The Soviet Century – Archaeology of a Lost World 
by Karl Schlogel
Princeton University Press 

SINCE the end of the Soviet era, there has been many a book documenting its rise and fall and inevitably a lot of these have taken a fittingly political and historical approach. 

Their quality, however, leaves much to be desired. All too often they have been hastily put together cold war-style pot boilers and cliché-ridden end of history rehashes.

More recently, however, there have been a number of other books, many lavishly produced, which have started to try to capture people’s lived experience of actually existing socialism, documenting everything from Red Army monuments to the murals on the Moscow metro. Writers like Owen Hatherley have also pioneered more serious studies of socialist architecture and urban planning, his well-written explorations having become particularly good examples of this new genre of considered Soviet archaeology.