Night of Stone
Merridale, Catherine & McWilliams, Susan
EYES WIDE SHUT Might of Stone Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia Catherine Merridale Viking Books, $29.35, 402 pp. Susan McWIIIiams________ When my mother, a psychoanalyst,...
...There was always a reason not to talk...
...The average life expectancy for a Russian man, says the World Health Organization, is fifty-six years...
...Thaf s not to mention World War I, which took between 1.6 and 2 million Russian lives...
...Her research leads to the only conclusion it can: Although it is impossible to number the dead, the dead somehow still exist in the land of the living...
...into difficult moments...
...The Soviets never told these tales themselves, at least not publicly...
...And that's not to mention the brutality of the revolutions themselves, beginning with 1905's Bloody Sunday...
...The assembled Russians exploded into laughter...
...In our sort of life people had to shut their eyes to their surroundings," Mandelstam wrote in her chilling memoir Hope against Hope...
...That's not to mention the postrevolutionary Red Terror, when the Bolsheviks began to execute, in what would become a perverse national tradition, their real and imagined enemies...
...It is only when Merridale remembers the words of Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of poet-turned-prisoner-turnedcasualty Osip Mandelstam, that she begins to break through...
...During the Soviet era, there was always a reason to be silent...
...The accounts of these tragedies have come in the form of individual autobiography...
...But silence, Merridale tells us, has its own violence...
...That's not to mention the two other major famines, 1921-22 and 1946-47, and the shorter-lived but still fatal "hungers" of 1917,1919, and 1924...
...As the Western media have reported, Russians are dying at alarming rates...
...Census Bureau, which also forecasts that the decline will accelerate, leaving the population at 118.2 million by 2050...
...How have they, to use a decidedly Western term, coped...
...Deaths now outpace births by a ratio of about 1.5 to 1. It is no exaggeration to say that in Russia today, death is more prevalent than life...
...But Russia's human decline also raises bigger political questions...
...What does that mean for the Soviet experiment and for the former Soviets, then, when after seventy years of work that labor turns out not to mean anything...
...In Night of Stone, historian Catherine Merridale sets out to document the veritable parade of disaster that visited Russia and its neighboring republics during the twentieth century...
...Commonweal 31 September 14,2001...
...Fortunately, it is very, very short...
...The dead cannot speak...
...To shut your eyes like this is not easy and requires a great effort...
...What does it do to a person, and what does it do to a society, when the national pastime is waiting for the next bad thing to happen...
...Memory, for the Russians, can be a kind of nightmare...
...In the officially atheist, consciously mortal Soviet world, the dictate of eternality was: "The only thing we can call immortal is our labor...
...On these terms alone, Merridale's history is numbing—numbing because it is so bleak, but also because it's a secret history...
...Merridale learns to listen not to her interviewees' words, but to the spaces between their words...
...Death is no joke in Russia, so much so that it has become a joke...
...Susan McWIIIiams________ When my mother, a psychoanalyst, visited Russia three years ago, her university hosts were eager to explain the Russian mind...
...And what is worth doing now...
...So Merridale turns to the living to ask the hard questions...
...She paused, took a dramatic breath, readying her audience for the punch line...
...For Western observers, especially those who believed that an infusion of capitalist democracy always makes the least off better off, and that the postCommunist era would usher in new prosperities, these statistics are troubling at best...
...If that work was all a mistake, what did they do it for...
...In interviews with witnesses and survivors, Merridale finds that the answers aren't easy to come by...
...One woman, during a dinner gathering, thought a typical Russian joke would be a good way to begin...
...Russia's population plummeted from 148.1 to 146 million during the 1990s, according to the U.S...
...Though perestroika, glasnost, and later the dissolution of the USSR now make it possible to discuss such topics, Russians tend to keep quiet...
...Certainly, Merridale is the first to lay out the damage in all its gruesome scope and impact...
...How have the Russians come to understand their last bruCommonweal 30 September 14,2001 tal century...
...Within those silences, she unearths the bodies...
...A steady stream of blood it is, from the familiar goriness of the Stalinist purges and the Nazi siege of Leningrad to the littleknown tragedies of dekulakization, in which the Communist Party killed or dispossessed countless undesirables in the name of collectivization, and the great famine of 1931-32, in which between 5 and 7 million people starved to death...
...The urge always to look, like the diligent and eager workers in a Soviet propaganda poster, toward a Utopian future—a future in which there is no past—might be the strongest legacy of a culture of death...
...In Russia, often, neither can the living...
...Life is very, very difficult," the joketeller said...
...Russians have made a habit of dissociating, of speaking in fragments and tangents, of interjecting, "Don't you want another cup of tea...
...Or perhaps more accurately, the assembled Russians grunted their appreciation, threw back shots of vodka, and poured themselves another round...
...Merridale tries to set up group interviews to make for better conversational flow, only to find that Russians don't do dialogue...
...Susan McWilliams is a graduate student in political philosophy at Princeton...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 15
