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.Smith’s history is not the first to meet this fate. When I began writing a new biography of my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev — the Soviet premier who initiated de-Stalinization in 1956 — in 2000, it was already more than a history book, because criticism of Khrushchev’s actions (which many called a betrayal) were running rampant in Russia. By the time the book was published in Russia in 2024, its relevance was inescapable.This was, after all, nearly two decades after Putin began his slow rehabilitation of Stalin’s image, telegraphing his plans to unravel whatever messy progress Russia had made toward democratization. And it was just two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which ushered in not only a protracted war against Ukraine’s people and infrastructure, but also a sharp crackdown on dissent within Russia.