Night of Stone: death and memory in Russia by Catherine
Merridale (Granta, ?25 (это цена, ?=фунт))
Catherine Merridale opens with a macabre little drama, as the bones
of politicians, poets, writers and musicians are exhumed from a rough Siberian
grave where they have lain for 60 years. "It's like a fairy story, isn't
it?" says a watching relative, continuing through her tears: "They brought
them here in their shirts - it must have been so cold." Suddenly the ceremony's
decorum is shattered by a woman hurling herself, keening, to the ground,
followed by others in a wild group lament. The officials look embarrassed,
the women are moved away: this is no place for peasant emotion.
But in Russian village life, keening was a very important skill. Merridale
notes its persistence as one of many indications that the Russian soul
has not been totally denatured by 80 years of Communism. She embarked on
her quest armed with a clutch of standard notions - that Russians were
brutal, that life was held cheap, and that their 20th-century tribulations
must have left them all traumatised - but what she came back with is infinitely
more complex and interesting. Based on interviews with doctors, priests,
psychologists, soldiers, Communist cadres, former prisoners and families
of political victims, this majestic oral history should be required reading
for anyone wanting to understand the Russia of today.
Vladimir Putin may be bothered about Russia's rapid population decline,
but Merridale shows its high mortality rate to be par for the course. If
Russia is now one of the few developed countries where life-expectancy
is falling, it had that same distinction 100 years ago, and its Orthodox
population has always fared worse than its Catholics or Jews. Yet Orthodoxy
itself - and the superstitions which accreted round it - was, and is, an
immensely fecund force, nowhere more so than where death is concerned.
Merridale's account of the practices to which the living resorted to
ensure that departed souls should feel well and happy - and to ensure they
didn't come back to haunt - makes colourful and sometimes hilarious reading.
For the point was that they were not departed. Immanent in woods and streams,
they were waiting for redemption and resurrection, and were believed to
need to stay in constant contact with their own piece of earth. Hence the
Russian horror of cremation, and the perennial obsession with bones: Trotsky
and co may have wanted to demystify the relics of Christian saints, but
their own empire was founded on the bones of the Communist saint whose
embalmed remains this month went back on display.
Hence, also, the importance of the bones buried in mass graves all over
the Soviet empire, whose belated exhumation forms the kernel of Merridale's
story. Seven million died in the 1933 famine, but when the 1937 census
reflected this, its findings were suppressed and its officials shot. The
graves of the bewildered conscripts who died in Afghanistan were scattered
so cleverly that few realised how numerous they were. The victims of Stalin's
purges - whose families were conned into thinking they were merely serving
hard labour "without right of correspondence" - are in most cases still
awaiting their requiem.
No short review can do justice to the picture which emerges from this
riveting narrative. Eye-witness accounts of unspeakable horrors are balanced
by amazing proof of endurance, as much by the mind as the body. There isn't
much heroism here, but stoicism is stamped on almost every page. Catherine
Merridale discovers again and again that while her respondents need to
weep, they need even more to conserve the strength to go on living.
She doesn't gloss over the moral squalor of the post-Communist state,
or the ugliness of its resurgent anti-Semitism, but in a typically graceful
paragraph she spells out her key finding: "Death, in Russia after Communism,
is still a bird, the extinction of a star, the flight of a winged and vulnerable
soul, like a new-born child, a stroke from the scythe of fate. There are
seas or a dark river to be crossed... and on the other side there waits
that other light in which the soul must watch."
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