Washington Post - 07.08.2001

 

Washington Post

BLOOD RED

Review by Robert G. Kaiser

RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIANS
A History
By Geoffrey Hosking
Harvard Univ. 718 pp. $35

NIGHT OF STONE
Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia
By Catherine Merridale
Viking. 402 pp. $29.95

EMPIRE
The Russian Empire and Its Rivals
By Dominic Lieven
Yale Univ. 486 pp. $35

SUNLIGHT AT MIDNIGHT
St. Petersburg and The Rise of Modern Russia
By W. Bruce Lincoln
Basic. 419 pp. $35

"Russia is one of history's great survivors," writes Geoffrey Hosking at the outset of his vast tome, an idiosyncratic, exasperating and brilliant recounting of Russia's astounding thousand and more years. He is surely right about that.

In a contest for best national story, only the English could compete with the Russians. And if the contest took into account grimness and gore, the English would fall out of the running. From its ninth-century origins around Kiev, to the Mongol Golden Horde, to the two Greats, Peter and Catherine, to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky and Pushkin, Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachev, the history of Russia is a mind-boggling parade of horrors, triumphs, glories and disasters. For curious human beings it is an endlessly fascinating subject.

So authors continue to write an endless supply of sometimes-endless volumes exploring it. No single volume can do justice to the subject. Hosking's Russia and the Russians proves that point emphatically. The monumental achievement of a distinguished historian, it is engaging, provocative, intelligent, overwhelming and -- at many junctures -- woefully inadequate. It's a wonderful book, but skimpy on many of the great subjects of Russian history, from Peter and Catherine the Great to Joseph Stalin. Reading Hosking leads to the conclusion that doing even cursory justice to Russian history would require several thousand pages, and he gives it barely 700. The fact that he is trying to pack it all in makes the book as dense as a Russian forest, though fluently readable nevertheless. Hosking's literary problem, simply put, is that Russia has too much history.

The gem in this group of new books is also the most narrowly focused, Catherine Merridale's haunting history of unnatural death in 20th-century Russia. Night of Stone is a revelation, though it deals with familiar subject matter. By confronting her topic with determination and resourcefulness, Merridale succeeds in making the oft-told tale of Russian brutality to Russians both fresh and unbelievably horrific. Considerably more than 50 million Russians died prematurely in the 20th century, a number so big it cannot be fully absorbed. (It's as if England, Scotland and Ireland had all been erased from the map.) But reading Merridale will bring one as close as it may be possible to come to a vicarious understanding of what such losses mean.

"The heart of this book," she writes, "is absence and loss. Silence, and not answer, lies at its core." The silence is a consequence of the Russian penchant for forgetting and denying. An important part of Merridale's research was the gathering of oral history from subjects who, it appears, never discuss the topics she asked them about in their ordinary lives. Obviously an empathetic person and talented interviewer, Merridale could get them talking about the horrors they'd seen, to her readers' great benefit. But she is rattling skeletons (quite literally) in the Russian national closet that are normally ignored. By the end of Night of Stone, you understand the enormity of the hidden horrors that modern Russians are not confronting.

Even readers familiar with the history of 20th-century Russia will be stunned by Merridale's careful accounting of the killing that took place. Stalin's terror in the '30s and the devastation of World War II, the best-known episodes, together represent only about three-fifths of the total. Russia lost perhaps 2 million in World War I, more than Germany did (and 25 times more than the United States). As many as 7 million more died in the Russian civil war that followed the truce at Versailles, and consolidated the Bolshevik revolution. Famine in the early '20s claimed 5-7 million victims, then the "collectivization" of agriculture killed 1-2 million, and more famine in the early '30s killed millions more. Then the great terror of 1937-38, a monument to Stalin's madness, took the lives of now-uncountable millions, including many of the most talented members of society. In World War II about 25 million Russians perished. Right after the war the terror resumed, taking millions more victims, including hundreds of thousands who had been prisoners of Nazi Germany, and were eradicated merely because of that. (This is one category that Merridale's account almost ignores, oddly.) In 1946-47 famine returned, and killed thousands more.

This is far from a complete list, since Russians were dying unnaturally before the first World War, and for 50 years after the second. Russian life expectancy has been, for all of modern history, radically shorter than in other European countries.

Even more impressive than her accounting is Merridale's literary skill. Using individual cases and an ingenious combination of memoirs, archival materials and histories, she brings this horrific tale of death to life. Her book is a tour de force. She successfully debunks the prosaic and prejudiced idea -- commonly heard in Europe for centuries -- that the Russians are somehow barbarians beyond the reach of normal human instincts by demonstrating, again and again, how unmistakably human both perpetrators and victims have been.

Merridale is especially compelling in sections addressing the enormous question of how the Russians who survived cope with the horrors they witnessed and experienced. Most often they have coped by denying and by forgetting. That is why she puts silence at the core of her story. Russians have survived the last century in part by ignoring what really happened. This is one way to cope, of course, but it leaves terrible scars.

All of Russian history has left scars: Each of these books forces us to confront them. Russia is a country never governed -- never -- by a regime that worked to improve the life of its citizens. Only in the last 15 years have Russian leaders made any serious effort to change this state of affairs, still without much success. Hosking's Russia and the Russians and Dominic Lieven's Empire both emphasize the importance of empire in Russia's past. But as both books show, Russian leaders viewed the accumulation of a vast empire as a way to protect the Russian state, not to improve the circumstances of ordinary Russians.

Lieven's book is an artful argument about the nature of the Russian empire that rests in large part on comparing it to others, particularly the Austro-Hungarian, British and Turkish versions. It's an impressive piece of English intellectual showmanship, full of insight but marred occasionally by a pinched reading of the Russian experience. Still, Lieven argues persuasively that for the leaders of Russia, "vulnerability and weakness were often at least as powerful a factor as an instinct for territorial expansion" as the empire grew.

Empire also allowed Russians to think well of themselves, an important concern for centuries. As Lieven makes clear, Russians' sense of their uniquenesss has been central to the national myth, under both tsars and commisars. This pride was another kind of defense. He quotes the delighted response of an enthusiastic delegate to the Communist Party Congress of 1921 to the Bolsheviks' success in making the new communist Soviet Union "the center of a world movement," which "has filled with pride and with a special kind of Russian patriotism the hearts of all those who are connected with the revolution." This wasn't exactly what Marx and Engels had in mind with "workers of the world, unite," but it does help explain the early success of communism in Russia.

The least original but easiest to read of these books is W. Bruce Lincoln's Sunlight at Midnight, a biography of St. Petersburg. This is Lincoln's last book. A prolific author of accessible Russian histories, he died at 61 in 2000. His subject is one of the great Russian inventions, a beautiful European city built from nothing, literally in a swamp.

Peter the Great began the project in the early 18th century; it was completed by successors who embraced Peter's compulsion to give Russia a great European capital and a window on the West. European architects and artists made it possible. After the revolution of 1917, St. Petersburg (by then Petrograd, and later Leningrad) lost its role as national capital, because the Bolsheviks turned away from its pretensions. This happened, Lincoln observes, in part because rapid industrialization at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries transformed St. Petersburg into a center of industry, its glorious palaces ringed by factories belching thick smoke and pollution. "Awash in the paraphernalia of progress," Lincoln writes, "St. Petersburg stood no longer for the grandeur of Empire but for the things that many thoughtful Russians found troubling in the West." So moving the capital to Moscow under the new red flag allowed the old dreams to survive in a new setting.

Lincoln's book would make a good companion on a trip to what is again St. Petersburg, where the life of the imperial capital can no longer be found but the stage set remains intact.

In more than a millennium of recorded history, the Russian experience has been marked by great accomplishments and great deprivations. Sadly, the deprivations have consequences that now weigh down the accomplishments. These books describe the legacy that makes Russia's current experiment so challenging. There is little in the country's past that has prepared it to become a modern, tolerant and efficient democracy. Russians have no real experience with independent civic institutions, checks and balances, or even the restrained use of power. Russian citizens have been estranged from the state for many centuries -- one of Hosking's themes. The modern history so painfully and vividly recounted by Merridale is a kind of curse.

The tragedies of Russia's past haunt its present and cloud its future. So far, free Russians haven't found ways to confront this reality. They are trying to borrow foreign notions (most notably, capitalism and democracy) to create a new Russia without fully accounting for the previous versions. It would be wonderful if these books, particularly Merridale's and Hosking's, were translated into Russian now and widely read by Russians, who could benefit greatly from them.

Robert G. Kaiser, The Post's Moscow correspondent from 1971-74, is the author of "Russia, The People and The Power" and "Why Gorbachev Happened."