Interview with Jim Pinnells, Author of Saturn's Daughters

Many thanks to author Jim Pinnells, author of Saturn's Daughters, for the following interview.

What first prompted you to write this book?  And was there something missing in either the contemporary coverage of terrorism or the historiography on the subject? 

I completed the first version of Saturn’s Daughters not long after I left university – many years ago. At that time I knew very little about revolution and even less about women so the book was little more than an adventure story. What attracted me to the subject was the romantic self-sacrifice of the revolutionaries, the hopelessness of their quest, and the superb arrogance of a handful of students taking on an Empire. I returned to the theme in middle-age, rewriting the story from the point-of-view of Countess Anna. A solitary, scheming, rich, beautiful aristocrat now takes on not only an Empire but the forces of revolution as well. Fortunately by this time I’d learned a lot more about revolution and a shade more about women. In my late sixties I gave the novel its final shape. It becomes now a tragedy: noble idealism that necessarily destroys the idealists. Three women share the heroine’s burden, two fictional and one historical. What attracts women to self-destructive violence? Why do women feature so prominently in the ranks of revolutionaries? How closely linked are violence and sexuality?  By this time I’d had a good look at terrorism from the practical, preventive side and I’d thought a great deal about female psychology – which is not to say that I’d understood women. Far from it.

As to contemporary coverage of terrorism, the press never seems to get much beyond the question: Why? “Why did these young Chechens, to whom the United States had so generously opened its arms, repay this kindness by bombing the Boston Marathon?” The question is an accusation and no answer is offered. Scholars probe deeper than journalists, but they seldom have access to terrorists in the same way that Truman Capote had access to the Dick and Perry. Journalists, scholars – and novelists. A writer such as Dostoevsky in The Possessed (and in the unwritten but planned sequel) can probe the psychology of terrorism in an unscientific but highly provocative way. That is the approach I’ve tried in Saturn’s Daughters.

How did you go about researching this book, and specifically the history of terrorism in nineteenth century Russia?

Half a century of reading, asking and discussing with practitioners on both sides of the terrorist fence have been distilled into this book. I’m a story-teller, not a historian, but the great libraries (British Museum, Cambridge University Library and so on) are open to researchers of all kinds. I try to read not only about the period, but also to read what my characters would have read. Newspapers, magazines, manuals. Sometimes, though, a request slip for books can get you into trouble: Make Your Own Dynamite, Explosives for Home and Farm, Letter Patent No X dated 1868 for IMPROVED EXPLOSIVE COMPOUND. Even the sleepiest librarian begins to wonder. What I wanted to know, of course, was what information was publically available to Kibalchich in 1880. His nitroglycerine was superior to anything available on the market. How did he do it?

One of things I liked most about the book was your careful treatment of the relationship between women and terrorism.  What do you think most historians misunderstand about the role of women in the history of either Russian or global terrorism?

One of the women in Saturn’s Daughters, Evgenya, takes up boxing in a gym where her man of the moment (known as the Hangman) earns money sparring. She enjoys the physicality and the punishment her body has to take. She wins a couple of professional fights, fighting with bare fists and punches, kicks and head butts all allowed. Professional women at that time mostly fought naked. Later in the story Evgenya tides herself over financially by sparring in a women’s gym in Moscow. Yes, in 1880. Women as fighters and killers. I find little or nothing about that in the standard treatments of terrorism. Especially treatments of terrorism in the nineteenth century? It isn’t there. And again, revolutionary sexuality (“free love” as it was called) is also sidelined. No contemporary source discusses it in detail, though What is to be Done? comes close. Was free love the “norm”? In Saturn’s Daughters the subject is at least addressed.

Although your book is primarily concerned with the nineteenth century roots of Russian terrorism, what does this history reveal to you about revolutionary violence and state-sponsored terrorism under Stalinism?

When I first visited Leningrad in 1970, there were streets named after Perovskaya and Zhelyabov (now renamed). In 1967, Leo Arnshtam made a film with the title “Sofya Perovskaya.” Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, carried terrorist credentials. Vera Figner, Mikhail Frolenko and others lived in the Soviet Union well into the Stalin era. Obviously the subject of revolutionary terrorism was not taboo in Soviet times, but it sits uncomfortably with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under Stalin, the Narodnaya Volya had little or no press. Under Krushchev and Brezhnev it was only a shade warmer. To me this embarrassed half-silence is part and parcel of the great Soviet paradox: the way in which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union positioned itself as a revolutionary party and clamoured for revolution on the international stage while maintaining the strictest control on revolutionary (aka counter-revolutionary) activity at home.  In the Spanish Civil War, paradox collapsed into grisly farce. Though farce is the wrong word: it had no funny side. Terrorism from below and terrorism from above have nothing in common: no common goals, methods or underlying political beliefs. That the Soviet Empire traces its origins, at least in part, to the Decembrists and the Narodnaya Volya is one of the great ironies of history.

Your book seems to link terrorism to both regressive and progressive social factors.  Would you say that Russian terrorism should be linked more to Russia’s so-called “backward” political traditions, or, paradoxically, to its fascination with hyper-modern forms of politics? Or is this a false choice?

Regressive – progressive. To put your question a shade more concretely, is it progressive or regressive when young and privileged members of a hereditary nobility reject their wealth, reject their privileges, and sacrifice their lives in an attempt to put things right with their society? In a sense, of course, it is a higher paternalism: the insulted and injured cannot change the world, so, in our superior wisdom, we must do it for them -- even if we die in the attempt. That is our feudal duty. It is easy to mock such high-mindedness. When Andrei Zhelyabov, a genuine peasant, joined the movement he was lionized. Sofya Perovskaya went to the length of falling in love with him. It is easy to mock, but mockery misses the point. Personally I don’t see these young people as drawing-room poseurs sucked into unwilling action by their own progressive rhetoric. They were not toying with Utopias. In Saturn’s Daughters I‘ve tried to imagine myself (and the reader) into their skins. “Excuse me, could be tell me how it feels to be a member of the Narodnaya Volya? Progressive? Or regressive?” “Just let me get this load of mud to the end of the mine tunnel, just let me get this suitcase of dynamite to Moscow, and I’ll try to answer your question.”

What, if anything, does your book reveal to students of terrorism today?  What are the parallels to nineteenth century Russia?  What are the differences?

In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles famously regrets that he is “Part of that Power which always wills evil, always procures good.” For the Narodnaya Volya, I think the situation was the opposite: they willed good but inevitably procured evil. Saturn’s Daughter’s examines for each of the characters the mechanism that kicks in when terror is adopted as a political weapon. A group decides to blow up a factory after work so that no one is injured. The political impact is trivial, but the members of the group are now criminal and permanently “on the run.” To stay free and continue the good work, it will perhaps be necessary to kill an occasional policeman and certainly to execute spies within one’s ranks. To move the work forward, bigger bangs must be created within ever riskier contexts. The logic of events extinguishes the voice of “conscience” – or of common humanity if the word conscience is no longer appropriate. “I know it is wrong to put the lives of innocent bystanders and children at risk, but we have no choice.” This self-brutalization, doing evil knowing it to be evil, in the long run, and sometimes in the short run, turns an idealist into a psychopath. The mechanism is clear in the lives of the women and men who coalesced into the Narodnaya Volya with the single goal of murdering the Tsar – at no matter what cost. And when Tsar Alexander was dead, Tsar Nicholas set to work perfecting the police state. As usual, the fruit of terror was repression, not enfranchisement.

Not much has changed. Political terror still attracts idealists. Whatever they may become later, few terrorists start out as the “perverts and savages” of the popular press. I think this idealism deserves far more attention than it gets. Also unchanged is the fact that political terror still induces repression, as the lines at every airport and the NDA “scandal” so clearly illustrate. On the other hand, the technology of terror has been upgraded. The three basic requirements – a big bang, fast communication and fast transport – have not changed, though full fuel tanks have replaced dynamite, the internet has replaced the telegraph, and planes have replaced trains.

Would it be fair to say, looking at terrorism then and now, that political terror is worse than a crime and worse than a sin – it is a mistake?

Diplomacy at Pushkin House

The other day I met a friend I had not seen in over twenty years.  Insofar as this blog is centered on history and nostalgia, I don’t mind dwelling upon such encounters, even when they aren’t ostensibly related to Russian history.  However, this friend, a pleasant reminder of the distant past, reminded me that I have been enthralled with Russia for longer than I care to admit.  Talking with my friend, I am reminded that Russia has been with me for since early adulthood, if not before. A single dinnertime conversation reminded me of the complex circuitry of obsession.  Long, long ago, this friend had given me a copy of my first Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed.  That book was of course a revelation to me.  At the time, I was stunned that anybody had been able to publish a book like that—full of fire, sexual depravity, and dark nihilism.  The fact that tsarist Russian censors had let the book pass seemed even more incomprehensible, but I suppose conservative aristocrats and radical intellectuals each have different takes on Dostoevsky’s treatment of conspiratorial murder in the service of atheism, nihilism, and revolution.

The evening’s Russian leitmotif doesn’t end there.  This friend had introduced me to Ayn Rand, although she currently denies any affiliation for the Russian objectivist.  At the very least, this friend taught me how to pronounce the thinker’s name, a unique talent in my shady corner of a small Chicago suburb.  Unconvinced that I can stretch my theme even further?  My friend had a brilliant father who invented a popular board game called Diplomacy, a game in which the Russian Empire loomed large.  The game is set in Europe on the eve of the First World War.  In this game, up to seven players attempt to manipulate others into helping to upset the balance of power.  The game depends on the near-equality of all seven Great Powers, which included Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Italy, Turkey, and of course Russia.

As always, Russia was unique.  While all other countries began the game with three armies (or navies as the case may be), Russia alone was granted the privilege or responsibility of fielding four military units.  Looking back, this anomaly seems fitting.  When you played Russia, you were inevitably forced to think in multi-dimensional ways.  Specifically, you became involved in the Balkans and, at the same time, you moved again foes in the Baltic and Northern Europe.  The strategic and symbolic effect of Russia’s position in the game mirrored that of historic Russia, which often balanced forces in these two areas, or balanced forces on its eastern and western flanks.  

The game was always a memorable if exhausting experience.  One played for hours upon hours and often gave up short of a decisive conclusion.  The classical principle of balance of power almost always prevented the game from moving quickly to an end.  If England grew stronger, France and German inevitably combined to overcome the threat before turning against one another.  The Russian position resembled that of all the other powers, except for straddling two fronts.  But its other unique characteristic was its location at the edge of the world.  Although vulnerable on each of its two fronts to potentially superior forces, it faced no enemies to its back and therefore never quite collapsed altogether.  

Thinking about the way Russia was represented on this board game reminds me of the extent to which we think about nations symbolically.  What is Russia?  Russians have of course wrestled with this question for several hundred years.  But even ordinary, armchair gamers are confronted with constructed notions of the Russia nation-state.  In Diplomacy, Russia is a big country,  a threatening country:  by virtue of its four military units, potentially more powerful than any other single country.  In Diplomacy, Russia has a split personality:  its armies and navies are powerful, but hopelessly separated from one another by strategically unfavorable terrain.  Russia is an oriental power, heavily engaged with the other European powers but ultimately unique, situated at the edge of the ideologically constructed zone called Europe.

This notion of a constructed country comes in part from Antoinette Burton, who in turn relies on Benedict Anderson and a host of postcolonial theorists and practitioners.   Burton spends a lot of her time diagnosing Britain.  Who came up with this idea of what Britain means?  Who benefits from this idea?  Who reproduces this idea?  Thinking back on my evening with an old friend, I can’t help but reflect on what Burton might call the contingent or even artificial nature of history.  On a personal level, my idea of Russia, even my love of Russia, was influenced by a hundred different but related circumstances, including a board game, a Russian novel, and the public person of one of Communist Russia’s most famous critics.  If my own definition of Russia has been manufactured in chaotic but not entirely random ways, how should we think about America’s overall perception of Russia and the Russian past?  And why stop there?  Who has gained, and who gains today, by a European or even global thesis that Russia is backward, violent, bipolar, or even soulful?  I’ve spent a lot of time reading about Russia, but much less time thinking about how and why I’ve encountered the texts that I’ve read about Russia. 

I’ll conclude by mentioning one of Antoinette Burton’s books, Archive Stories:  Factions, Fictions, and the Writing of History, a collection of essays by various authors about the strange career of specific historical archives.  Burton’s introductory message reminds us that archives are not themselves ahistorical.  Each archive has a history.  How and why archives were produced and maintained over time, and how they get to us matters a great deal.  If we don’t have Foucault’s understanding of power, which is always already local, and always already contested, we may easily misread the sources, “missing the forest for the trees” as it were. 

Take John Randolph’s essay in Archive Stories, entitled “On the biography of the Bakunin Family Archive.” In Randolph’s essay, we see how Bakunin’s papers have “lived” a long, complicated, and deeply politicized life.  Over time, they have reflected a Romantic cult of sentimentality, supported the Bakunin’s sisters’ intervention in the public sphere, and undergirded Liberal, Bolshevik, and even Thaw political positions.  Looking at the archive as a contested site of evolving political and cultural discursive positions is one way to ensure that the Bakunin papers don’t end up propping up an ahistorical or unexamined myth of Russia as a whole. 

It’s interesting to hear Randolph mix his own personal observations about life in the archive with his broader treatment of the Bakunin papers. For when Randolph reminds us that the women who guard the papers at Pushkin House today are underpaid, we note that the archives not only have a history, but they may have a gender.  At any rate, I remember my own awkward excursion to Pushkin House two years ago.  Not knowing the language, nor even the history of the place, I ventured there as a tourist to the shrine of Russian literary culture.  The goal was mystical, to soak up the religious afterglow of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Bulgakov.

I guess this is the point of Archive Stories, to remind us that such pilgrimages come at a price if they reinforce or reproduce distorted or ultimately harmful views of a people.  For my part, I’ll confess a moment of supreme awkwardness in Pushkin House, a moment that certainly reflects Burton’s concerns about ethnocentric and quasi-imperial attitudes toward the Other.  In the archive, I spoke my own language.  Worse still, I assumed that Russia was in economic free fall, and at one point offered a generous archivist a “tip” for spending so much time walking me through the exhibits.  She refused, of course, but the audacity of my own condescension left me feeling ridiculous.  I too am a part of the history of the Russia “idea.”

This post is dedicated to Alan Calhamer,  inventor of Diplomacy and one of LaGrange Park's finest minds.

Antithesis, Anti-World, Anti-Self

Jonathan Brent's Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia is a perfect little book. Like the Elif Batuman's Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them--and hopefully, modestly, this blog--it's a blend of the personal and the historical. That is, Brent discusses the historical controversies surrounding issues such as the Kirov Assassination, the Doctor's Plot, the destruction of the literary and artistic elite, Lenin's role in establishing a police state, the Comintern's level of activity in various nations, Isaac Babel's demise, the legacy of the KGB, moral responsibility for the gulag, etc., while also documenting his confused but sensitive reactions to the alien and shifting landscape of post-collapse Russia. It's a landscape of suffering, fear, poverty and economic hardship, strident anti-Semitism, burgeoning consumerism, and general shabbiness. In one telling scene, the author moves about his host's apartment cautiously, less he break or destroy any one of the dozens of poorly made consumer items or delicate pieces of furniture that litter the place. In this ill-constructed country, even turning a faucet on or off can result in a major plumbing disaster.

Brent went to Russia at the end of the Cold War as Yale University Press' chief negotiating dignitary. As such, Brent has a keen sense of the importance of his mission. Although he could not have known with certainty that Russia's archives would soon be closed to outsiders, he did understand that the world's ability to see many of these rare and precious documents was fragile and tenuous. Blessed with a novelist's rhetorical powers, Brent is able to articulate that which this blog sometimes struggles to assert, that Russian archives and Russian history lies at the heart of all quests at modern self-understanding. Russia was not only the mirror-image of the West throughout much of the previous century, it was also the boldest experiment in "engineering men's souls" ever attempted. That the experiment failed so disastrously is merely one more reason to persevere in our attempt to explain its origins and results.

As Inside the Stalin Archives is so closely aligned to the worldview of this blog, perhaps a few quotations are in order.

First, here is Brent discussing Russia's place as the Russia as America's alter-ego:

"...I had grown up under the sign of the Cold War; I had hid under my desk as a child in fear of a nuclear attack from an unknown enemy; I had watched on television the U.S. and Soviet ships off the coast of Cuba in their fateful standoff; I had gone to bed many nights fearful of the invisible particles of radiation raining down on us continually from the skies from our atom bomb testing; I had protested the Vietnam War and spend a night in prison as a consequence; as a child I had ridden the bus to school every morning trying to make out the import of the words, "We will bury you," that were printed on an advertisement for the United Nations along with a picture of a small, round man standing at a podium with one first raised as if in anger..."

Second, here is Brent stating this blog's central premise:

"..the history of the Soviet Union was, in my view, the entryway into understanding the history of the world for the last seventy-five years of the twentieth century. I emphasized that for me this was not only a project of understanding Soviet history but also of understanding my experiences and those of my generation growing up in post-Sputnik America."

Third, and finally, here is Brent discussing the proper ambivalence with which we should confront Soviet history:

"Never clearly seen, never understood, a mortal enemy--yet for those who fell in love with the revolution and its literature and music, not only an enemy. It seemed the inevitable reflux of everything around us. It was that which had always existed contra to us, an anti-world, an in some ways an anit-self. It formed the natureal complement, the necessary antithesis that mirrored our every move and made us conscious of ourselves."

Russia-licious

Let me admit my bias up front: Elif Batuman may have already written the book I’ve been planning to write. Her book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, is very similar in form and substance to the work of creative nonfiction that I’d like to inflict on people in a year or so. Batuman’s book has somehow received an extraordinary dose of marketing support and publicity in recent months. Its advertisements appear conspicuously in the New York Review of Books; the product is well placed in many bookstores; and at least three different people have forwarded me one of its ecstatic book reviews.

Is jealous warranted? I’d say so. Batuman has a few advantages over me: she’s a Harvard and Stanford University graduate; she speaks Russian; she’s travelled to Russia; she had previously published a series of well-received articles in prominent magazines; and, most importantly, she’s clever and funny, with more than a dash of David Sedaris in her.

As it turns out, the book is very good, but not quite what either its title or its press promised it to be. More than anything, the book is a darkly comic description of the hell that is humanities graduate school. Batuman’s essays make use of Russian literature, but, like this blog, these essays don’t hesitate to make wide detours whenever the author feels the urge to discuss some of her own intellectual or personal experiences. It’s this mix of the personal, the comic, and the academic that attracts me to the author and the book. When the book works, it’s because the comparative literature or literary theory is shedding light on her autobiography, or vice-versa.

By her own admission, the author once set out to write a novel but failed. The mass of her writings lacked form or structure. Presumably, this unique approach to creative non-fiction, replete with comic interludes, irony, and rich character descriptions, is a second attempt to produce something akin to a novel. Butuman writes well, and her adventures in Eurasia (studying Uzbek literature alongside of a boyfriend), Turkey (she’s ethnically Turkish), St. Petersburg (she visits a replica of a tsarina's’s ice palace), Yasnaya Polyna (there’s a Tolstoy conference there, can’t wait to go someday), and California (she serves as a handler for some of writer Isaac Babel’s kin) are worth reading.

Putting jealousy aside, the book’s critical reception should lend legitimacy to this blog’s project, the attempt to link personal narrative to public history and quasi-academic discourse. Moreover, this isn’t really about Russian literature, and certainly not about other people who are obsessed with the subject. The book is really a treatise on obsession as it gets amplified or distorted by the very strange rituals of graduate school. If you boiled this book down, there might be only 75 pages or so if real Russian literature or history, if that. (But was it Batuman who described some character who said you don’t judge the beauty of a dress by the quantity of fabric its tailor used in its construction?)

So there might still be a vacuum for a book about obsession with Russia, as opposed to obsession about literature in the context of graduate school? The irony for me is that the book’s title, the Possessed, taken from the title of one of the author’s favorite Dostoevsky books, was probably one of the books that launched me on my path toward monomania many years ago. Strangely, when Butuman recounts the plot’s dark, twisted plot, I can recall almost nothing about it. The book stayed with me on some level. I’ve never doubted that it was one of the best books I ever read. Notwithstanding Butuman’s assertion that Joseph Frank and other Dostoevsky critics see it as a deeply flawed book; the Possessed discusses human nature with a brutal frankness seldom seen anywhere else. It’s acutely Russian in the sense that it reveals human depravity with a nakedness found in no other literature.