I found it very difficult to get both of them in the book and found myself saying sort of this happened, but also this happened all the time. But actually these things existed alongside each other, not necessarily as contrast. So you could have a person experiencing both the oppression and happiness in their own lives at the same time. Then you had people who only had one or the other side and everybody thinks that their life story is somewhat reflective of the entire state. I think what I found talking to people was that it completely depended whether they were willing to live with the oppression in exchange for social mobility.
Adam Rutherford asks what ordinary life was like in the Soviet Union and how far its collapse helps to explain Russia today.
Karl Schlögel is one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union. In his latest book, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (translated by Rodney Livingstone), he recreates an encyclopaedic and richly detailed history of daily life, both big and small. He examines the planned economy, the railway system and the steel city of Magnitogorsk as well as cookbooks, parades and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow.
The historian Katja Hoyer presents a more nuanced picture of life in East Germany, far from the caricature often painted in the West. In Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 she acknowledges the oppression and hardship often faced by ordinary people, but argues that this now-vanished society was also home to its own distinctive and rich social and cultural landscape.
But what did it feel like to live through the fall of communism and then democracy? These are the questions Adam Curtis looked to reveal in his 7-part television series, Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone (available on BBC iPlayer). The archive footage from thousands of hours of tapes filmed by BBC crews across the country records the lives of Russians at every level of society as their world collapsed around them.
Producer: Katy Hickman