How Best to Look at Russian History

Many history books about Russia and the Soviet Union published in recent years are microhistories: scholarship that looks at the past as through a microscope, prioritizing the minutiae of everyday life over wars, government changes, economic cycles, and other large-scale events.

One recent example is Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017), about the private lives of Bolshevik elites who shared an apartment building. Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (2023) puts the material in materialism, exploring Soviet existence by way of ordinary household items like wrapping paper and Krasnaya Moskva perfume bottles. More recently still, The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-lived Victory over Totalitarianism (2025) by Mikhail Zygar covered the Soviet Union’s final years through hundreds of interviews, including one with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, Mark B. Smith, W.W. Norton & Co., 576 pp., $49.99, July 2026

Cambridge historian Mark B. Smith’s Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, released in January, has much in common with these other titles. Like Slezkine, Smith looks under the hood of Soviet state machinery, revealing its many parts and how they fit together. Like Schlögel, he emphasizes the tangible aspects of history, like the 7,000 loudspeakers installed inside the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. And like Zygar, who grew up in the Soviet Union during Gorbachev’s reforms, he inserts himself into the narrative: The book concludes with lessons learned from his wife, whom he met in Moscow and who died of cancer shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On its surface, Exit Stalin—which spans the time between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s death and the country’s collapse—is yet another attempt at using microhistory to resuscitate a society and way of life that no longer exists. More than any of his peers, though, Smith also wrestles with the limitations of microhistory and its ability to make sense of Russia today. “[D]id the Soviet past cause the war in Ukraine or make it unlikely?” he asks in the afterword—a question every book on Russia must now grapple with. He did not find a clear answer and doubts he ever will.

Though often traced to Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s 1976 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, the origins of microhistory arguably stretch back as far as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the great Russian novel’s philosophical epilogue argues that history is not—as Thomas Carlyle famously put it—“the biography of great men,” but the sum of all human activity: an infinitely complex story that cannot be simplified without sacrifice.

Microhistories of the Soviet Union mostly started appearing after its collapse, partly thanks to previously unavailable archival documents and partly due to the disappearance of ideological constraints that, among other things, discredited individual agency. Restoring personality and agency to those who were silenced in the gulags or stayed quiet to avoid them, these histories were—in a way—a belated challenge to the remark often attributed to Stalin that a million deaths are only a statistic.

A hospital for Gulag prisoners working on the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal in Russia on July 25, 1933.Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

By his own admission, Smith’s turn to microhistory—after a previous book in 2019, The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It, that was more removed and conceptual—stemmed from a loss of confidence in his own methods. All his research had told him a full-scale invasion of Ukraine would never happen. His Russian wife, however—who “valued individual personhood,” “distrusted abstract collectives,” and listened to her own lived experience—correctly guessed the opposite. After years of covering the ensuing war on his blog, Beyond the Kremlin, Smith eventually arrived at the opinion that scholarship and expert analysis could not do better than the on-the-ground knowledge gathered by journalists and others.

Smith also credits his approach writing Exit Stalin to the Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, a major influence on Russian microhistory and author of Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013). “I don’t ask people about socialism,” Alexievich writes in the introduction to her book, for which, like Zygar would do later, she interviewed hundreds of people about their memories of living under communist rule. “I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life.”

Exit Stalin dwells on sundry details, too, like fan mail addressed to Daniil Granin, a popular author who criticized the Soviet system under Nikita Khrushchev, or the so-called comrades’ courts that administered “revolutionary justice” for neighborly disputes. The scope of Smith’s research is as broad as circumstances allow, because “no group, not even the Politburo, had a monopoly on the meaning … of Sovietness.”

Similar to Secondhand Time, information in Exit Stalin is presented mostly as is, with minimal commentary on their causality. By tolerating contradictions that other historians might ignore or try to straighten out, Smith demonstrates that the Soviet collapse—much like the so-called thaw that followed Stalin’s death—was not inevitable but contingent and therefore avoidable.

By accepting contingency, Smith not only pushes back against the idea that the Soviet collapse guaranteed Putin’s rise to power, but also that Russia is stuck in an unending cycle where one authoritarian regime is replaced by another. The latter view is familiar from Russian literature and Soviet dissident culture, but it is also rooted in Western prejudice: in the belief that the Russian people, like those of former European colonies, are fundamentally incapable of cultivating democratic governance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin walks prior to his inauguration ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow on May 7, 2018.Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP via Getty Images

Microhistorians seek the general by way of the particular—or, in Alexievich’s words, to “chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary.” Her hope for Secondhand Time—as well as many of her other books, including the similarly structured The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II—was that by bringing together a vast variety of voices, a single chorus would naturally emerge.

In Exit Stalin, this doesn’t really happen. Sources frequently talk over or past one another, creating a cacophony that bewilders as much as it enlightens. Smith presents a civilization defined by perpetual uncertainty on one page and monotony on the next—describing Mikhail Gorbachev as both “the last revolutionary” and a Western-style social democrat whose reforms betrayed the causes he claimed to support.

Smith is far from the only Soviet historian to end up with an oxymoron. At one point, he quotes the political scientist Vladimir Shlapentokh, who referred to the Soviet Union as a “normal totalitarian society” that enjoyed internal stability despite—and because of—its systematic brutality. Elsewhere, he mentions Alexei Yurchak, who wrote of the Soviet collapse that “everything was for ever until it was no more.”

In theory, history viewed through a microscope is supposed to produce a sharper image than when it is viewed through a telescope. In practice, however, one can be as fuzzy as the other. Where a “macrohistorian” might gloss over significant details, microhistorians can sometimes miss the forest for the trees. One runs the risk of overgeneralizing, the other of misattributing a deeper meaning to singular occurrences. Neither tendency is especially useful for someone who looks at the past to make sense of the present.

Another potential pitfall of microhistory is that, by concentrating on the historical relevance of subjects outside or at the bottom of existing power structures, the microhistorian misconstrues the dynamic between ruler and ruled. Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, though a compelling portrait of Soviet nostalgia, at times suggests that Putin is merely responding to a preexistent public demand for dignity and purpose, rather than reigning through intimidation and propaganda. At worst, her interviews give the impression that Russians control Putin rather than the other way around; at best, that they exist in a symbiotic relationship where one cannot be separated from the other.

An activist of the National Liberation Movement, a Kremlin-backed pro-Putin organization, holds a flag with a portrait of Putin in front of the State Duma building in Moscow on Dec. 19, 2023. Getty Images

Exit Stalin avoids this pitfall by extending its microhistorical approach to the highest corridors of power. Rather than concentrating exclusively on dissidents, ordinary citizens, and low-level bureaucrats, Smith also studies the interior and material lives of those at the very top of the Soviet food chain. Of these, Khrushchev and Gorbachev emerge as his two main characters, and it is in juxtaposing them that his research proves most relevant to understanding what is happening in Russia today.

Exit Stalin does not simply ask why the Soviet Union collapsed. Instead, it asks why Soviet civilization survived the liberalizing reforms of the thaw, but not those of glasnost and perestroika. In his search for an answer, Smith does not explain why the Soviet Union led to Putin so much as how Putin himself has managed to stay in power—and what might happen once he’s gone.

The biggest and simplest reason that the Soviet Union did not survive Gorbachev is because Gorbachev, unlike Khrushchev, was unwilling to use state violence to crush his opposition. Although Khrushchev condemned Stalin’s purges and relaxed censorship of art and media, he also sent in soldiers to crush the anti-Soviet Hungarian Revolution in 1956, an example his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would follow in response to the Prague Spring a decade later. When more of Moscow’s satellite states moved away from communism in the late 1980s, the Kremlin did nothing—and so the Warsaw Pact dissolved.

Coercion and suppression, far from abandoned following de-Stalinization, not only remained a core part of Soviet civilization from beginning to end but also played a crucial role in ensuring its survival. Agreeing with Zygar and others that the Soviet Union fell as a result of internal as opposed to external factors, Exit Stalin implies that Putin’s government will not crumble unless he himself allows this to happen by abandoning suppression. And just as Khrushchev preserved the Soviet system after denouncing Stalin, a future president could tear down Putin’s image while still perpetuating his nationalist, imperialist, Orthodox Christian “Russian world” ideology.

Bystanders gather in front of a board displaying an image of Putin and a quote from his recent address to the nation—”We had no other chance but to act differently” in invading Ukraine—in St. Petersburg on Feb. 25, 2022.Sergei Mikhailichenko/AFP via Getty Images

Coming to Exit Stalin after reading Tolstoy or Alexievich, one might be surprised at Smith’s conclusion that the Soviet Union fell not as a result of the cumulative actions of all Soviet citizens, but the inaction of a single person. Does doing so not run counter to the spirit of his methodology?

One way to reconcile this tension is by noting that, for Smith, the decision to opt for a microhistorical approach is first and foremost an ethical one. In the introduction, he writes that if he were to tell but one story about Soviet history, it would be that of Masha, a character from Vasily Grossman’s novel Everything Flows. Based on a real person, she was one of Stalin’s statistics sent to the gulag on trumped up charges, where loss and hardship eventually brought her to the “realization that all hope had vanished.”

After sharing a snippet of her story, which survives only through a work of fiction, Smith asserts that anyone who argues “a kind of normal life emerged during and after Khrushchev’s Thaw must first look Masha in the eyes;” in other words, historians of the thaw cannot ignore—or even attempt to reconcile it with—what came before. For many microhistorians, this assertion also rings true for writing about Soviet history in general.