The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

"Then, in 2020 or so, I was commissioned to write The Shortest History of the Soviet Union . That was really interesting to me, because I had been around for quite a lot of the Soviet Union, maybe about half. I first went there as a graduate exchange student in 1966. The Soviet Union had then collapsed in 1991, and thirty years later seemed a good time to look back at it and reflect on, ‘What was all that about?’ That was a big challenge, I can tell you. Not only did I have to get in all the important things that happened in the Soviet Union, but because of the way it collapsed into constituent national republics—which became countries like Ukraine and Georgia—I had to run that theme through the whole book. There are 16 different republics! The final thing to say about writing The Shortest of the Soviet Union is that, as historians, when we offer a historical explanation, we tend to suggest that things had to happen. Whether or not we think that or not, we imply that things are inevitable, because we’re giving this great explanation of how they happened. With the collapse in 1991, you had something that surprised everybody, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. That is prima facie evidence that contingency played a big part in the collapse. So I was examining the question, ‘Can you explain to readers why something happened without implying—which, in this case, I felt would be really quite wrong—that it had to happen and no way it couldn’t happen the way it did?’ Yes, that was an even shorter book. It’s part of a series where you take some big event, and look at the consequences that flow from it. That was interesting because, first of all, I like the death scene. We have eyewitness reports about it, which we might get to later. But we also have a recent film by Armando Iannucci called The Death of Stalin , which covers the ground of my second chapter. I found it fun to play off that. Then I have a look at how the death played internally. What are the reactions to it? How did it play externally? What does the West think about it? The chapter that was maybe the most fun to write was about Stalin’s ghost. What are the arguments about the legacy of Stalin and Stalinism? This became a central political issue: how much do we want to keep of Stalinism, and how much do we want to get rid of? No, probably if I were to pick my favorites, it would be a slightly different list. Basically, I picked books that are either always in my mind as representing a particular take or aspect of the Soviet Union, or else that I’m often going back to. I was not going for historical work. I was looking for memoirs and literature, and I wanted things that had a very distinctive voice. I was also trying to get a range of voices: I didn’t want them all to have the same kinds of insights on the Soviet Union."