Sara Wheeler's Mud and Stars

Sara Wheeler has written a wonderful little book about her relationship with Russia.  The book focuses on author's visits to the homes of Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky.  But it also touches on her delightful attempt to master the Russian language as she approached the age of fifty.  The book isn't especially original, or tightly organized.  It's also a slightly awkward mixture of travel writing, literary criticism, and collective biography.  On the other hand, the author provides readers with a nice introduction to varied Russian literary giants, and provides readers with a number of amusing anecdotes about her travel and language adventures.  At any rate, Russophiles will definitely envy her trips to so many literary shrines in Russia.  I know that I treasure my own visits to apartments or homes once owned or occupied by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Block, Nabokov, Akhmatova, and Gogol, and regret not being able to find or enter apartments or homes once owned by Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, and Chekhov. When all is said and done, I guess we're all religious, one way or the other. 

Some favorite quotes from the book are below

Dostoevsky

He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

From Brothers Karamazov.  "For real Russians, the question of the existence of God and immortality are of course first and foremost."

A Dostoevsky biography reads like a Greek tragedy.

Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, imperious, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight.

From Queen of Spades.  Would she like a Russian [novel]?  "Are there any Russian novels? the countess queries.

Pushkin produced the first major Russian work in almost every literary genre.

Pushkin was a heroic shagger who had time to write only when he had a sexually transmitted disease.

Two years later, he married her, writing to a friend to say that she was his 113th love.

Turgenev

Turgenev's father:   My son, fear the love of woman;  fear that bliss, that poison.

Lermontov

I have a congenital desire to contradict;  my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind.

Gogol

Gogol's mother was proud of her son and in old age told neighbors that Nikloai Vasilyevich had invented the railway engine.

According to one academic there are eighty-six kinds of food in Dead Souls.

Chekhov

His stories and plays deal with the essential problem of being:  How to find meaning before the return to dust.

Chekhov felt that he had "wasted his life on fornication"--who hasn't--and wished to write a report on the condition of the prisons and prisoners, hoping that it might do some good.

"It seems to me," he said, "that Pushkin and Gogol are not understood here."

On Russia

Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russia.

Russia emerged as an increasingly shocking country. 

Catherine the Great said [Russia] was too big to govern, or so they say she said.

Russians claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.

Russia has two eternal problems, roads and idiots.

Quoting Alexandra Kropotkin:  "Russians are nice people, though in certain parts of Russia the admixture of Oriental blood may lend a definite touch of deviousness to their thought and behavior."

Quoting Alexandra Kropotkin:  "The whole of Russia is a prison camp."

Dostoevsky:  "The most basic spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything."

I remember my friend Colin Thubron, an accomplished Russia watcher and fluent speaker, saying that in decades of visiting, he had never met a smiling Russia.

The author's prose [Grossman's]  reinforced my opinion, forged both through direct experience and through reading, that for most people, being Russian has always been miserable--before, during, and after communism.

...the Soviets like shifting graves around, controlling death as they did life.

One of my Russian grammar books says that da and nyet "loosely correspond to yes and no."

We covered kto, "who," and chto, "what," or "that."  Cats and dogs, it turns out, had to be referred to as "who."  I asked Irina why.
"Well," she said, "they are not insects."

Words I had to look up

Lubricious





Other

Raisa Gorbacheva, we heard, was the first Russian First Lady who weighed less than her husband.

Kremlin Wives

Although the role of women at the pinnacle of the Kremlin society isn't the most important aspect of the history of gender during the Soviet experiment, Larissa Vasilieva's book, Kremlin Wives, is a surprisingly illuminating good introduction to the subject of communist women's history. Published only shortly after the collapse of the Soviet state, Vasilieva was able to interview a number of important Kremlin women as well as to attain relevant files related to their frequent brushes with Stalin's security organs.  Vasilieva, who was herself a relatively privileged member of the Soviet apparatchiki, tells the story of Soviet womanhood through the biography of elite Soviet women.  These women include the wives of Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Budyonnaya, Molotov, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev, to name just a few of Vasilieva's fascinating subjects.

For the most part, the Kremlin wives were highly intelligent leaders in their own right.  Certainly Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, as well as Lenin's mistress, Inessa Armand, made important contributions to the revolutionary movement, and Krupskaya in particular helped to shape the Soviet worldview, especially regarding education.  Even so, both women always put Lenin first, and their willingness to take a back seat to Lenin's political primacy was a portent of things to come.  Although revolutionary history is filled with examples of heroic female Russian revolutionaries, male Soviet leaders were never entirely comfortable  Until Raisa Gorbachev proved that the Soviet Union was able to accept another dynamic, educated, and highly visible woman in public affairs  (and many Soviet citizens retained serious reservations about Raisa's public role), Krupskaya was the last wife of the Party's leader who exercised a clear position of leadership in her own right.  

With the rise of Stalin, the role of elite Soviet women became much more conservative.   Whereas many revolutionaries had at least entertained ideas about free love, female emancipation from child reading duties, divorce, and the link between bourgeois family structures and capitalism, the cult of Stalin soon reconciled Soviet political culture to pre-revolutionary gender norms.  While Stalin's own wife (or his second wife to be more accurate), Nadezhda Alliluyeva, worked, and maintained her own professional identity, her suicide ( if not murder) seemed to mark the limits of Stalin's tolerance for independent women.  

Of course the predominent theme of Kremlin Wives is, almost necessarily, a description of how women dealt with all-encompassing terror.  Marshal Budyonny's second third wife is illustrative. While making the Marshall a happy home by playing the role of a traditional domestic housewife, Maria Vasilievna, also had to contend with the fact that the Marshal's second wife, Olga Stefanovna, had been imprisoned on trumped up charges. Molotov's wife, Paulina Zhemchuzhina, was actually imprisoned even as her husband continued to serve Stalin.  Beria's wife, Nina Beria, had to contend with the fact that her husband was systematically raping young women, in addition to overseeing the state's more formal mechanisms of terrorizing its citizens.  Nina seems to have chosen to live in denial, although the Vasilieva is right to point out that it can be very difficult to pass judgement on any of the Kremlin wives when they were fearful of being sent to the gulag or killed of they voiced any criticism of Stalin or his henchmen. 

With Stalin's death, the daily regime of terror soon subsided.  However, it's difficult to say that the effects of terror didn't last until the very end of the Soviet Union, if not beyond.  Nina Kukharchuk, Khrushchev's wife, had survived the terror by remaining in the shadows.  She wasn't a glamorous woman, but she had once served to promote Soviet power in its infancy.  Born poor,  Nina Kukharchuk remained a stalwart communist functionary who accompanied her husband on a few famous diplomatic missions but mostly strove to support her husband in his domestic life.  Her successor, Victoria Pretrovna, also adopted a low profile, accommodating her husband, Leonid Breshnev, even as he moved from one mistress to another. While not necessarily personally corrupt, Victoria Pretrovna supported her relatives even as they abused the privileges of the communist elite.

Taken as a whole, the Kremlin wives were both similar to, and different from, ordinary Soviet women.  The Kremlin wives were, generally speaking, a confident group of women, at least insofar as anyone living so close to the edge of terror could be considered confident.  The Kremlin women were extremely privileged in many respects, and many made use of the special stores, dachas, and governesses that were available to them.  However, their lives were extremely complicated.  The Soviet Union never fully worked out its attitude toward women.  Were they supposed to work outside the home or in the home?  Were nannies okay or a sign of bourgeois privilege?  Was it possible to play a public role in public affairs?  Did women have an important role to play in the formation of policy related to childhood, education, or family life in general?  How much education, and what type of education, was desirable?  The Soviet Union collapsed even as these debates raged around Raisa Gorbachev.

Some quotes from the book:

"If she doesn't shut her mouth the Party will appoint old Elena Stasova as Lenin's widow in her place!"  Vasilieva citing Stalin.

"Intelligent, beautiful, and as delicate-looking as porcelain, Alexandra Kollontai put women's sexuality at the center of the Communist agenda."

"What is rarely mentioned is that the revolutionaries fought a small detachment of palace gaurds and the Petrograd Battalion of Women.  In other words, the Bolsheviks' victory that night was over women."

"The Kremlin, the seat of Soviet power, was also a vast communal apartment complex."

"Even the best parents ruin their children by bringing them up at home."  Lyadov-Mandelstam.

"Can a collective person be produced in an individual family?  To this we must say a categorical no."  Lyadov-Mandelstam.

"No Kremlin wife's opinion was ever officially welcomed.  Those who challenged that fact--such as Molotov's wife, Zhemchuzhina, as we shall see--were promptly arrested."

"We're creating a new state," she wrote.  "People need us.  It would be hypocritical to deny ourselves the things people always acquire when they come to power."

"Larissa Reisner was a tangle of contradictions.  She could turn simple immorality into an exploit. Osip Mandelstam recalled that Larissa once threw a party solely to enable Cheka agents to arrest the guests."

"She cast her lot with him like a tiny sailboat drawn to a giant ocean-going steamer."  Svetlana Alliluyeva describing her mother's relationship to Stalin.

"He went so far as to offer to shoot his wife, an impulse evidently familiar to many Kremlin men in those days."

"This time she found the beaches empty.  All the fashionable women from last season were now in jail."

"As the Soviet system scythed and leveled its human resources, fear was a daily staple and worked its way deep into the Russian character."

"The personal has no social significance."  Kaganovich.

"A large quantity of male debauchery."  From an official inventory of Beria's office.

"Stalin wanted to create a mighty state, and he succeeded.  Of course there had to be victims.  But no politician then could see any other path that would us to our precious goal without victims."  Nina Beria.

"...Kremlin life is part of a complex distribution system of privilege that must always be kept a secret."

Volkogonov

Dimitri Volkogonov deserves a special place in heaven. Although he was a very senior communist military leader for many decades and even produced a series of sterile treatises in support of Soviet military and ideological objectives, he developed a conscience and eventually wrote a series of brilliantly critical histories of modern Russian statemen. Two years ago, I read his biography of Stalin. Although one Stalin biography tends to blend in with the next, Volkogonov’s Stalin was bold, intelligent, original, and meticulously researched.

Western historians tend to be condescending about historians in other countries. With respect to historians who were forced to participate in Marxist-Leninist historiography, this condescension seems relatively well founded. However, Volkogonov’s scholarship is liberal, sophisticated, and grounded in the newly uncovered archives of the Soviet state, some of which have become inaccessible with the rise of Putin and his successor. If anything, Volkogov surpasses his Western peers by melding Western historical technique with a greater respect for special Russian sensitivities and particularities.

Volkogov’s books are predicated on exhaustive research and impeccable logic, but their power stems from his newly found antipathy to Bolshevism. As the Volkogonov’s longtime editor and translator, Harold Shukman, argues in the preface to Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, reminds us, Volgognov’s family suffered a common fate in the 1930’s. His father, a communal farm manager, was shot, his wife exiled, et cetera and so on. In a sense, Volkogonov approaches history in a very traditional, top-down, way. His books do not deal directly with what Sheila Fitzpatrick would call “everyday Stalinism.” Even so, Volkogonov seems to understand that there is an important link between these leaders and the sad fate of ordinary Russians who lived in the last century, and this one.

I hope to post several times on Autopsy of an Empire since I haven’t discussed many of the Soviet leaders, aside from Lenin, Stalin, and to a lesser extent Khrushchev and Gorbachev. I do in fact accept the central premise of Volkogonov’s Autopsy of an Empire, and that is that the reign of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko (or at least their rise to power), says a great deal about what the revolutionary experiment really became and really meant.

The other interesting thing about Volkogonov’s Autopsy of an Empire is that it is written from the point of view of a patriot. This historian is angry. Like other Western historians, he regrets the tragedy and death that accompanied the decisions of men like Lenin and Stalin. But Volkogonov is also angry about the Bolsheviks did to Mother Russia. As an active member of Yeltin’s government, and someone who interacted with many of the leaders he discusses in this book, Volkogonov is no passive adherent of Western emulation. He wants a strong, prosperous, independent Russia, capable of discovering its own truths whenever possible. Yet his patriotism makes him even more contemptuous of the Soviet leaders, Lenin included, than Western historians are likely to be. In Volkogonov’s overstated view, the Soviet experiment hurt only the Soviet people, and indeed helped the world by warning it what not to do.

Raisa was a Capricorn

It’s a good thing the Soviet Union collapsed when it did because we’ve all somehow forgotten that it appeared—almost right up until the moment of the collapse—that the Soviet Union was holding its own, even winning, even in the first half of the 1980s. As I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the Communist Superpower seemed to have a lot going for it. It remained the largest country in the world; its population was larger than ours; its army was said to be superior to that of the U.S., in quantity if not in quality; and we were routinely told that the Soviets enjoyed strategic superiority in many key aspects of the nuclear arms race.

The Soviet Union had its problems, but it possessed immense natural resources, including astronomical quantities of oil, which dwarfed our own. It had reliable allies in comparison with our NATO client states, who often went their own way even on matters directly related to the safety of the Western World. The Soviet Union also continued to do well in the war for the hearts and minds of the so-called Third World (now renamed the developing world). The Russians had, for instance, apparently chosen the right side in the Arab-Israeli conflict, insofar as Israel had little to offer America in comparison with the wealth, population, markets, and oil of the Arab League and OPEC. Moreover, despite the quagmire of Afghanistan, the Russians had clearly won in Vietnam, and were doing well in Africa, where, once again, the U.S. seemed to have backed the wrong side: the minority Apartheid regime of White South Africans.

The Soviets were even gaining ground in Latin America. Cuba had survived a trade decade for decades, and Ronald Reagan insisted that Nicaragua and Grenada were lethal threats to the security of the continental United States. Remember the map Reagan showed Americans of a huge red surge washing up to the U.S. southern border by way of Nicaragua and Mexico?

Soviet superiority also seemed to manifest itself in chess, with the Soviets maintaining both the first and second positions in the global sport. There were no more Bobby Fishers in the 1980s: We knew we couldn’t be either Kasparov or his opponent. The Russians continued to well in international sports as well. The Russian state had another important advantage: its leaders didn’t need to contend with alternative parties, or organized public opposition, or true freedom of the press.

Even when Communism entered into the period of Glasnost and Perestroika, the Soviet Union evinced certain signs of competitiveness. The viability of the system was epitomized in the strange pairing of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev, confident, supremely intelligent, and urbane, the Soviet leader emerged as a master of public diplomacy. Where David Stockman’s book The Triumph of Politics revealed that Ronald Reagan frequently slept during key meetings and required blow up dolls or other gimmicks to engage his attention for White House presentations, Gorbachev boldly challenged stereotypes about what a Communist leader could do or be. He, more than Reagan, seemed to be the man of the future. He was—or so it seemed to many, especially in Western Europe--for peace, reform, and change.

If Gorbachev seemed like a sophisticated leader who was prepared for the future, Ronald Reagan’s confidence seemed rooted in his Hollywood past. It was a matter of playacting. Reagan could deliver speeches, but was he the real thing or was he a B grade actor? A large minority of the United States didn’t think he was smart enough to be president. (It turns out alzheimer's might have been part of the problem). However, for me the real key to understanding Soviet potential for the future was not Mikhail Gorbachev but his wife, Raisa. While Raise was a sophisticated, substantive woman who had earned a doctorate and taught philosophy at the college level for two decades, Nancy Reagan was spending huge quantities of money on designer dresses and consulting astrologers. In the past ten years, I’ve come to reassess my superficial appraisal of the two women, and I’ve come to respect the magic of astrology.