And How History Can Resolve It

The Russia Anxiety

'This exciting and provocative book blows apart misconceptions about the Russian past' Lara Douds, Times Higher Education 
 
Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world. It is both European and exotic, powerful and weak, brilliant and flawed. Why are we so afraid of it? 
 
 Time and again, we judge Russia by unique standards. We have usually assumed that it possesses higher levels of cunning, malevolence and brutality. Yet the country has more often than not been a crucial ally, not least against Napoleon and in the two world wars. We admire its music and its writers. We lavish praise on the Russian soul. And still we think of Russia as a unique menace. What is it about this extraordinary country that consistently provokes such excessive responses? And why is this so dangerous? 
 
Ranging from the earliest times to the present, Mark B. Smith's remarkable new book is a history of this 'Russia Anxiety'. Whether ally or enemy, superpower or failing state, Russia grips our imagination and fuels our fears unlike any other country. This book shows how history itself offers a clearer view and a better future.

A fluent meditation on Russian history, a gallant attempt to reason with those who believe that Russia is condemned to an endless cycle of failed reform and resurgent authoritarianism ... a welcome antidote to the overwrought stuff about Russia so widespread in the West today.

Compelling... Russian history is many layered, Smith argues, and the deeper we dig the more apparent it becomes that the tropes of Russophobic history bear little or no relation to reality ... As a Russian history specialist, he deploys his deep knowledge of the country's culture, society and peoples to capture with verve and imagination the grand sweep of its history, and combines this with an astute commentary on contemporary politics.

Fizzing with energy, Mark B. Smith's book explodes many myths about the Russians and compels us to reflect critically on ourselves.

Simon Dixon, author of Catherine the Great

In this exciting and provocative book, Mark B. Smith blows apart misconceptions about the Russian past ... Smith's energy and dynamism carry the day.

The author is a highly informed guide, [who] prompts a review of prejudices ... Smith makes an important fundamental point: we must talk to the Russians and live alongside them.

Smith makes a very strong case that Russia's past needs to be considered as much more complex than it generally is. For that reason alone, this book deserves a large audience ... The Russia Anxiety is a very welcome book. It provides a provocative and much needed analysis of Russian history which ably shows the oversimplified nature of most Western understandings of Russia.

Paul Robinson, author of RUSSIAN CONSERVATISM and Professor of History at the University of Ottawa

The Russia Anxiety is a valuable effort to assess the long history of the West's Russia-related worries ... Regrettably, more than five years [since the annexation of Crimea], the United States seems no closer to developing either a strategy or a policy to manage its relationship with Russia. Mark Smith's provocative book won't solve that problem alone, but it does offer some valuable guidance in thinking about solutions.

Mark B. Smith teaches in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev and the blog Beyond the Kremlin.

Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world. It is both European and exotic, powerful and weak, brilliant and flawed. Why are we so afraid of it? 
 
Time and again, we judge Russia by unique standards. We have usually assumed that it possesses higher levels of cunning, malevolence and brutality than other countries. Yet it has more often than not been a crucial ally, not least against Napoleon and in the two world wars. We admire its music and its writers. We lavish praise on the Russian soul. And still we think of Russia as a unique menace. What is it about this extraordinary country that consistently provokes such excessive responses? And why is this so dangerous? 
 
Mark B. Smith's remarkable new book is a history of this 'Russia Anxiety'. Whether Russia has been ally or enemy, superpower or failing state, it has always had a exceptional status in our imagination.

Mark B. Smith

Accessible and comprehensive … Smith's authentic account of Soviet life is enlivened by biographical sketches and his deep understanding of Russian culture and society

Deeply informed … A significant book for anybody who seeks to understand modern Russia

Smoothly readable … A fascinating chronicle of the Soviet Union … Exit Stalin offers a superb history of the rise and fall of a utopian state and its dangerously deluded ideology

Superb... Immensely important... This is a tragic story, and Smith tells it magnificently

Richly detailed... Mark Smith’s impressive history gives readers a powerful sense of what it was like to live under communism in the four decades between Stalin’s death and the country’s disintegration at the end of the cold war

Exit Stalin asks a timely question: what is life in a non-democratic modern society actually like? Smith builds up a picture of an entire culture, a way of life, a vivid sense of an entire disappeared world and forces the question: would you accept the price?

Vivid ... Excellent ... An essential and accessible addition to the library of Soviet and post-Soviet studies

Despite the vast complexities and scope of Exit Stalin, Smith manages to fully immerse the reader throughout ... What is clear, even within the first few pages, is that this is a landmark work on Russian history, one like no other, and a gold mine filled with emotional power and unknown stories

Meticulously researched ... For anyone interested in a dispassionate overview of the late Soviet period, it makes for fascinating reading'

A sweeping social history of Soviet life in the decades between Stalin’s death and the union’s collapse … Smith’s great achievement is to have written this civilization from the inside out — in the food queues and the bookshops, in the guitar songs and the blat networks, in the millions of new apartments with their own kitchen tables

Although it died less than half a century ago, the Soviet Union, even to many who experienced first hand its complexities, contradictions, cruelties, and moments of creativity, can seem as if it belongs to ancient history. Mark B. Smith brings this lost world to life through a powerful combination of exhaustive scholarship, lucid prose, and subtle insight

Well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history. It makes the time and place imaginable

Where Smith’s analysis shines is in his ability to move his narrative from politics to culture to history to personal stories, thereby capturing the rich texture of a society in transition. Rarely has a non-Russian writer demonstrated such a profound understanding of the cultural details and idiosyncrasies that have influenced the formation of Russian society after Stalin

To this enthralling journey across an archipelago of twentieth-century Russian people and situations, Smith brings deep historical knowledge, analytical prowess and formidable emotional intelligence. At the end of it you have not just learned something, you have been somewhere. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary Russia and its people

The most insightful and accurate cultural history of the Soviet Union that I have encountered, and a very good read, to boot

The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991

With Stalin's death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place. Yet it also became one that was more predictable for its citizens, and made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s. 
 
Mark B. Smith's original and evocative book recreates the day-to-day life of this vast state, the largest ever to exist. What was life like in a country which made such absolute claims for the future, which claimed to be on its way to creating a people's utopia and which, like the USA, owned enough atomic weapons to end human life on Earth? 
 
Exit Stalin is filled with extraordinary stories about those who lived in the USSR and the distinctive and functioning civilization that they built. Many of them embraced its values, understood its goals and could not imagine life outside such a vastly ambitious and progressive project. The shortages, coercion and incompetence that underlay the USSR - and which by the late 1980s would doom it - have to be understood alongside the acceptance it always had from many of its citizens. And this in turn is a crucial issue for understanding Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century.

Mark B. Smith

Books by Mark B. Smith

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