Sergey Radchenko's Unwanted Visionaries

Sergey Radchenko's new book, Unwanted Visionaries:  The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War, closely scrutinizes Gorbachev foreign policy in Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Far East.  Radchenko's deep familiarity with Russian, Chinese, American, and Indian diplomatic history, to say nothing of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese foreign policy traditions, is impossible to gainsay:  the polyglot Radchenko is a master of his diverse sources and he is therefore remarkably comfortable with the decision-making processes of each of the region's key players, never hesitating to explore the diplomatic overtures of even some of Asia's lesser powers, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. 

Radchenko's analysis of this period in diplomatic history transcends the confines of Soviet history, revealing a complex and evolving international system with few or no fixed diplomatic certainties.  Its lessons should be equally applicable to historians of American, Japanese, and Chinese foreign policy.  Nevertheless, certain key themes in Soviet "national" history emerge from this chaos of shifting diplomatic rivalries.  Most importantly, Unwanted Visionaries suggests that the Soviet Union was seriously taxed by its efforts to maintain, or even improve, its status in Asia during this period.  First, the Soviet Union was engaged in a losing war in Afghanistan.  Second, its allies, North Korea and Vietnam, were isolated and impoverished.  Third, its economic decline prevented it from offering its longtime ally, India, much in the way of international trade or economic aid.  Fourth, Japan remained unwilling to improve relations with the Soviet Union so long as Gorbachev remained unwilling to part with at least two of the disputed Kurile Islands.  Fifth, and most importantly, China continued to resist the Kremlin's longstanding claim to leadership within the socialist community of nations, and worried about (and sometimes resisted) the Soviet Union's diplomatic and military activities in Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia.

Unwanted Visionaries is a meticulously researched book.  Its detailed chronology of events is also impressive.  One couldn't hope for a more elaborate and careful description of key moments in Asian diplomatic history. Radchenko's one mistake may be that he sometimes favors chronology at the expense of sustained analysis.  While Radchenko explains the context for the individual decisions of Russian statesmen, he seldom gives readers a broad for evaluating the nation's broad diplomatic goals.  Radchenko's strength as a diplomatic historian is that he is remarkably free of ideological bias, but without ideology it may be difficult to evaluate the overall basis for Soviet decision-making.  Radchenko doesn't entirely neglect the biases of the Soviet foreign policy elite, either before or after Gorbachev's ascent to power.  Nor does he ignore some of the democratic and economic imperatives of Glasnost and Perestroika.  But notwithstanding the book's title, Radchenko doesn't really give us a handle on any Soviet foreign policy expert's vision for either Asia or the Far East, whether that vision be wanted or unwanted.  Perhaps that's the point.  Gorbachev never really had such a vision, but to the extent he did, it was incompatible with the realism required of a Soviet statesman.  For if Gorbachev had articulated a clearer Asian policy, and indeed even if he had pursued that vision more aggressively, surely that policy would have been overcome by the deteriorating political situation at home.  When one a nation considers selling islands to Japan, or asks for loans from China (beware, America), what chance does it have?

Unwanted Visionaries is perhaps less than the sum of its parts but the book offers readers wonderfully illuminating insights into a number of intriguing chapters in Asian diplomacy. The sections dealing with the Soviet Union's rapprochement with China in the wake of Tienanmen Square are particularly enlightening.  At this point, the roles of the two great powers were reversed:   The Soviet Union lent Russia a degree of diplomatic support, while China hoped that Russia would somehow remain under its wing in the socialist camp.

The conclusion of the book is suggestive as well, and one only wishes its themes were examined in more detail.  As the Russian Federation replaced the Soviet Union, the influence of Moscow in Asia declined precipitously.  In the past, Russia had used Asia as an area of influence whenever its ambitions were checked in Europe.  When Russia was checked in the Crimean War, it attempted to expand in Central Asia.  If Revolutionary Russia was blocked in Europe, why not stoke the fires of revolution in China?  Even Stalin turned toward Korea when further European expansion seemed too costly.  As Radchenko points out, Russia has never had any qualms about exploiting its proximity to Asia, and indeed its own claims to be "part Asian," when Europe seemed too formidable to her.   But if this formula was already out of date when Japan defeated Russian in 1905, how much more out of date was it when Gorbachev took power?  Today, comparatively few Russian citizens actually live in the Asian portion of the country, and Russian economic activity in the region is largely limited to the exploitation of natural resources.  This stands in stark contrast to the economic vitality of Japan, South Korea, China, and other emerging economic giants.  Radchenko's final thought is that this isn't such a bad thing.  If Russia is no longer competing for the title of regional hegemon, it might at least attempt to benefit from low-key participation in the Asian economic miracle.  The key, Radchenko argues, is to avoid grandiose diplomatic gestures and militaristic sloganeering in favor of the quiet, sustained diplomacy of cooperation. 

Arthur Koestler's The Invisible Writing

Once upon a time, every bookish American seemed to have a copy of the postwar phenomenon, The God That Failed. As a bookish as well as politically active person, my mother naturally had a copy of the book on her bookshelves. As an emerging atheist, I liked Richard Crossman's title and read The God That Failed before I was old enough to make sense of it. Looking back, I suspect that this compilation of six essays about the evils of communism, including a famous entry Arthur Koestler, helped to keep liberal-minded Americans like my mother firmly on the side of America and her democratic allies. Or, if the confessions of these particular former communists didn't necessarily sway people like my mother to steer clear of communism, then the logic behind these essays surely did.  For those who believed in social justice, communism had its allurements, but these allurements weren’t offset by the creed’s anti-democratic and indeed totalitarian tendencies. 

Arthur Koestler's brilliant examination of the logic of the Soviet Show Trials of the late 1930s, Darkness at Noon, was even more damning.  The book revealed that even communism’s best and brightest defenders, men who resembled Old Bolshevik cosmopolitan thinkers such as Nikolai Bukharin, were ensnared by the vicious sophistry of Marxist-Leninist logic. There is something truly astounding about Koestler's ability to get inside the mind of the Bolshevik victimizers/victims. But then Koestler was once a die-hard communist, so it's not altogether surprising that he should be able to accurately depict both the enchanting but ultimately malevolent aspects of modern Europe’s greatest quasi-religious faith.

Koestler’s perspective on communism remains educational.  Reading the second half of his memoirs, The Invisible Writing, one is reminded that communism transcended Russia’s frontiers.  Koestler, a Hungarian communist with intimate ties to Hungarian, German, Spanish, and British communism, to name just a few dimensions of his truly transnational political activity, even spent a considerable amount of time in Stalin’s Russia during the 1930s.  What’s remarkable about his sojourn in the Soviet Union is that the outlines of Stalin’s criminality were already so clearly visible.  Although a “true believer” at the time, Koestler’s independent habits of mind never entirely left him. True to his profession as a journalist, Koestler witnessed a backward, bureaucratic, and secret police-infested society in close detail.

Visiting Russia for the first time, Koestler didn’t intend to critique the Soviet experiment. In fact, his ties to the German Communist Party and Comitern meant that he was expected to praise the Soviet Union at nearly every turn.  Some friendly criticism could be tolerated, but only as a smoke screen to cover his fundamental support for the Soviet Union’s political trajectory.  If he encountered any signs of poverty or technological backwardness, Koestler was expected to attribute these failings to the legacy of absolutism or capitalism more generally.  But Koestler’s encounter with Soviet reality was devastating, and may have led to an open rupture much earlier, if the rise of the fascists in Germany hadn’t overshadowed his Russian observations. 

Koestler’s brilliant description of the Soviet Union is particularly valuable insofar as he was given the opportunity to travel to many of the country’s diverse regions, including the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and Turkish republics.  Incredibly, even before the Great Terror, Koestler's description of the country revealed many of the Terror’s adumbrations, as well as many of the Soviet Union’s other faults, including provincial-level show trials, social prejudice, concentration camps, censorship, propaganda, cultural philistinism, extreme centralization,poor economic planning, consumer goods shortages, overcrowding, housing shortages, long lines, famine, party privilege, political disenfranchisement, and the hyperactivity of the internal security organs. 

Koestler's Soviet travel writing is perseptive, trenchant, critical, and wickedly truthful.  Most interestingly, Koestler juxtaposes his original, sympathetic, depictions of his Soviet adventures with his subsequent, post-Soviet analysis, of the same phenonomena.  The contrast is striking.  Originally, Koestler, like most communists and fellow travellers, went out of his way to explain Soviet failings as bourgeois or even feudal atavisms. If something didn't work well, this was a legacy of tsarism which the modern, Soviet government was diligently working to correct. 


Some quotations from The Invisible Writing:


"The history of mankind would start with the World Revolution;  all that went before was merely a choatic, barbaric overture."

"It is not the Terror, but the existence of this ubiquitous organization without which nothing can be done, and which alone is capable of getting things done, that defines the structure of the totalitarian police state."

"There has never been a society in which a rigid, hierarchical order so completely determined every citizen's station in life and governed all his activities."

"This traditional hierarchic system, formerly confidened to the civil service, now embraces the entire nation."

"The only goods easily obtainable in Kharkov in 1932 were fly-paper, contraceptives and postage stamps."

"I have always had a deep longing for the primeval chaos, a nostalgia for the apocalpyse;  and here I found myself in the middle of both."

"...for the tradition-bound people of Asia the enforced voyage in the time-machine amounted to their deportation into a disconsolate and incomprehensible world."

"The G.P.U., like the gods, are capricious."

"In Russia it is not considered a sign of cowardice to behave in an affable manner towards people of whom one is afraid, and personal pride is not considered a virtue."

"To complete the nightmare, there was my own deep-rooted feeling of guilt towards the proletariat of which Werner was the perfect symbol--the deformed street-urchin, the cat-killer, the hunted and persecuted..."

"...like all the men whom I met in Tiflis, he was a heavy and expert wine drinker."

"Why," she asked pathetically, "Why is it that the leaves die wherever we go?"  In retrospect my overall impression of life in Russia has become tinged with the sadness and desolation of this remark."

"...even a travelling salesman may notice that a sunset lends color to the sky."

"This twin policy of centralization--plus atomization is a basic feature of the Soviet regime."

"The drab streets, the unrelieved shabiness and poverty, the grim pomposity of everything said and written, the all-pervading atmosphere of the reformatory school.  The feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world."

"The overwhelming bleakness of an industrialized Neanderthal."

"And yet I remained a Communist. I had learned that facts had to be appreciated not on their face value, but in a dynamic way."

"Why do you talk in a whisper?" he asked. "Do I?" I said, "I thought I was talking normally."  "In Berlin you used to yell, and now you whisper," he said.  "That is all I want to know about Russia."

"Berlin and Moscow were distant abstractions, and their two dictators shadowy, legendary figures like Nero and Caligula."

"Our association was to end in a ghastly scene which still haunts my imagination."

"His deatg was, fittingly, announced to his sisters by the giggling and spluttering village idiot."

"...the Kremlin Borgias."

Pushkin's Queen of Spades

My new book club meets tonight.  I am excited to introduce Russian short stories to a small group of students who are under some form of court-ordered lock down.  I am nervous about my lack of experience educating teenagers, and worried by my lack of knowledge about the reading levels of this particular group of students.  However, I am going to give them serious readings, namely, the Penguin Classics book, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.  Hopefully, with the right support, they will find some level of satisfaction in learning new things while conquering difficult texts.  I will also use the book club also has a vehicle for enhancing my own knowledge of Russian literature.  To date, I’ve never really read all that many short stories, so this particular genre will be new territory for me. 

As a form of introduction to the club’s theme, Russia, I will ask students a series of questions related to their current knowledge of Russia, which may be limited to the Olympic Games or Soviet spy themes in American cinematography.  Drawing on my previous presentation to a grammar school, but adjusting the sophistication of the answers to my high school audience, I will ask students some basic questions such as the following:  Is Russia an old country or a new one?  Is it hot or cold?  Is it flat or mountainous?  Is it far or close to the United States?  What language do they speak in Russia?  What religion do they practice? 

After giving students a general framework for a discussion of Russia, I will try to give them at least a couple of broad reasons for my own personal interest in Russian history and Russian literature.  While passions may never be fully rationale, I will explain that Russia bears sustained scrutiny because it is a large country (in terms of both geography and demography), an influential country (in terms of its cultural legacy, communist past, and historic military might), a complex country (in terms of both diversity as well as its ambivalent relationship to Europe), and a unique country (in terms of both its religious history and almost unparalleled record of revolution, war, and upheaval). 

After covering Russia’s value as an object of study, I’ll say a few words about Russian literature, focusing on the global impact of its novelists, poets, and short-story writers.   While the reasons for Russia’s deserved literary fame aren’t necessarily easy to explain, I will say a few words about Russia’s claim to fame in the annals of world literature.  First, I’ll mention just a few of the “great names” of Russian literature, which include Pushkin, Gogol, Oblomov, Schredrin-Saltykov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bunin, Gorky, Pasternak, Tsveteva, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Akhmatova.  Second, I’ll say that Russian literature has a reputation for being profoundly serious, moral, philosophical, and eschatological, if not also egregiously dark and Manichean.

Next, we’ll review some of the reading comprehension techniques we’ll need to be developing as we tackle a series of difficult Russian texts.  One slide from my first night’s presentation will be entitled, “How to read like a college student.”  This will entail a number of overlapping strategies, including underlining, rereading, note-taking, dictionary use, marshaling textual evidence in defense of an opinion, paraphrasing, and collaborative discussion and problem-solving.  I will also give students some basic tool to keep in mind as they approach a complex new plot for the first time.  For instance, even serious readers need to figure out one or more of the following questions:   who, what, when, where, and why?  The overall theme will be that students need not expect reading to be easy in order to see it as rewarding.  In fact, the reverse is at least sometimes the case:  the harder the text, the more difficult its narrative and complex its symbolism, the more satisfying and important it may turn out to be. 

Our first story will be Pushkin’s “Queen of Hearts.”   After asking students to explain the basic plot of the story, and after asking them several open-ended questions about what they liked or didn’t like about the story, I will use the text as a platform for introducing students to historical themes.  I will ask students, for instance, to identify passages that demonstrate something about the society Pushkin was describing.  We will, specifically, focus on what the short story reveals about the role of the Russian aristocracy, specifically focusing on Russia’s female aristocrats.  What were Russian aristocrats expected to do with their time?  What constituted an ideal aristocratic man, or an ideal aristocratic female?   We will of course examine Pushkin’s story-telling devices as well, including those related to suspense.  By the conclusion of the discussion, which will only happen two weeks after today, I’m hoping the class will have jointly diagnosed and rehearsed the story’s plot, and then explicated some of the elements of Russian aristocratic society related to militarism, leisure and gambling, gender, class and rank, and elite Russian identity.

Russian History Outreach

Generally speaking, this blog is a personal, self-reflective, and indeed idiosyncratic undertaking.  Placing little emphasis on public dialogue, I document my own investigations into Russian, and especially Soviet, history and literature.  The result is personally satisfying but also somewhat isolating and indeed solipsistic. Therefore, in recent months I've started thinking about interacting more intentionally with a greater variety of actors in order to enrich this project.  With this end in mind, I've applied for, and received, a short-term (i.e., two-week) Fulbright to Russia for this coming April, entitled the Fulbright Russia Community College Administrators Seminar.  As part of a small group of American community college administrators, I'll travel to Moscow, and then a regional city, in order to learn more about the Russian system of higher education. Needless to say, I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to travel to Russia, and even more grateful to participate in a dialogue on education with my counterparts in Russia.  My hope will be to bring back some of this knowledge to my home campus in order to continue the process of internationalization we've already begun.  

My second effort to interact with others on the subject of Russian history is very different.  Yesterday, I had my orientation to become a volunteer book club facilitator to seriously troubled teenage boys.  In this book club, we'll be reading a book entitled, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida.  My goal is to introduce students to Russian literature, but also to history and, more broadly, "college readiness" concepts.  Of course, my experience with troubled teenagers is very limited, and I may not be able to get these students interested in reading Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, and Babel.  Perhaps the texts will prove to be too complicated for them, or the subject matter far too remote.  But I have a hunch that perhaps my own passion for the subject will translate into something positive for them, over time.  

Many years ago I used to go to Zen teacher once a week.  The teacher arrived at a Unitarian church and set up a circle of pillows and began his meditation.  He did this whether students showed up or not, and he charged no fee.  Often, I was the only student to arrive.  Sometimes I would regret the fact that the instructor's spiritual practice didn't have an audience, but over time I started to see that his willingness to show up each week for no ostensible reward was itself part of the spiritual message he was delivering, either to himself, or to his few students.  This Zen teacher's self-discipline and generosity were the most important education he offered us.  In this way, I  hope that somehow offering my own fascination with Russia to students will somehow touch them, or inspire them.  My goal will be to make these students a little more interested in history, a little more knowledgeable about Russia, and a little more willing to believe that people care about them.  I doubt many of them will develop an active and sustained interest in Russia, but perhaps some of them will develop their own equivalent, life-sustaining interests and passions.  

While I'm sure my preconceived notions of doing a book club on Russia to this particular student population will quickly be altered or overturned, I am presently hoping that I'll be able to bring back some of what I learn on my Russian Fulbright and share it with them.  

  

Olga Andreyev Carlisle's Under A New Sky: A Reunion with Russia

One of my greatest pleasures is to stroll into my office library to select another book to read on Russia.  I love reading so much it has utterly overshadowed my ability to conduct real research.  My wife, a very succesful researcher in the field of electrical engineering, tells me that I should stop reading for a period of several months to do some sustained thinking about Russia.  This time away from books would allow me to decide what it is that I wanted to contribute to the study of Russian history or literature. The time away from books would afford me the chance to separate out my thoughts from those of my favorite authors.  What is it I have learned about Russia and the Russian Revolution?

It's difficult to know for sure if one never pauses long enough to reflect on one's own opinions.  Sadly, my love of reading is difficult to surmount.  As soon as I've finished one book, I long to take up another one, or several of them simultaneously.  Perhaps my compulsion to reach for another book is a symptom of fear.  Do I have something original to say about Russia or revolution in general?  If I were afraid of the answer, I'd naturally never want to settle down with my own thoughts very long. 

In any case, for the time being, I remain a serial reader of Russian books, always in danger of favoring historical breadth rather than depth.  And this week, I made my customary visit to my office library and stared at its various sections.  What book to select, and from which section?  My Russian books are organized haphazardly under the following headings:  the Revolution proper, memoirs, poetry, theatre, literary criticism, contemporary fiction, Soviet fiction, anti-Soviet or diaspora fiction, Stalinism and the history of the gulag, Russian women and gender studies, academic tomes, intellectual history, late imperial Russia, the Cold War, international communism, regional studies, and comparative revolution, contemporary Russian fiction, the literature of the Russian diaspora, late and post-Soviet Russia, complete histories of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov (works by those two writers overwhelmed neighboring shelves), nineteenth century fiction, generic histories of Russia, Russian history and literature journals, etc.  

Understandably, the choice of a next book can be a difficult decision.  Last week I settled on something from my late Soviet/post-Soviet shelf, although the book might just as easily have been categorized under memoir. Ordinarily, I don't expect much from my modern Russian books.  I don't read a lot in this area, and so don't spend a lot of time or money ensuring that I've acquired the best books on Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. What's more, so many books were churned out in response to the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, that many of them have not withstood the test of time.  Even so, I always feel that one can't quite make sense of the whole of the Soviet experience, or even the Revolution proper, unless one understands its concluding chapters, or indeed its epilogue.  This of course is my problem as a researcher.  I can't settle down to even a single era.  As soon as I finish a book on the Revolution, I wanted to know what happened before these events, what happened after them, and what happened in other areas of the world simultaneously.  

But I digress.  In this instance, I picked up a short book by Olga Andreyev Carlisle, granddaughter of the best-selling late imperial author, Andreyev.  The book turned out to be a real find.  While not terribly poetic or original, Andreyev Carlisle's family ties form a tangible link in the chain of pre-revolutionary Russia, Soviet Russia, and post-revolutionary Russia.  They also bind Russians who moved abroad to those who stayed behind.  Incredibly, the Andreyev clan also turns out to form a link between liberal and nationalist insofar as Olga's aunt turned away from the liberal and democratic traditions of her husband's family and moved toward spiritual mysticism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism.

The focus of Olga's memoirs is the virtues of the Russian intelligentsia. The book depicts Olga's interactions over the years with Akhmatova, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Askoldov, Lydia Chukovsky, Nadezdha Mandelstam,Vasilyn Aksyonov, and Joseph Brodsky.  In fact, Olga has family ties to authors and poets as well as socialist revolutionaries such as the famous Victor Chernov, one of Lenin's fiercest critics on the left.  Her book testifies to the continuing power of the idea or myth of the intelligentsia.  Although Olga's hopes in the 1960s were dashed after the Soviet Thaw came to an end, she was intimately involved with Russian intellectual resistance to totalitarianism, both at home and in the diaspora.  This book is an attempt to document the survival of liberalism in Russia against all odds.  On the other hand, Olga's second homecoming at the end of the Soviet period, her "reunion" with Russia, is clouded by the resurgence of virulent anti-Semitism.  At the time, many Russian Jews had real reason to fear the advent of Russian "democracy."  Resurgent Russian nationalists were blaming Jews for the entire Soviet experiment, and using only thinly veiled threats to drive many Russian Jews into exile.

This reminds me of my attempts to follow one popular Russian news service.  Reading the RT news is an unnerving if profitable experience on many levels.  For the RT press seems to exist only to retaliate against American and West European attacks against Russia.  If Russia is criticized for human rights violations, Russia's news organs make counterclaims about American human rights violations.  In a sense, reading the Russian news is salubrious.  Russia's unique, non-European, vantage point can unveil hypocrisy and highlight American foreign policy errors and abuses.  But of course the news is often disingenuous.  Russia really does make outrageous mistakes in its treatment of minorities, for example, with the recent anti-gay laws being only the most egregiously hurtful of these laws.  But worse still is to read the website feedback sections, filled as they with endless and flagrant anti-Semittic, racist, and homophobic rants.  Reading these neo-Nazi diatribes of hate, one is reminded of the paradox which has confounded Olga and all other members of Russia's intelligentsia.  If Russia is the land of Tolstoys and Gorkys and Bunins, it's also the land of the Zhirinovskys and Black Hundreds.

Leonid Dobychin's The Town of N

While Leonid Dobychin is today a footnote in the book of Soviet literature, his short novel, The Town of N, is a wonderfully sensitive portrayal of pre-revolutionary life on the outskirts of the empire.  The novel tells the story of a child who grows up in the decade prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.  The Town of N is a bildungsroman:  the child narrator is coming to terms with sex, politics, religion, education, and culture. He's also coming to terms with European and Russian literature.  In the course of 100 odd pages, the narrator tackles almost canonical work of Russian prose, and many European classics as well. Although the child doesn't ordinarily understand what he's reading, he's moving through them, and wrestling with their meaning on some rudimentary level.  Whether or not he has understood them, the narrator is familiar with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Andreyev, Chukovsky, and other Russian writers, as well as Dickens, Nietzsche, Pinkerton novels, and a variety of other Western writers and artists.

As Dobychin's title is redolent of Gogol, so too are his cast of small-minded provincial characters.  Richard Borden's introduction to the European Classic edition of the book, argues that Dobychin's protagonist is beset by a veritable circus of venal, self-important, and grasping of Russian bourgeois.  Certainly the protagonist's family and immediate circle of acquaintances is bourgeois, anti-Semitic, and nationalist if not xenophobic.  The child has grown up in an atmosphere of deep suspicion.  As town-dwellers, the protagonist and his mother regard both workers and peasants--to say nothing of Japanese, Poles, and Jews--as dangerous elements which threaten to overturn the natural order of society.  Once, after the disturbances of 1905, the protagonist regurgitates his mother's disgust that the poor, who lived in dark and smelly basements, were beginning to feel that they had a right to open their windows for air once in a while.

Notwithstanding the protagonist's limited worldview, my own (admittedly first) reading of The Town of N suggests that Dobychin is mainly concerned with depicting his protagonist's world realistically; after all, from a youthful vantage point, adults almost always appear as inscrutable, mysterious, and vaguely threatening, beings. If his protagonist's mother doesn't trust her own maid, and blames Witte's for purposefully landing Russia in trouble with the Japanese in order to appease his Jewish wife, what middle class adult in later imperial Russia did not also harbor similar prejudices?

What's interesting about Dobychin's take on a classic coming-of-age story, is that his narrator is confronting modernity as well as adulthood.  In fact, the plot of The Town of N revolves around mico as well as macro-level events, which often intersect.  On the one hand, he's monitoring the progress of the construction of a local church or paying attention to the activities of his neighbors;  on the other hand, he's bearing witness to the introduction of new technologies, Eastern fashions, political trends, and even social facts, to borrow from Durkeim's terminology.  In the space of just a few years, the character observes the appearance of cinema and electricity and notes the arrival of a new level of political violence characterized by strikes and assassinations which culminate in the Russian-Japanese War and the failed revolution of 1905.

Richard Borden tells us that Dobychin was disgraced by the Soviet literary established and committed suicide shortly thereafter.  His work clearly did not conform to the conventions of socialist realism. Certainly it did not glorify Soviet workers or Soviet construction projects.  Whether or not The Town of N reflects badly on Bolshevik Russia is difficult to say.  Borden points out that comparing modern Russia to Gogol's Russia demonstrates that the Soviet regime would ultimately fail to transform or even improve the dismal circumstances of the Russian people.  The Russian people remained what they had been in Dead Souls. Russian lives remains short, nasty, and brutish.  Their society remained authoritarian, elitist, superstitious, and lubricated by patronage.  (In the Town of N, the police commissionar has his own designated box at the theatre!) But of course this novel isn't set in Soviet Russia.  It's failures are prevolutionary and as such they inherently testify to the Soviet Union's raison d'etre.  The Town of N is in fact a site of intense and rising political dissatisfaction, confusion, and conflict, symbolized by politicized funerals, strikes, terrorist bombings, police shootings, school closings, mobilized soldiers, anti-war literature (i.e., The Red Laugh), expressions of monarchical support, police-issued "certificates of political loyalty," and Black Hundreds marches. If anything, Dobychin's adolescent narrator is observing (or perhaps reflecting) a flawed, divided society in search of radical or event violent transformation.


Some quotes from The Town of N:


"One said he had not sorrrows and wept bitterly:  "God has forgotten me," he grieved."

"Maman told her about how the count had caught two peasant women mushroom picking in his forest and had beaten them up, and she was indignant."

"That fall Father was infected doing a postmortem and died."

"She died there.  She left me three hundred rubles, and maman told me not to spread this fact around."

"Have you read the book "Chekhov"?--she finally asked, reddening."

"Whenever it fell silent, the people near us would discuss England and condemn her. --A Christian nation--they would say--and she's helping the Japanese."

"He was a ragamuffin, and it occurred to me later that he might have a knife and that he could help me take revenge on my penmanship teacher."

"--You've got to eat more rice--maman now said at dinner--and then you'll be strong.  The Japanese eat only rice--and look how they're defeating us."

"Ladies, stopping by the cartloads of food, were sampling.  Peasants were saying foul things out loud.  I was seeing them up close for the first time.--They're like beasts--said Olov, and we had a chat about them."

"We asked Kanatchikov to keep an eye on Evgenia [the family servant]."

"Peasabnts were harrowing.  Ravens revolved around them.  I pictured to myself Chichikov's travels."

"The common people are rebelling--we said. --Measure that can be taken are few."

"I was forbidden to go beyond the gate, and I didn't aspire to.  It would have been terrifying suddenly to encounter peasants alone."

"Father Nikolay explained to us that all creeds had been granted freedom, but that didn't really have much significance and, as before, the principal religion would remain ours."

"I've noticed that I'm already becoming like a grown-up. Sometimes I'm already reminded of childhood."

"I was a bit surprised to hear peasants conversing, just like we did."

"In a cupboard I found a book called "The Life of Jesus."  It astonished me.  I didn't think it possible to doubt in the divinity of Jesus Christ...--Whatever, then--I said to myself--can you be sure of completely?"

"I noticed now that mamam has begun spying on me.  From that day on I tried to behave in such a way that it would be impossible for her to find out anything about me."

"After that they conversed about how sad it is when you suddenly learn that somebody is against the government..."

"--I recall--she said--the year '05.  It was terrible.  People were impertinent then, like wild beasts."

"A policeman came along and made everybody remove their caps."

"One hundred years had passed, it turned out, since the birth of Gogol."

Douglas Smith's Former People

Douglas Smith's book, Former People:  The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, is a wonderfully well-researched account of the tragedy that befell Russia's nobility during the Revolution and the subsequent decades. Smith acknowledges the fact that aristocratic political traditions and economic practices alienated peasants and workers, and even goes so far as to say that most nobles predicted a revolutionary apocalypse even before World War I.  Nevertheless, Smith also helps readers to understand that noble-born Russians suffered grievously.  Indeed, Smith makes a compelling case that the Soviet Union's brutal treatment of nobles foreshadowed the racial cruelty of the Nazi regime.  For the Soviets harassed and hounded anybody with even the slightest biological ties to the Old Regime's nobility, and that included even the children and grandchildren of former nobles. Although the Bolsheviks used class rather than biological terminology to attack their perceived enemies of state, they clearly came to believe that any level of cruelty and coercion was justified if it meant that the Russian people could become purer, less burdened by unproductive and potentially dangerous counter-revolutionary classes.

Smith's book is a compendium of suffering but many so-called "former people" struggled to maintain at least some of the traditions and practices of their past lives.  In some case, former members of high-society met to participate in elaborate balls.  Sadly, Soviet informers caught wind of the events and eventually used them as evidence of an aristocratic conspiracy to undermine socialism.  Smith's treatment of some of the rapid decimation of Russian aristocratic culture is heart-wrenching.  Peasant violence against former aristocrats who tried to survive in the countryside was often deadly, propelled as it was by a desire to ensure that former landlords could never again return to their lands. Of course, all Russians suffered during the Civil War, and most suffered during Collectivization and the Great Terror.  Former aristocrats suffered more than most. Interestingly, Smith's analysis of the letters and diaries of individual families reveals the extent to which many noble families refused to consider emigration.  While some nobles did escape the Soviet Union, many others preferred systematic persecution and even repeated jailings to the idea of "betraying" Russia by emigrating abroad.

In the end, the spirit of the Russian aristocratic culture did survive Bolshevism, and even Stalinism.  That spirit was weakened and bloodied, but alive. Smith's greatest contribution to the historiography of the Soviet Union in general is to remind us that aristocratic culture wasn't always a bad thing.  Undoubtedly romanticized by many in the Russian diaspora, Russian noble culture was often educated, modern, international, phlegmatic, and, to a surprising extent, liberal.  Many Russian nobles even supported the idea of revolution, even suspecting that Bolshevism was a form of cloaked counter-revolution. As Smith reminds us, even Lenin was a product of noble culture, and in fact Lenin claimed noble privilege on more than one occasion in his eventful life.


Some quotations from the book are below:



"For many Russian nobles the revolution came as no surprise."

"Today there are more Golitsyns in North America than in Russia."

"...between 1861 and 1905, the rural nobility lost an average of 1 percent of its land a year through either sale or foreclosure."

"...by 1900 the working class numbered roughly 1.7 million, about 200,000 fewer than the number of Russia's nobles."

"Exiled to Siberia in 1897 for his political activity, Lenin claimed noble status in order to soften the harshness of his punishment."

Smith quoting Nabokov's father:  "To be for the tsar meant to be against Russia."

Smith quoting Nicholas II:  "Do you meant that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain my confidence?"

Smith quoting a 1917 peasant song:

"And from the bitter aspens shall we hang
Every last lackey of that Vampire-Tsar."

"The children of Count Pavel and Natalya Ignatiev saw the February Days as a "wild street carnival that they could not wait to get outside to see."

"We shall not get out of it this time!  one landowner said.  "What will become of us without our rent-rolls?"

"The next month, the eighty-year-old son of Ivan Kireevsky, one of the founders of Slavophilism, was murdered together with his wife at his estate in Moscow Province..."

"She stroked them, reassuring her littles ones it was nothing to worry about.  "It's just the revolution," she whispered, and they turned over and "went blissfully back to sleep.""

Smith citing Gorky.  "Oh, how hard it is to live in Russia!  We are all so stupid--so fantastically stupid."

Smith citing General Ruzsky.  "Great Russian Revolution.  All I can see is nothing but one great robbery."