Mark B. Smith – författare

'Superb... Immensely important... This is a tragic story, and Smith tells it magnificently' The TelegraphOne of the most anticipated books of 2026 according to Financial Times and New StatesmanAn extraordinarily atmospheric and powerful history of the world's largest state and its decline and fall With Stalin's death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place, but one which became more predictable for its citizens and one which made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country that the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s.Mark B. Smith's remarkable 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 - has 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 21st century.

'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.

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.

Within fifteen years of the end of the Second World War, many tens of millions of Soviet city dwellers had been rehoused—liberated from shelters and overcrowded communal dwellings—and the paradox of housing ownership rights under proto-communism had been clarified. The transformation of the Soviet cityscape and of popular living conditions underwrote many other changes in Soviet life. In this first, full-length study of one of the major social reforms of twentieth-century European history, Smith presents an analysis built on hundreds of previously unexplored sources that include papers from state and municipal archives, material from the popular and professional press, legal tracts, films, novels, and personal accounts. Property of Communists makes two substantial contributions to historical scholarship. First, it challenges the commonplace belief that the housing program was entirely a post-Stalin reform and discusses in detail its wartime and late Stalinist origins as well as its escalation under Khrushchev. Second, the originality of Smith's study involves property relations, as he demonstrates that the Soviet housing stock was never a monolithic item of state ownership, but was the subject of multiple tenures that invested the individual resident with substantial rights of possession. With its wide chronological framing, its reappraisal of the status of property and ownership in the first communist society, and its anchoring in comparative history, this provocative book will appeal to a broad audience of European historians and Soviet scholars and students.