On the Ruins of a Failed Utopia
KENEZ, PETER
On the Ruins of a Failed Utopia Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia By Eleanor Randolph Simon & Schuster. 431pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Peter Kenez Professor of history:...
...Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russians have once more been grappling with an extraordinarily difficult and altogether novel challenge...
...She thinks that there may be hope for improvement in the not too distant future...
...Her heroes are overworked and underpaid doctors, homosexuals, semisuccessful ballerinas, small-scale entrepreneurs, priests, grandmothers...
...Indeed, it is hardly controversial: Crime is rampant...
...Miracle cures, for example, are not altogether irrational when normal ones are unavailable...
...Practically all of Randolph's accounts not only have an air of verisimilitude but capture the flavor of contemporary Moscow...
...Now Eleanor Randolph has performed the valuable service of bringing that chaotic scene into sharper focus...
...the intelligentsia and the pensioners, in particular, are suffering badly...
...Her Waking the Tempests helps us make sense of the new Russia's evolution...
...I found the story of a woman scientist who becomes an entrepreneur and sells cosmetics especially absorbing...
...Analysis of the major political upheavals that occurred during her tour is left to others...
...On her return in 1995, Moscow looked better to Randolph than ever before...
...One is largely made up of people who more or less shared President Ronald Reagan's position concerning the "evil empire...
...the Russian form of capitalism is ugly and disorganized...
...old values no longer make sense, but new ones still have not replaced them...
...I, for one, do not think that Russians are particularly strange...
...She sees a nation whose traditional values cannot be easily reconciled with the principles of modern capitalism...
...She writes about miracle cures offered by quacks, vicious murders, peculiar religious beliefs, and spectacular get-rich-quick schemes...
...A tale of bureaucratic infighting at a ballet school, at least to me, was less interesting and revealing...
...Few close students of Russia would disagree with the picture Randolph paints...
...They believe Russia's problems have been caused by the mistakes of the reformers, passionately dislike its cruel form of capitalism, bemoan the abandonment of the mythical "third way" between socialism and capitalism, and foresee only misery and chaos...
...Before 1917, for instance, no nation had attempted to create a new society on the basis of an ambitious ideology, and none had suffered so devastatingly from a self-immolating terror...
...Not unreasonably, they blame the country's current ills on the legacy of 74 years of Communism, by and large approve of President Boris N. Yeltsin and his reforms, and have confidence in the future of Russian capitalism...
...Perhaps because she is a journalist...
...It is difficult to place the author in one or the other group...
...Instead, she concentrates on telling us about the lives of ordinary folks she came to know when she lived in Moscow...
...Inevitably, some of the vignettes are more poignant and successful than others...
...Observers of present-day Russia are ever more sharply divided into two groups...
...Members of the second group were enthusiastic partisans of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev...
...The bulk of her book is unrelentingly negative...
...Randolph, who worked in Moscow for the Washington Post from 1991 to 1993, and returned for a visit in 1995, is an intelligent, courageous and sensitive journalist...
...Intriguing, too, was the murky case of a mistreated ex-wife aided by a policeman, probably her lover, who has her scoundrel former husband murdered...
...Although the case is meant to demonstrate the backwardness of Russian jurisprudence, I disagree that the sentences meted out were disproportionate...
...In her Epilogue, however, she is more optimistic...
...Randolph also tends to be attracted to what strikes her as unusual and exotic...
...And while she is generally sympathetic to her subjects, she is well aware of their characteristic prejudices and foibles...
...The author's numerous vignettes of daily life in this time of anarchy, though, illuminate the human dimension of the great transformation under way...
...The rest of us, meanwhile, have been watching with horror and fascination as individuals try to cope with the consequent chaos, in what just yesterday was the world's other superpower...
...In any event, it is undoubtedly more difficult to engagingly convey that the overwhelming majority of people, after all, continue to live their usual humdrum lives: They go to work, go to restaurants and movies, and in the autumn go to pick mushrooms in the forest...
...I hope she is right...
...For no one knows how to rebuild a country on the ruins of a failed Utopia, how to create an economic, legal and political system appropriate to the end of the 20th century and beyond...
...Their dramas, moreover, have always been vast in scope...
...Confessing at the outset that she is neither a historian nor a political scientist, she eschews grand theories...
...Reviewed by Peter Kenez Professor of history: University of California, Santa Cruz ONE of the distinctions of modern Russia's history is that time and time again its people have been forced to become path-breakers, to improvise in the face of unprecedented circumstances...
...Her discussion of these matters is always sensible, but as she herself admits, she finds Russia an alien place...
Vol. 79 • July 1996 • No. 4
