Soviet Union
Culture of death
A historian's view of 20th century Russia shows the traumatic legacy of totalitarian terror.
The British historian Catherine Merridale set out to write the story of 20th century Russia, a society that saw two revolutions — the Soviet, in 1917, and the overthrow of Communism, in 1991. She wanted to write about “the idea that a modern revolution could try to create an entirely new kind of person.” What she found was more coherence than disjunction, and most of this coherence had to do with death.
It could hardly be otherwise in a society that, from the beginning of World War I in 1914 to Stalin’s death in 1953, lost more than 50 million citizens to war, to political violence, to the famines that swept the country in the early ’30s and late ’40s, and to the epidemics that followed each of those catastrophes, often because the sheer numbers of dead meant corpses were stacked at cemeteries or tossed into the street. The spring was a particularly dangerous time: The snow that had kept bodies from decomposing through the winter melted, and infected water flowed through the streets.
Were Merridale not such a fine writer the stories she is telling here might well be unendurable. It’s not that she has hoarded atrocities to recount with relish. The worst she has to tell she delivers calmly, without fuss, with a sensibility that blends reason and emotion in a way you associate more with literature or music than with the writing of history. But what she has to tell is horrible enough — the cannibalism that accompanied the famines, the people who were told their loved ones were about to be released from Stalin’s prisons when they had in fact been shot years before, the horror bordering on black comedy. In 1937 Stalin held a much-trumpeted census. The information that was gathered, which suggested the catastrophic scale of the famine that ravaged the country in 1932-33, was deemed so potentially disastrous to Soviet rule that the results were declared top secret. All the national officials who worked on the census were arrested, and some were shot.
Some of Merridale’s observations — how the Communists paradoxically determined to create a society of scientific atheism with religious fervor; the lavishness of Russian Orthodox funerary finding an unlikely echo in the lavishness of Soviet state funerals and the fetishization that has attended the preserved body of Lenin — make such sense that it’s as if it were all in your brain all along, just waiting to be articulated.
Much of what she writes here is startling, nothing more so than the strange combination of denial and unassuagable grief that results when a culture of death is also a culture of enforced silence. Think about it: Because of the nature of the violence that defined Stalin’s reign, mourning someone who had been declared an antirevolutionary or an enemy of the people was the easiest way to get branded an enemy as well. In a weird way, the people left to mourn Stalin’s victims began to do the dictator’s work for him. In a state of totalitarian terror, Russians learned to repress their emotions, learned not to even voice grievances or doubts about the government in private conversation for fear of being overheard or reported. When your life depends on the manner you adopt, that manner ceases to become an act; you play the part fully so no one ever has cause to doubt your sincerity.
Merridale describes a society of people who have suffered violence unimaginable to most of us, many of whom are now experiencing psychological trauma because the lies of the regime that oppressed them are being exposed. It’s not just things like the discoveries of Stalin’s mass graves but, perhaps most traumatic, the explosion of the myth built around the Great Patriotic War (World War II). More than half of those 50 million dead died in Russia’s military during the War, many due to a combination of incompetence and arrogance, a willing sacrifice of soldiers to make a point about Soviet bravery. Confronting those truths has proved to be devastating for the remaining generations. Merridale reports that some of the elderly who have recorded testimonies for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation have suffered depression and even heart attacks after reliving what has been so long buried.
The best historical and political writing is often the sort that brings no comfort. Merridale’s searching sensibility, her refusal to be satisfied with easy answers will likely please neither the left nor the right. There can be no self-delusions about the nature of communism after reading this book (and certainly no retreat to the comforting myth that “true” communism has never really been attempted). Nor can there be any possibility of using the deaths recounted here as “icons for freedom.” That, Merridale writes, “is the most complacent kind of moral tourism,” another gross appropriation of murder for political ideology. This book is an example of moral and emotional bravery. Merridale has contemplated the worst without invective. That she has done so while maintaining her steady, pained, questioning and restless voice pays honor to the dead and sets an example for everyone left pondering their fates.
Charles Taylor is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger. More Charles Taylor.
What to watch instead of “Winnie the Pooh”
While the yellow bear makes a comeback on the big screen, his Soviet doppelganger Vinni Pukh deserves some love too
Vinni Pukh (or Vinni-Puh), the Soviet cousin of Winnie the Pooh. With its totally un-Pixarlated look and nougaty nostalgia core, Disney’s new “Winnie the Pooh” movie might be the perfect antidote for the summer 3-D blockbuster. Then again, do you really want to pay $12 for a film whose main appeal is that it feels old? Not to get all Eeyore on you, but I’d just as soon fork over my money for something I haven’t seen before. (Which also rules out the new “Transformers,” with its reused fight sequences.)
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
Gorbachev accuses Putin of contempt for voters
Former Soviet leader also says Russian government only has imitations of parliamentary and judicial systems
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin seen during his meeting with Sports Minister Viltaly Mutko, left, and Tatarstan regional President Rustam Minnikhanov to discuss preparedness for the Universiade-2013 in Kazan, in the Konstantin Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2011. (AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Pool)(Credit: AP) Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has accused Russia’s current rulers of conceit and contempt for voters in his harshest criticism of the government yet.
Gorbachev on Monday criticized Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for saying that they will decide between them who should run for president in Russia’s March 2012 presidential vote.
Gorbachev said the statements show an “incredible conceit” and disrespect for voters. Gorbachev has previously avoided personal criticism of Putin, who is widely expected to reclaim presidency.
Gorbachev, who will turn 80 next week, also denounced the main pro-Kremlin United Russia party as a “bad copy” of the Soviet Communist Party and said that Russia has only imitations of a parliament and judicial system.
“How I Ended This Summer”: A thriller from the Russian Arctic
Pick of the week: "The Shining" meets "Shutter Island" in the subtle, spectacular "How I Ended This Summer"
Grigory Dobrygin in "How I Ended This Summer" I feel pretty safe in telling you that there are layers of social and political allegory beneath “How I Ended This Summer,” Russian director Alexei Popogrebsky’s thriller about two men alone in the Arctic. I mean, it’s a Russian movie — that goes with the turf. But you don’t have to go spelunking for deep meanings below this impressively crafted piece of cinema to enjoy it. Filmed at an actual meteorological research station in the Russian Arctic coast that was built under Stalin, “How I Ended This Summer” combines memorable images of the gorgeous, rugged wilderness, meticulous sound design that emphasizes the characters’ isolation, a dash of dark wit and a dose of madness.
Continue Reading CloseHow “Battleship Potemkin” reshaped Hollywood
An electrifying new restoration reveals Eisenstein's Soviet-era classic as pioneering action cinema
Anybody who thinks that Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” is an “art film” either hasn’t seen the movie at all or had it ruined for them by some combination of a butchered print and a tedious film-history professor. As a remarkable new restoration of the 1925 Soviet silent classic makes clear, “Battleship Potemkin” is first and foremost an action drama, a work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension. This taut, 71-minute picture is stitched together from more than 1,300 shots, very few of them lasting more than three or four seconds. For better or worse, this film’s true revolutionary legacy is not art cinema but Hollywood; it’s got a lot more in common with Tony Scott’s “Unstoppable” than it does with Andrei Tarkovsky.
Continue Reading Close“Disco and Atomic War”: How David Hasselhoff won the Cold War
A hilarious Estonian documentary (yes, really!) asks whether disco and "Dallas" defeated Communism
A still from "Disco and Atomic War" You won’t see another documentary all year long that packs quite the same combination of pure fun and eye-opening information as “Disco and Atomic War,” a strange and delightful work of historical collage from Estonian filmmaker Jaak Kilmi. No, I know — I can feel you slipping into a coma out there: O’Hehir is trying to convince me to watch an Estonian documentary! But hang on a second while I fling a pitcher of ice water in your face and explain that this particular Estonian documentary features David Hasselhoff (in his classic “Knight Rider” phase) and dueling Finnish- and Soviet-made instructional videos about disco dancing. And you have not lived, my friends, until you have seen a bunch of 50ish Finnish people in mid-’70s leisure wear completely giving up the funk.
Continue Reading ClosePage 1 of 8 in Soviet Union