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
