No Exit from Stalin |
MOSCOW—An account of how Stalinism was dismantled in the Soviet Union, published more than seven decades after the tyrant’s death, should be one of those books you pick up to discover, or rediscover, the past. But 26 years into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, the University of Cambridge historian Mark B. Smith’s Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953–1991 reads more like a manual—a means of decoding Russia’s recent past and perhaps even getting a glimpse of its future trajectory.