Robert Alexander and Richard Lourie

Fictional treatments of historical actors and events can supplement our overall understanding of the past. Robert Alexander's book, Rasputin's Daughter, and Richard Lourie's book, The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, are two cases in point.  If Douglas Smith's new biography of Rasputin leaves little to be desired, Alexander's short work of historical fiction concisely describes the way in which someone could view the "mad monk" both sympathetically and unsympathetically for some of the same personality traits.  For Alexander's daughter admires her father's charisma, generosity, and devoutness, but also detests his hypocrisy, sensuality, and crassness.  The fictional approach to the man allows us to see how the man could become invaluable to the empress even as he was despised by so many ordinary (and aristocratic) Russians.  

An even better work of fiction, Lourie's The Autobiography of Stalin helps readers to cut through the mountains of research on the man to understand the man's defining character traits.  Of course, on some level everyone familiar with twentieth century Russian history must know that Stalin was cynical, cold-hearted, and malicious.  But a book like this helps one to imagine how this villain might have (even must have) understood his world. A book like this helps us to resolve some paradoxes about this man who seems to have combined real elements of insanity with an uncanny ability to view the world realistically, even dispassionately.  One of Lourie's most interesting insights into Stalin is that he probably took Trotsky extremely seriously. While it's easy to believe Stalin used the myth of Trotsky as a tool to destroy his enemies, if we actually believe that Stalin was worried about Trotsky we might better understand the bizarre way in which he attacked his enemies.  Why did he blame so much on one man, namely Trotsky?  The novel suggests that Stalin's psychopathic side could work in tandem with his realistic side.  He could enjoy hounding a hated man and his followers to their deaths even as he used this sadistic enterprise to reinforce his position.  Lourie's Stalin is fascinating most of all for his ability to blend realism with monomaniacal adventurism.   

 

Romanov Massacre

For many people, the brutal murder of the Russian royal family in July, 1918, was the quintessential act of the Soviet regime. It of course a heinous act. With Lenin's approval, the Bolsheviks took almost twenty minutes to shoot and stab to death the tsar, his wife and children, and even a few royal servants. Robert Alexander's novel, The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, is only the latest in a long series of books and films that deal in some way with this Gothic horror scene. Alexander's book isn't particularly inventive, but it doesn't need to be: people are enthralled by this true crime story above all others. The murder of this Victorian family was bloody, and premeditated, and the only mitigating factor is that the victims didn't really expect to be cut down when they were asked to go into the basement to take a photo in order to prove to the capitalist press that they were all alive and well.

Focusing on the end of the Romanov family is necessarily fascinating. We wonder why the murderers did what they did. We wonder how the Romanovs felt as they contemplated their imprisonment and compared the Special House of Detention, their Siberian jail, with the life they had know in St. Peterburg's multiple palaces. We wonder if the any of the members of the Royal Family knew--whether consciously or subconsciously--that their collective liquidation was a very real possibility. But when we focus on the end of the royal family we seem to forget that Nicholas II and his wife were guilty of dozens if not hundreds of crimes. This of course is the byproduct of despotism: whenever you inherit or assume total power you are ultimately responsible for everything that happens on your watch. Nicholas--decent family man that he was--can therefore be blamed for pogroms, spies, Raputin and everything that he represented, civilian massacres, and perhaps Russia's disastrous participation in World War I. Notwithstanding these mistakes, he didn't deserve the death he got, nor of course did his family and their servants. But focusing on this single act of picturesque inhumanity seems to distract us from that which briefly lay between Romanov and Bolshevik, and that is Liberal Russia. Although we sometimes forget Kerensky, Nabokov, and the Kadets, their destruction during the October Revolution is in some ways a greater tragedy than that of this doomed family.