Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, by Mark B. Smith
In his review of Exit Stalin, a Wall Street Journal critic made some doubtful assertions. He claimed that the author, Cambridge history professor Mark B. Smith, fell into the old left trap of extolling Lenin as the benevolent visionary and denouncing Stalin as an unfaithful servant who perverted the path of Bolshevism. In fact, Smith does no such thing. He writes plainly enough that Marxism’s “Leninist variant was based on extremism and ruthlessness, not compromise and compassion.” Smith calls out “the cold, modernizing imperatives” in the revolutionary vision of Stalin’s rival, Trotsky. The Bolsheviks, Smith writes, “were aggressively intolerant and obsessively pure minded”; they “grabbed power while their rivals dithered and used violence to keep it.”
Exit Stalin is not a chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution, a biography of Lenin or an account of Stalin’s murderous regime, but an assessment of what came after. Despite orchestrated displays of grief over his death, Smith makes clear that most of Stalin’s minions breathed sighs of relief. Exit Stalin asserts that even the worst of them, the heinous Lavrenty Beria, chief of the secret police, wanted to reduce the prison population and “eliminate Stalinism from the surface of Soviet life.” A coup toppled and killed Beria, and in the jockeying for power, a striver of working-class origins, Nikita Khruschev, rose to the top. Smith makes no attempt to dry-clean his spotted record. He calls Khruschev “the Man of the People with Blood on his Hands.”
The thesis behind Exit Stalin is not that Khruschev and his successors created a socialist utopia, even if that was his deluded aspiration, but that conditions in the Soviet Union improved for most of its citizens. Under Khrushev, massive modern housing construction granted privacy for families that had been forced to live in communal squalor. Most never became homeowners in the Western sense, but growing numbers were given—after enduring a waiting list—secure rights of occupancy to apartments or shares in coop buildings. (Naturally, the Communist elite had first pick.) Censorship remained but loosened. Writers, filmmakers, artists of all sorts could tip-toe carefully through the moral dilemmas of Soviet life. Under Stalin, the merest hint that all was not well was punished by slave labor or death.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The Khruschev years have been called the Thaw as Stalin’s ice-cold legacy unfroze without entirely melting. Smith acknowledges the resulting fog, “the blurred edges and hazy moral zones of de-Stalinization.”
Khruschev proclaimed that a version of Marx’s utopia would emerge in the Soviet Union by 1980. Although the date passed, Soviet civilization continued to evolve under increasing pressure from the Afghan war, its own unworkable economy and the examples of Western democracy and consumer capitalism that filtered through an increasingly porous Iron Curtain. “Everything about Gorbachev’s politics and career was a product of Soviet civilization”—and no one suspected when he took charge in 1985 that the Soviet Union would dissolve within six years. Smith summarizes his unhappy thoughts about a post-Soviet civilization imposed by surveillance and violence. Unlike the Wall Street Journal critic, Smith hesitates to draw a definitive, one-answer-for-all questions conclusion about a history still in flux.
Get Exit Stalin on Amazon here.
Paid link
