Memorial

A few months ago my stepmother told my fiancée that Grace Shouba, my mother, was a constant presence at her home.   The statement struck me as odd at first:  Grace died twenty-five years ago, and of course had never even visited my stepmother’s current home, let alone my stepmother’s previous home.  Her pictures were not on any wall.  Her things--what few inherited objects that were left to us--were mostly relegated to the basement.  But of course my father’s “new” wife had helped to raise my brothers and me, and so had lived for the past two decades with hundreds of shared remembrances of our most cherished memory.  

When I thought about my stepmother’s statement, I had to admit that Grace was everywhere in her home.  My father and two brothers talked about Grace a lot; and when we weren’t talking about her, the omission was sometimes glaringly obvious.   After all, Grace was the unifying theme of our shared past—a collective experience, a familiar ghost, and a sometimes all-consuming memory.   In fact, after twenty-five years, Grace had become something bigger than a dead loved one:  in many ways, her name had become a mythological symbol for childhood itself, with all its myriad joys, sorrows, adventures, and tragedies.  

For me at least, the memory of Grace now represented the best and worst parts of life, and her spiritual presence seemed to permeate my every interaction with my parents and their home.  The past is always present, and this certainly is part of the message of Montefiore’s novel about the Russian heroine, Sashenka.  Montefiore, who wrote a brilliantly researched book about Catherine the Great’s favorite, Potemkin, as well as two of the best recent biographies of Joseph Stalin—The Court of the Red Tsar, and Young Stalin, clearly believed that any twentieth century Russian novel must inevitably lead to a dialogue between Russia’s tragic past and uncertain present.  

Sashenka, who grows up in a rich, Jewish St. Petersburg family, throws herself into the revolutionary struggle against the Tsar.  Thus, in the first part of the book, Montefiore takes us back and forth between tsarist excess (Sashenka’s mother is one of Rasputin’s dissolute admirers) and puritanical revolutionary responses.   We come to understand why Russians had become exhausted by economic inequality, bourgeois decadence, autocratic stupidity, military catastrophe, and capitalist exploitation.  Yet we are also introduced to a Marxist-Leninist conspiracy, and its dangerous moral and ideological assumptions about class warfare.   Although we know why Sashenka is attracted to change, we also understand that this attraction is darkened by the Bolsheviks’ antidemocratic and violent approach to politics. 

Montefiore skips over the Civil War, Collectivism, and the Great Terror proper, and introduces us to fully formed Stalinism.  As World War II approaches, Sashenka and her  bigwig NKVD husband have become the model Soviet citizens.  Their attitude toward Stalin and Stalinism are no doubt typical of the time.  In awe of the Great Leader, they somehow managed to both love and fear the man and his political regime.  They understand that many of their close friends and colleagues had disappeared during the past two years, but they hoped against hope that these disappearances were justified according to some greater Party imperative or logic of history.  When they themselves wind up in Stalin’s cross hairs, they perish, victims of the same deadly and often arbitrary game that Sashenka’s NKVD husband had been playing for so long to prop up the Bolshevik regime.  Montefiore’s larger story, however, is about historical memory.  

In the final part of the book, Montefiore shows that Sachenka’s torture and savage death did not erase her memory, or the significance of the millions of other innocent Russians who died at the hands of Stalin and his criminal colleagues.  Indeed, Sashenka’s children and grandchildren miraculously uncover the tragic story of their ancestor’s past.  And somehow Sashenka emerges again, irrepressible, insistent, and all-consuming.  History, and especially Russian history, always demonstrates the simple fact that death doesn’t really end anything.  The living have an urgent need to make contact with the dead, and the level of this urgency is related in some morbid way to the abruptness and unjustness of the death.  And perhaps the dead—like Hamlet’s father who famously said:  oh, horrible tale!--also have an urgent need to make contact with the living.

Politics of Leaving

My office is nearly empty now. I've put away books and dismantled all elements of bourgeois display. I've packed up all of the family photographs, files, and antiques that adorned this space over the past three years. I've put away a fencing trophy my maternal grandfather (the Left-Wing inspiration for this blog perhaps) won at Harvard in 1912. I've packed up a set of clay cats my paternal grandfather made in the impoverished, smoke-filled twilight of his life. I have cleaned up a war ration card my mother received at five years old. There's a stripped down table that sat in my paternal grandmother kept in her cluttered basement for many decades. Family photos, antique (but not valuable) clocks--everything must go.

There are only a few Russian books left here. I've uncovered a stash of excellent political works. There is William Taubman's biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, which demonstrated that this Cold War leader was as complex and contradictory as any modern leader. Khrushchev was all things, impossible to sum up. He was guilty of monstrous crimes as one of Stalin's henchmen, and yet helped to put the Soviet Union onto a much more humane path after Stalin's death. He was incredibly clever and funny, but somehow also capable of extremely foolish, impetuous, and boorish behavior. The ultimate sycophant under Stalin, Khrushchev somehow demonstrated real bravery, not only on his path to power, but also in his efforts to publish his memoirs while in the political wilderness.

On the Khrushchev theme, I've got Guiseppe Boffa's laudatory account of the Khrushchev era as a whole called, somewhat dramtically, Inside the Khrushchev Era. Boffa was an Italian journalist and fellow travellor who praised the Soviet Union for its technological and industrial achievements, and heralded Khrushchev as a practical and humaine leader--just right for the age of detente.

On Stalin himself, I see Simon Montefiore's two equally good books, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, and Young Stalin. Montefiore has quickly established himself as one of the deans of Russian history, and rightly so. These two works somehow reveal sides of Stalin that hadn't yet emerged, especially Young Stalin. Montefiore managed to uncover dozens if not hundreds of previously undiscovered sources about Stalin, some by former lovers and others with almost as much personal knowledge about the legendary autocrat. The whole course of history seems to have reversed itself with this book. One somehow comes to see a Stalin who wasn't destined to become the master of Russian's destiny but who, nevertheless, possessed a real and multi-faceted genius, for politics, but also for organization, criminal activity, revolutionary propaganda, and even, perhaps, poetry.

Next, I've got two of Isaac Deutcher's three books on Trotsky here, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky 1921- 1929, and the Prophet Outcast,Trotsky 1929- 1940. Although undoubtedly biased by sympathy for the man's political perspectives, these are tremendous books, thoroughly researched but vivid tales of political courage and indeed heroic opposition to Stalin's ascendancy. Of course, Deutcher doesn't criticize Trotsky's crimes nor even his personality flaws that ensured his defeat by opponents. Deutcher also wrote the unfinished Lenin's Childhood, a short potrait of Lenin, his father and mother, and, most importantly, his terrorist brother who was executed for his involvement in a plan to assassinate the tsar.

Other political books on hand are Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin, which illuminates the ties that originally bound Eastern European strains of communism to Moscow, but also shows how Yugoslavian leaders became alienated by Stalin and Russian primacy in general. And, to follow up the story of dissillusionment with Djilas' ant-communist treatise, written from a Yugoslavian prison, there's The New Class. Somewhat more globally, I also have Walter Laqueur's book of political essays here, Out of the Ruins of Europe. One of these is even titled Russian Roulette. So glad I went with Soviet Roulette instead of Russian Roulette, the title which first came to me when I presented the idea for this blog to my wife and one of her best friends (who said, quite correctly, that I needed a hook for the blog a la Julia and Julia: ideas anyone?).

Down to my last few books, I see that the majority of these are in some fashion political works as well. As I've said before, I grew up believing that politics was everything. I don't practice that belief anymore, but my obsession with the Russian Revolution is a form of nostalgia for a time when everybody shared my early belief in the primacy of the political over the cultural. (A time when most people didn't think that Real Housewives of New York, Orange County, Atlanta, and New Jersey would trumps everything remotely political in terms of its watercooler or Facebook appeal). I've got the book, The Lost Politburo Transcripts, which shows Stalin's mastery of a unique form of political discourse, the politburo debate and group decision-making process. And another, The Death of Uncle Joe, which describes the progressive disillusionment of some (but definitely not all) of the British communist intellectuals, especially in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It's a book that inspired me to think about why my Left-of-Center friends and family didn't come down harder on the Soviet Union for its massive human rights violations. On the same theme of disenchantment with communist ideals, I have Robert Conquest's book of short, anti-communist essays and editorials, Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques from the Struggle for Truth. It's filled with dozens of short Conquest essays on subects such as Koestler, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Grossman, Sakharov, and Djilas.