniel Brook
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Afropean
- Notes from Black Europe
- By: Johny Pitts
- Narrated by: Johny Pitts
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In the face of growing racial discrimination, anti-immigrant sentiment and the spectre of terrorism looming large over an economically stricken continent, Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities: too indelibly woven into Europe to identify with Africa and yet struggling with outdated ideas of what it means to be European.
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Excellent
- By Suzie M on 04-04-24
By: Johny Pitts
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Three Tigers, One Mountain
- A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan
- By: Michael Booth
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
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There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.
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Not much new here if you are already familiar
- By Neil Richert on 07-13-20
By: Michael Booth
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The Invention of Sicily
- A Mediterranean History
- By: Jamie Mackay
- Narrated by: John Lee
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Sicily has always acted as a gateway between Europe and the rest of the world. Fought over by the Phoenicians and Greeks, the Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, and the Spanish and the French for thousands of years, Sicily became a unique melting pot where diverse traditions merged, producing a unique heritage and singular culture. In this fascinating account of the island from the earliest times to the present day, author and journalist Jamie Mackay leads us through this most elusive of places.
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Wonderful overview of Sicily
- By jay lazier on 01-28-24
By: Jamie Mackay
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City
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- By: P. D. Smith
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
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For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers - the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.
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Commuters companion
- By Anna on 05-19-13
By: P. D. Smith
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Fracture
- Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 17 hrs
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When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell-shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: The old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.
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Lots of good trivia information
- By Jean on 07-23-15
By: Philipp Blom
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Those Who Forget
- By: Geraldine Schwarz
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
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During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer - those who followed the current. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her grandfather took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology.
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Not what it purports to be
- By DPM on 10-10-20
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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Like the revolutions, it got off to a good start
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What listeners say about The Soviet Century
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- J. H. Robinson
- 07-28-24
Great work
10/10 work on the history of every aspect of the Soviet Union. Should be required reading.
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- evboy
- 05-27-23
Yes, it is long but,
Very much worth reading if one wants to grasp the inner workings and life within the Soviet system. In the West, particularly during the Cold War when we were all under the threat of mutually assured destruction from nuclear weapons, no one seemed to
fully grasp what life was like in the Soviet Union or how it came to be that way. The author does an excellent job of spelling out the evolution that came about from the Revolution. The narrator does a superb job with this book, and is perhaps one of the best narrators I have heard on Audible.
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- Noah
- 07-19-23
Perfect for scholars, General in-depth overview
This is a very long book, but understandably so. It contains a lifetime of perspectives on the Soviet Union, discussing family life, political change, and the culture of the Soviet Union in sometimes excruciating detail. Audiences look for a concise look into the USSR and the culture of "the people" will be very pleased, although there is far less about the outer republics, These areas would rightly deserve their own section.
Bar an in-depth study in Post-Soviet studies journals, papers, and other obscura, you will not find a more comprehensive general source. What it lacks in specificity on some of the outer republics and their experience, it makes up for in discussing the culture of the Soviet Union. It is a must read companion for any scholar or layperson that wants to dive behind the broad swaths of the Russian/Soviet subjects on Audible, which often repeat the same stories and narratives to a disappointing effect.
I highly recommend this audio book for those looking for a general perspective with high levels of detail. However, it does suffer from an academic style and long winded sentences. If you can handle thirty hours of often very depressing and academic stylized writing, you will get a lot out of this.
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- Ninza
- 05-24-23
Long winded book
This books is tedious to listening to as the author writes in a long winded way and talks about irrelevant stuff. As a result I wasn’t able to finish listening to this long book. It should be rewritten after removing 2/3 of long winded chapters.
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