Sana Krasikov's The Patriots

I probably lack the kind of formal literary education to properly define the genre of historical fiction. However, my untutored opinion is that historical fiction different from the ordinary variety of fiction only in its overweening obsession with historical verisimilitude.  However we define historical fiction, in recent months I've been making an effort to delve into non-Russian novels that dwell upon Russian historical themes.  To be sure, the term "non-Russian" can be almost as problematic as the term historical fiction. After all, many American, Western European, and Eastern European authors, emigrated from Russia or its border states, or have relatives who have done so.  And these authors have written some of the best historical fiction around.  Witness Sana Krasikov's wonderful novel, The Patriots, a well-told, emotionally gut-retching tale which helps readers to understand important aspects of the twentieth century of both Russia and America. 

In her wonderfully suspenseful book, Krasikov (a Jewish New Yorker with roots in both the Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia) manages to tell the story of three generations of American interaction with Russia.  As the author acknowledges in her end-notes, the book draws upon the experience of American emigres documented by the author of The Foresaken:  An American Tragedy in Stalinist Russia (See my earlier post on the excellent book).  For Florence Fein, a left-leaning socialist Jew, is lured to the Soviet Union by love, a sense of adventure, and the promise of a bright socialist future.  However, over time her dream of a life on the vanguard of history sours.  The Soviet Union is, after all, was experiencing a painful transformation to modernity, even without the added stresses of totalitarianism government. Eventually, and almost inevitably, Florence's American ties prove to be a vulnerability, and she ends up stripped of her passport and without any means of escaping the world's first socialist state.  Not long afterward, she is arbitrarily convicted of subversion and thrown into the Gulag, like so many other denizens of Stalin's Soviet Union. 

Many other books have been written about the Soviet experience under Stalin.  Some have been covered in this blog.  What makes The Patriots unique is that it continuously ties the Russian experience to the American.  For Florence's American experience in the Depression makes her eager to go to Russia, and her grandson's search for adventure makes him willing to try to cash in on his Russian heritage by moving to Russia during the post-communist era of Russian corruption, cronyism, mobster rule, and capitalist exuberance.  The overall lessons of this book are simple enough.  First, Russian and American histories are inextricably linked to one another (and both involve the Jewish experience).  Second, citizens of the twentieth century have highly fluid identities.  Mother, child, and grandchild, at times feel both comfortable and alienated by both Russia and America.  Third, Russia continues to be a land of tragedy.  Under Stalin, people lived in fear of expressing any open opinion.  They dreaded their neighbors, and expected to be removed from their homes at any hour of the night.  But under Putin, life remained chaotic, with criminals continuing to exercise arbitrary authority over individuals who got in their way.  The Patriots is a sophisticated book. If a comparison must be made, it is to Anthony Marra's novel, The Tsar of Love and Techno, since that emotionally searing books also tracks twentieth century history across several generations, and anchors its plot-line in Russian tragedy, i.e., Stalinist repression and the conflict in Chechnya.

Eugenia Ginzburg and Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism

Does the literature of the gulag capture the essence of the Soviet experience during the 1930s? Unprecedented numbers of Russian citizens (as well as many other categories of people) found themselves in a Siberia work camp during this period, and those who escaped the gulag were very likely to spend a considerable amount of energy anticipating execution or arrest.  But can arbitrary imprisonment and twenty year terms of hard labor capture the experience of a whole generation of Soviet citizens, many of whom surely supported Stalin and the Bolshevik project in general?  After all, camp memoirs reveal the extent to which even Soviet prisoners could defend the Soviet leader by claiming that Yezhov or Beria, and not Stalin, were to blame for prosecutorial or prison guard excesses.  If only somebody could get word to Stalin about what was happening in his name, the world would be put right again. 

Anya Bremzen, author of a wonderful memoir entitled Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, recently noted the problem with understanding the second full decade of Bolshevik rule.  The 1930s were a schizophrenic episode. You might well have been swept up in the purges, but if you remained “free” from arrest, you were very likely to be immersed in a state of “totalitarian joy,” i.e., an unending series of Communist festivals to celebrate Soviet achievement.  Understanding this dualism, it’s useful to read a book like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey Into the Whirlwind in the context of a larger book about totalitarianism such as Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism.  On the one hand, Ginzburg’s book details the madness of Stalinism in which a loyal and dedicated Bolshevik leader could find oneself under arrest for no apparent reason at all.  Ginzburg’s classic tale of the Great Terror describes a typical cycle of Soviet justice, including arbitrary arrest, family disgrace (followed by imprisonment of both her husband and parents), psychological and physical torture, summary military trial, extended sentence, prolonged solitary confinement, barbaric transportation to the edges of Siberia, and brutal work conditions in the taiga.  On the other hand, Arendt’s theory of totalitarian government reveals that such a cycle of arbitrary terror was intrinsically linked to the nature of the Bolshevik’s ideology, an ideology that required an unending pool of enemies.

What exactly is totalitarianism?  Arendt’s treatise on the subject, groundbreaking at the time of publication, remains acutely perceptive.  In some ways, Arendt made the original argument that you can’t understand Stalinism without looking closely at Hitlerism.  In both cases, the ruling party became almost synonymous with the state.  Beyond that, the party made radical claims to represent all of humanity.  The case for fascism representing a claim to global government is perhaps controversial.  However, Arendt points out that fascist parties sprang up everywhere in Europe even as the Nazi platform clearly called for the conquest of large portions of the globe.  The communist plan for global government is much clearer,  although Arendt must remind us not to take Stalin’s call for “socialism in one country” too seriously.  Once the totalitarian party makes a claim to global suzerainty, it’s not hard to begin to treat its citizens as traitors, and foreign citizens as either natural saboteurs or spies.

The radical nature of totalitarian government expresses itself in another way.  According to both Nazism and Stalinism, the party is a movement rather than a traditional government,  If the party is a movement, it must continuously encounter new categories of enemies.  Arendt’s claim is that Nazism constantly found new enemies, and would have done so long after it had eliminated the last Jew from any of its territories.  The Nazis, after all, had already declared war against Slavic peoples, and indeed various categories of German people, including Communists and the allegedly “un-hygienic.”  So too did Bolshevism continue to identify new opponents long after subduing any hint of opposition from former aristocrats or bourgeois intellectuals.

In fact, Arendt notes that totalitarian regimes thrive on the logic of arbitrary terror as described by Ginzburg in Journey Into the Whirlwind.  According to Arendt, totalitarian governments are politically powerful but economically chaotic and inefficient.    Ginzburg’s memoir proves this rule.  On the one hand, Stalin had turned all Soviet citizens into potential spies, complicit in the country’s perpetual state of terror.  The fact that all citizens could be arrested for no reason whatsoever also meant that the entire country had reason to worry.  Indeed,  Stalinism, like Nazism, had essentially made the very idea of rebellion irrelevant.  In mere despotism, a man or woman might decide to oppose the government and court death as a consequence of his brave act of defiance.  In totalitarianism, rebels were likely to be put to death for their opposition, but so too were perfectly loyal supporters of the system such as Ginzburg, a professor of Leninist history. If Old Bolsheviks suffered and died, what would genuine opposition to Stalinism have really signified? 

Ginzburg’s memoir also illustrates the chronic inefficiency of totalitarianism.  Over and over again, the Bolshevik government sacrificed economic efficiency at the alter of ideology.   Hundreds of thousands of productive and even largely loyal citizens were thrown into the most barbaric and disastrously inefficient work camps system imaginable.  Many died for little or no reason at every stage of the journey between arrest and productive labor.  The parallel with Nazism is obvious.  As Arendt reminds us, the Nazi economy and war effort were repeatedly undermined by the racist ideological aspirations of Hitler. 

On a mundane level, Arendt explains the logic of totalitarianism by discussing a fictitious request from Moscow for more pipes.  In a traditional setting, an economic logic would dictate why more pipes are needed.  Under totalitarianism, nobody but the secret police can really be certain why more pipes have been ordered.  Does the factory need the pipes to increase output?  Yes, perhaps, but even if this is true, why is more output needed?  Does one agency want to embarrass another by increasing production at this factory?  Does someone in Moscow want to blame the factory’s managers for overproduction?  According to Arendt, nobody but the secret police—ultimately controlled by Stalin—can know the answer to questions such as these.  In fact, both Hitler and Stalin created complex, overlapping, and even competing governmental structures.  These structures were always confusing.  The net result was that multiple and often competing policies were proposed simultaneously, which only the will of the supreme leader (expressed through the vehicle of the secret police) could resolve. 

Whether outlined by Ginzburg or Arendt, totalitarianism doesn’t seen like a very gratifying system of government.  Yet even totalitarianism has its pleasures.  For one thing, a system of perpetual purges and spectacular falls from grace offers unprecedented opportunities for career advancement.  Arendt argues that the purges inevitably implicated large numbers of new recruits in the original crimes of the Bolsheviks and Nazis.  Thus, while your own lifespan might be cut short at any moment, you might well have had the opportunity to rise to great heights before your inevitable fall from the dizzying heights of power.  These then are the joys of totalitarianism. 

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

A Soviet Dr. Seuss

Kornei Chukovsky's Diary: 1901- 1969, reveals the best and worst aspects of intellectual life in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, the celebrated children's poet, literary critic, Anglophile, and translator lived a rich, varied, and productive intellectual life during almost every phase of the communist experiment in government. Notwithstanding the work of the censures, most of Chukovsky's books and articles eventually found their way into print even during the age of Stalin. Chukowsky was not working alone. Throughout his long career he came into contact with brilliant and original thinkers and artists. On every page of the diary, one is reminded of the richness and diversity of Soviet poetry, prose, and literary culture. On the other hand, Chukovsky's Diary testifies to the enormous and sometimes violent pressure Soviet intellectuals felt from Bolshevik rulers who sought to implement an aesthetically dry and ideologically bankrupt literature of uniformity. Socialist realism, the creed of the Bolshevik cultural hierarchy, thwarted true artistry at every turn. And of course, the brutality of the state often led directly to the death of leading authors and poets, including Gumilyov, Mayakovsky, Babel, Mandelstam, and others.

Chukowsky established himself as a leading figure in Russian intelligentsia even before the First World War. He knew Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky, Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Alexander Blok, and most other major cultural and intellectual figures in St. Petersburg prior to the outbreak of war and revolution. In the aftermath of this conflict, Chukowsky maintained an awkward but generally collaborative relationship with the new revolutionary regime. But peaceful coexistence with the Communist Party was not an easy proposition and Chukowsky's journal is filled with doubt and anxiety over the artist's role in socialist society. What was his obligation, if any, to the state and its bureaucracy? To the proletariat class? To the exigencies of art, creativity and individual artistic genius? To the traditions of Russian culture, which sometimes ran counter to the interests of the Soviet Union, especially when the Russian diaspora was involved? To humanity as a whole?

Chukowsky tried to be loyal to the historical mission of the Russian intelligentsia, which seemed at first to be tethered to the health of the world's first socialist state, the USSR. Chukowsky adored Stalin and rhapsodized over the Great Leader and his Five Year Plan, although not even a diary--that intimate expression of personal feeling--can help to clarify whether Chukowsky's ideological stance was dictated by true feeling or a spirit of self-preservation in a violent dictatorship. But sometimes--and perhaps the Ukrainian famine was the first example of this--the intelligentsia's liberal mission seemed to be directly at odds with the state's mandate for grand historical change at any cost.

At times, Chukowsky's battle to reconcile his faith in Russian socialism with his humanistic tendencies and personal friendships is heart-wrenching. Take, for example, his description of his friendship with one of the Grand Old Men of Bolshevism, Zinoviev, who had been politically ostracized and was therefore now writing academic treatises on literary matters. One minute Chukowsky was a close friend and admirer of Zinoviev, the next minute he was being asked by state propaganda to believe that his erstwhile friend was a foreign spy who was engaged in a time-consuming plot to overthrown the government. The Diary suggests that Chukowsky, like many of his peers, veered between belief, unbelief, and fear for his own safety in the event that he looked too closely at the matter. Did Chukowsky write his Diary in the belief that the Cheka might oneday read its contents? It seems likely that he did, at least during the late 1930s and 1940s.

Although Chukowsky compromised with political reality on many different occasions, and probably could not have done otherwise if he expected to survive as a published author, the Soviet Union's answer to Doctor Seuss struggled mightily against the forces of repression and obscurantism in communist Russia. Again and again the Diary reveals the obstacles that Chukowsky confronted into order to limit censorship and maintain some level of integrity in the fight to keep faith with humanism, Russian cultural tradition, and literary freedom.

The forces of Soviet immorality waxed and wained. Chukowsky's biggest shock in this regard came as a result of Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956. In a moment, country's former ideological idol was overthrown and, at least for some, the dictator quickly became the very open symbol of intolerance, brutality, and ineptitude for the children's author and literary critic. In this new age of relative openness--which was not to last indefinitely--Chukowsky more allied himself more closely with the intelligentsia in opposition to official Soviet culture. While Chukowsky's daughter, Lydia, who lost a husband to Stalin's cruelty, pursued this fight much more aggressively than her father, Chukowsky became increasingly opposed to Soviet artistic strictures as he grew older. With little left to fear, and the state abandoning most of Stalin's worst tools of repression, Chukowsky became an advocate for persecuted artists such as Brodsky, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn. And as the children's author became increasingly more skeptical about the government's role in the arts, his Diary becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark corners of Soviet history, including the Gulag, the purges, the deportations, the post-revolutionary famine, War Communism, World War II, and the official literary campaigns against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko.

Slave Labor

The gulag lies at the heart of the Soviet experience. There are dozens or perhaps hundreds of excellent gulag memoirs but of course Alexander Solzhenitsyn's memoir remains the masterpiece against which all other treatments of the subject will forever be measured. Although Solzhenitsyn's brilliantly bitter indictment of the system will remain the world's best passport into Russian Communism's greatest moral disaster, Anne Applebaum's acclaimed book, Gulag: a History, is an objective and comprehensive account of the institution. Applebaum's book is nuanced and relies on almost every important historical source related to Soviet internment over the entire span of the Soviet Union's long life. Like Solzhenitsyn, Applebaum takes readers though every phase of the prisoner experience, including arbitrary arrest, painful and perfunctory trial, inhumane transportation, brutal acclimation, deadly slave labor, hospitalization, and eventual death or release.

Applebaum's book also covers the changes that occurred in the Soviet penal system over time, documenting the essential viciousness of Lenin's early policy of exile and punishment, but also acknowledging that the gulag changed over time, becoming better or worse, on the whole, according to circumstances related to political schism, collectivization, the Great Purge, industrialization, war, ethnic cleansing policies, demobilization, and peace.

Moreover, Applebaum's achievement lies in her ability to explain the diversity of experience within the camps. Not all camps were the same; and many if not most prisoners moved between them, if they did not die immediately of disease, exposure, starvation, abuse from guards and prisoners, and overwork. Additionally, the survivors' circumstances often changed dramatically, with little warning, only to change again a short while longer. Thus a prisoner could be exposed to the deadliest form of mine labor at one moment, and just a short while later put to life-saving work in the camp kitchen, before being sent to cut trees in the bitter cold without adequate clothing.

Applebaum's overall thesis seems to be that the camps were not all that far removed from the Nazi camps in terms of the suffering and death they inflicted. Even so, Applebaum acknowledges that the Soviet system was qualitatively different from the Nazi one insofar as the Soviets were often motivated by the desire to exploit slave labor as opposed to killing off enemies as an end in itself.

To be clear, the total number of gulag deaths is astronomical. However, Applebaum finds ample evidence to show that, notwithstanding an ideology that frequently dehumanized and vilified perceived class enemies, racial groups (ethnic Germans for example), or political opponents, Soviet officials not infrequently condemned overtly murderous policies, if only to improve economic results. In the end, Applebaum makes the case that the gulag was grotesquely inefficient, even as a method of achieving rapid industrialization. She also suggests--though the evidence seems somewhat more speculative--that the system functioned as it did because Stalin was personally committed to it. Involved in many details of camp policy, Stalin was a true believer in the value of the gulag economy. At first, Communists paid lip service to the notion that the labor system could transform class enemies into loyal communists and dedicated proletarians. Later, that pretense was dropped: class enemies were traitors to the state and deserved the very worst forms of punishment.

Stalin, of course, had no sympathy for class enemies, and thrived on the almost Hegelian notion that the thesis of communism depended on the antithesis of treacherous class opposition. Yet it's hard to say if his primary interest in the gulag archipelago was based on his belief that they represented a pure form of class and party justice, or whether his unrelenting support for slave labor was predicated on his rational if completely erroneous belief that slave labor represented the single most effective economic response to the problem of modernization and industrialization.

Baseball in Moscow

Revolutions are rare events so when they fail, as they most always do, they merit prolonged study. But when they succeed, they create thousands upon thousands of new social facts. This makes the Soviet Union inherently interesting. There is nothing ordinary about any aspect of the Soviet historical experience, whether we touch upon politics, economics, education, women’s history, class relations, philosophy, or the arts. On the other hand, the Soviet Revolution quickly degenerated into abject brutality. And to stand Tolstoy’s famous dictum about families on its head, all happy societies are different, but all really unhappy societies are the same. When a violent dictatorship overcomes any pretence of political or ideological opposition, what is there to differentiate it from any other violent dictatorship?

If Nazi Germany isn’t an exact replica of Soviet Russia, there are pronounced similarities. After all, when a government assumes total authority over the lives of its subjects—when any hint of ideological resistance will likely summon the executioner or, worse still, the torturer—people tend to act in exactly the same way: with fearful, understandable, and nearly total obedience. In some ways, Soviet genocidal authoritarianism tends to shut down historical inquiry. It’s one of the central problems of this blog. Since Stalin’s security forces shot between two to seven million citizens, dispatched many millions more to their almost certain deaths in the gulags, and killed off six million or more peasants via violent grain requisitions, we know that in many ways the average Russian who lived (emphasis on these two words: “who lived”) in the early decades of the Soviet experiment was frequently called upon to do one of two very simple things: suffer in silence or assume the posture if not the role of a psychopath by participating, directly or indirectly, in the murderous logic of Soviet ideology.

If this blogger sometimes forgets to dwell upon the astonishing dimensions of Soviet tyranny, it is largely because this tyranny was so lamentable that is blunts the imagination and resists the very thing that historians do, which is to “make meaning” of the past. At least on one level, there can be no meaning, or little of it, when a mass murderer is a country’s supreme leader and demi-god. Even so, the dead demand testimony. When the Polish President and his colleagues crashed in Katyn forest, where 15,000 Polish officers were murdered on Stalin’s orders, one is tempted to think that the dead may sometimes testify to the nature of crime when the living fail to do the job. At any event, many historians have done an admirable job of explaining how thoroughly immoral the Soviet regime could be.

The book, the Forsaken, is one of the best in this genre. Although it focuses its attention on the thousands of American immigrants who tried to flee the Great Depression by seeking work in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, it manages to document American suffering without losing a sense of the larger Soviet tragedy.
The author is tireless in his exposition of Stalin’s crimes. More originally, the author indicts America’s politicians (especially F.D.R. and Henry Wallace), state department and embassy officially (especially George Kennan), artistic elite (especially Robeson), business leadership (especially Ford), and journalists (especially Walter Durante) for their decisions to systematically ignore the fate of these “forsaken” Americans. In the end, the author makes a very convincing case that broad segments of America’s leading citizens bare directly moral responsibility for failing to come to terms with the evidence in front of them.

Clearly, we knew, or in some cases could easily have known, that the Soviet Union had become a grotesque and sinister parody of the original socialist dream that inspired so many people around the world, Americans included. Nevertheless, the author doesn’t fully acknowledge the validity of the real politick position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. If it was hard enough to get Americans to endorse war with Nazi Germany or Imperialist Japan, how hard would it have been to have been to move Americans toward diplomatic isolation or even war with the Soviet Union? And, even if diplomatic isolation was possible, would this have made sense during the 1930s and early 1940s?

Although it’s hard to come to grips with the fact that the Soviet leadership was evil incarnate, it is perhaps even harder to remember that the most dynamic powers in the world were as just as evil, and perhaps more powerful. After World War II, the nuclear threat and the memory of two world wars added new reasons to find ways of living with Stalin. The author’s riposte would be that he isn’t suggesting that America’s presidents should have courted war with Russia, only that they should have been more vigorous and public about their concern for Americans who had been forced to renounce their American citizenship or sent to the gulag for unspecified reasons and unspecified durations. He has a point.

Original Gangstas

Although already overtaken by events since its publication in the early 1990s, Stephen Handelman’s Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya is an important book. Its central thesis, while not entirely original, involves the claim that the Communist Party was a form of criminal conspiracy, and inevitably gave birth to the new mafia (spelled mafiya in Russian) that dominate large parts of the Soviet economy today.

We know of course that the Old Bolsheviks were fascinated by crime, and perhaps rightly so: in an era when almost all forms of oppositional politics were outlawed, there wasn’t much of a difference between social revolutionaries and criminals. As Montefiore’s biography, Young Stalin, reminds us: key Bolsheviks led armed groups that functioned both as mafia clans and Communist agitators, with Stalin going so far as to pull off hugely successful bank heists in order to finance Lenin’s political platform. Handelman also points out that most leading Bolsheviks spent a lot of time in the gulag, where they would have become intimately familiar with ordinary criminal circles. And many, like Stalin, openly expressed admiration for the ethos of the tough, ruthless criminal underworld.

When the Bolsheviks took power, it was in some respects inevitable that they would carry some of their criminal tendencies (if that’s not too strong a word) to the Kremlin. And indeed the Central Committee and Politburo did begin to resemble a meeting of dons to settle larger disputes about the state’s wealth would be distributed. Like the Mafia, the Party was always extremely centralized and hierarchical. Decisions were always made at the very top, and nowhere else. More importantly, over time the Communist Party became a kind of cosa nostra. Its members formed a relatively small subset of the overall population, isolated themselves from that population through specific socialization rites and rituals of loyalty, intermarried, and enjoyed a large set of special privileges which they endeavored to pass on to family and friends. (The author recalls that this brand of nepotism existed at every level of the Party, with Brezhnev famously giving his son-in-law a key post in his government. )

In fact, to become a Communist Party member, one required Communist Party personal sponsors, not unlike a traditional rite of entry into the Russia mafia. To be a Party member meant access to special schools, stores, jobs, cars, retirement packages, the possibility of travelling across and national borders, state-sponsored dachas, and vacations in the Crimea. It also meant you had a chance to become a political official or government bureaucrat. If one sets aside the criminal class, the Communist political and bureaucratic class—called the nomenklatura-- became, notoriously, the only class that mattered in Russia and the Soviet State in general.

To get things done, you had to work through the Party elite. They, aside from the mafia, who continued to operate throughout the Soviet experiment notwithstanding Stalin’s repressions, were the only “fixers” in town: they decided who received housing, who got permission to move to other regions, what jobs became available, what justice would look like, and everything else that affected ordinary people.
The reality of the situation was only fully revealed with the collapse of communism.

Although it seems ironic to some, Handelman believes it was inevitable that former Communist officials would collaborate with the mafia (now dangerously split into dozens if not hundreds of groups or factions) in the vacuum on a broad spectrum of outrageously successful criminal ventures that robbed the Russian people of most of their patrimony. If there must be an irony about the rise of Comrade Criminal, the ex-Communist gangster, it is that Communist ideology had always denied the very existence of criminality in Russia. According to official Communist doctrine, organized crime was a byproduct of decadent, immoral capitalism, but could not exist in a socialist state.

Solzhenitsyn’s Worst Book

Having recently said something about one of Solzhenitsyn’s best works, Gulag Archipelago, I should also mention one of his works, August 1914. This book, the first in a trilogy, is a real disappointment. It’s tragic really. The goal was noble: Solzhenitsyn has fought in the Second World War and probably wanted to invest some of the insights he received from that war into a history of the First World War. He also wanted to get at the origin myth surrounding the Bolshevik Party. Having proven its disastrous effect on the course of Russian history, he set out to attack it in its cradle. In fact, he attacked communism in the womb by delving into the war that made revolution possible.

Sadly, the work lacks a great deal. Its characters are wooden, completely uninteresting except insofar as they allow readers into specific battles. But even judged by the criteria of a war novel it fails. This is no War and Peace. We get no overriding philosophy of history or warfare, or at least we get nothing that could possibly transcend this particular zone of conflict in this particular era.

I think that Solzhenitsyn had too much to say to be effective as a novelist. He’s learned the strategies, studies the generals, and poured over maps. He knows why the Germans defeated the Russians, but can’t help readers to understand what this says about war, or human nature, or bravery, or anything human. The book is reasonable as a historical guide to the Eastern front, but not as art. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t synthesize anything, or provide the reader with suspense of any kind, but he does cover all of the factors that led to Russian defeat, especially failures in military intelligence, planning, and communication.

Now at this point in my post you may be saying, is this really Solzhenitsyn’s worst book? Can’t we count any of his outrageous xenophobic, nationalist exile monographs condemning the West? I’d say that calls for another post…

Death Scenes

I recently went to a friend's funeral and beforehand I was thinking about Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It was my first funeral in many years and I expected to experience something like what Tolstoy describes: the mourners go through the motions of grieving but feel a secret sense of satisfaction that it is not they who have died. They are blithely ignorant of the proximity of their own deaths and seek any distraction--in this case cardplaying--to avoid its reality.

This isn't what I felt at all though. The significance of mortality struck me like it never has before. This had something to do with a series of gruesome accounts related by acquiantances of my friend's illness and death. Of course, this made me consider that there is something uniquely Russian about a truly horrifying end, whether in fiction, on the battlefield, or in czarist or soviet prisons.

So I'm wondering what incidents in Russian life and literature best communicate this morbid ability to portray the betrayal of our flesh? Dostoevsky has to be considered the master. But there is a great death scene in The Oblomovs by Saltykov-Schedrin; Tolstoy's own death was fascinating; the death of Dostoevsky's father at the hands of his own peasants was awful; and obviously there are scenes in The Gulag Archipelago that defy all description.

By contrast English and American literature have little to offer: the pathetic death of Little Nell is characteristic of the Anglo-American discomfort with the topic. Does their familiarity with death mean that the Russians are more attuned to the full range of the life cycle, or is it merely the product of an unhinged social system that has produced far too many meaningless deaths? By contrast does our optimistic preoccupation with the future help our democracy function more or less smoothly, or is it a symptom of a deeper inability to engage with life?

Why Now?

I don’t know why I first became obsessed with Russia. I really have no connection to the country. I’ve never visited for example; don’t have ancestors from the area, etc. I took an undergraduate class, so I think my current obsession might be a form of nostalgia. And of course there are a few things about Russia that are almost intrinsically interesting.

It’s massive, for instance, and stretches many time zones, possessing untold natural riches, and a huge citizenry. The fact that it straddles both East and West is interesting too, as is its brutal past, historic ties to Mongol invasions, and relatively unique religion, being neither Protestant nor Catholic. What is more, Russian history is the history of so many other things, since Russian history is inter-tangled with the history of Eastern European states, Baltic states, Transcaucasia, Turkish states, and China, Japan, and the general European balance of power. The supremely good literature would make it worthy of an obsession as well.

However, it’s probably communism that makes for the obsession. Real revolutions are rare. The French Revolution of 1789 would have been a good subject for a blog. And when one happens it’s worthy of prolonged study. 1917 was a fascinating year. When rich people are exiled, killed, humiliated, forced to do manual labor, forced to share homes with their servants, or excluded from political power—something unusual has happened.

There is probably a lot of unrecognized continuity between pre-and-post Revolutionary Russia. However, the economic, political, cultural, artistic differences were profound. So it’s interesting to see what happens next, especially since Russia experienced no Thermidorean reaction, and never saw the overthrow of the Revolutionary tradition until the better part of a century had passed.

Even the French had nothing similar happen: first Napoleon, then the Bourbons again—and certainly no sans-coulette government. As a true crime aficionado, I’d say that modern Russian history is without parallel too. If you study British history, you must look for grave crimes abroad for the most part, in Ireland, or in more distant colonial parts. With Russia, you’ve got czarist crimes and pogroms, 19th century terrorism, then you’ve got revolutionary violence, and Stalinist purges, the Gulag, and the world wars, which were obviously ten times more bloody than anything experienced by Britain. And obviously, Russia too had all of the violence of colonialism, even without the overseas empire.

The other factor in Russia that makes Russian history interesting is its history of serfdom, which can in some respects be compared to American slavery, both ended in the same decade. Maybe the bourgeoisie is equally interesting, but it seems more familiar and therefore less interesting than Russian aristocracy and Russian serfdom.

There was a time when I was bored by the Cold War, bored by the decaying bureaucratic structures of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, for example. I’ve moved away from this because I’m now interested in the question of how something as evil and dysfunctional as the Soviet regime could transform itself into something so banal (if still evil). But I understand people who are bored of the Cold War. I myself sometimes think of Cold War history as something akin to 1970s music or episodes of some no-longer-relevant sitcom like Welcome Back Kotter. Still, this is a good time to study the Soviet Union. With capitalism experiencing another wave of severe setbacks, it’s important to look back at the only other distinct option that modernity apparently produced.