A magisterial, revisionist narrative history of the Soviet Union in its post-Stalin heyday, bringing a forgotten society to vivid life and offering a new explanation for how it suddenly collapsed.

In the aftermath of Joseph Stalin’s ironfisted rule, the Soviet Union was at a crossroads. Would it break from the dictator’s brutal regime or continue the campaign of violence and fear? As historian Mark B. Smith shows in Exit Stalin, the answer was both. Smith tells the story of the Soviet Union from Gagarin to Gorbachev, shedding light on how a moderated ideology of Bolshevism and the practices of central planning played out in the everyday lives of Soviet citizens. As he reveals, the Soviet world encompassed a host of contradictions, featuring nomenklatura restaurants, children’s Pioneer camps, May Day parades, and collective farms alongside corruption scandals, KGB crackdowns, espionage, and censorship. The result was the emergence of a distinctive and functioning civilization, a far cry from the vicious totalitarian state of the West’s imagination. A brilliantly original narrative of everyday life in the late Soviet Union, Exit Stalin also presents a new account of its end, showing how a series of unexpected decisions unraveled the entire project.