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.
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