Russia Lost and Found

...Highly revealing, too, are Schmemann's descriptions of the family and the village during the revolutionary paroxysms of 1905 and 1917-18...

...The other three were "Bloody Sunday" in January 1905 and the dissolution of the First and Second Dumas in 1906 and 1907...

...In fact," Osorgin noted sadly, "the entire government by the will of that same Gosudar [sovereign] did everything it could to undercut all the freedom that the Gosudar granted and to reduce the effect to the least possible...

...and some pungent observations on current conditions (Schmemann fears that corruption and lawlessness may be inviting a return to centralized, authoritarian rule...

...The Osorgins' village was variously called Karovo, Sergieyevskoye and Koltsovo...

...29.50...

...on returning to the village in 1967 after a long absence, she was shocked by its rundown condition...

...Responsibility is fixed for various disputed crimes...

...Schmemann's narrative moves artfully back and forth among three time perspectives, reminding me of some classical piano trios and triple concertos...

...Eyewitnesses who survived the long night of Bolshevism, or their children, are finally able to tell their tales to family and friends, journalists and scholars...

...Largely prompted by recent election returns, political analysts have made the study of Russian diversity (sometimes called "regionalism") the intellectual fashion of the day...

...It is all, with the exception of a World War II interlude, almost too sad to contemplate...

...The high ethical standards and ecumenical spirit that made Father Alexander's talks as appealing to others as to the Orthodox may have owed something to his family's origins in Latvia among Baltic German Lutherans...

...That was one of four key moments in which the bad faith of Nicholas II forfeited the confidence of much of Russian society...

...While Schmemann focuses on a single village over two centuries, Taplin describes the present and recent past of the remote regions he visited, from Vorkuta, Archangelsk and the Solovki Islands in the Arctic north to Kamchatka and Vladivostok in the far east...

...Of course, the radicals— Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary terrorists led by the police agent Yevno Azef—did what they could to exacerbate the crisis...

...Nizhny Novgorod is more than its historic Fair and the Sakharov House Museum that mainly interested Taplin on his brief visit...

...Taplin has many interesting stories to tell, not only about their natural settings and the difficulties of reaching them, but about their particular ways of life, traumas under Soviet rule and present difficulties...

...This was confirmed to Schmemann in a memoir given him by a lifelong local Communist who had gone on to become administrator of the Moskva Hotel in the capital...

...Schmemann's has the aura of a classic...

...In addition, he visited Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus and Tuva on the Mongolian border (both largely populated by non-Russians), as well as Veliky Ustyug, east of Nizhny Novgorod (a.k.a...

...Under Soviet rule, it eventually became the site of the (now bankrupt) Suvorov collective farm, and a rest home for Kaluga workers...

...Schmemann believes that Communism was most ruinous in its assault on the Russian countryside...

...Taplin, a foreign service officer with the United States Information Agency, has written a very lively, savvy book...

...The richness of all this material, illuminating a century of dramatic events across "one-sixth of the earth's surface," is probably beyond the capacity of current scholars to encompass fully...

...Downstream in bordering Orel and Tula provinces were the lands of Turgenev and Tolstoy, memorably described in their works...

...It is no accident that Russia is administratively divided among 89 provinces, territories and republics...

...Serge Schmemann, a Pulitzer Prizewinning correspondent of the New York Times, has produced the finest book about Russia ever written by an American reporter...

...It includes, for instance, a tart account of the KGB surveillance and other indignities visited on Western journalists...

...Finally, the "cello"part is the mournful tale of the ravages of the Soviet regime: "class war" in the villages, antireligious campaigns, collectivization, Stalinist repressions, World War II, the migration of young people to the cities...

...Open Lands: Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places By Mark Taplin Steerforth...

...His various guides are themselves of human interest...

...Readers should therefore be grateful both to Taplin for his pioneering in the remote regions, and to Schmemann for reminding us of the underlying Orthodox faith, aristocratic culture and peasant traditions that were never entirely lost and that, now reviving, will doubtless continue to influence Russians for a long time to come...

...His departure was mourned neither by the Right nor the Left...

...His qualifications are unique...

...Perhaps rightly so: It was never a "monolith" and is becoming ever less so...

...Gorky...

...Petersburg or the remote areas rediscovered by Taplin, each of which is very different...

...The author's father, Alexander Schmemann, a distinguished Orthodox theologian, broadcast for 30 years on religion and culture for Radio Liberty...

...The author first tried to visit the village shortly after he came to Moscow in 1980, but he did not succeed in doing so until 1990...

...Interesting political differentiation is under way...

...It is also representative of other major cities with histories of their own (e.g., Samara, Saratov, Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk) that became "closed" strongholds of the military-industrial complex, but have been undergoing rather rapid change since they were opened to foreign visitors and foreign investment...

...The more lively and intimate "violin" part is the history of the village and the estate over two centuries: specifically, from the 1770s, when the property was first acquired by a Russian general of Scottish descent named Kar (Carr...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope," "The New Russian Tragedy " After decades of narrow focus on the Kremlin, the 1990s have been a time for the rediscovery of Russia—its people, its culture, its true history...

...KGB interrogators and village drunkards are named and described...

...a genealogical table might have been helpful for keeping track of the Sergeis, Mikhails and Marias of various generations...

...That circumstance should not disparage Mark Taplin's adventurous travelogue covering nine remote regions long barred to foreign visitors...

...Schmemann's great-grandfather resigned his governorship in December 1905...

...Personally, I found most moving his account of the Osorgins' life in the decades before the Revolution, particularly the recollections of his grandfather, Sergei Osorgin...

...The Russian South is yet another set of stories...

...Local officials later told him that, when consulted by the KGB about the correspondent's initial request, they advised against it because he was bound to report the poverty and devastation of property under Soviet rule: for example, the destruction in 1923 of most of the family's finemanorhouse and, after World War II, of all of an imposing baroque church except the belltower...

...shrewd assessments of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's role and of the parallels between the collapse of Tsarist and Communist rule...

...The book contains photographs of both buildings as they once were and as they are now...

...All three interacting "parts" of Schmemann's story are interesting, and their cumulative effect is even stronger...

...Born in Paris, raised in New York, he is the scion of several families of the higher Russian nobility...

...The 18th and early 19th centuries are reconstructed through historical documents, while the Osorgins' story is told mostly through family memoirs and letters...

...But books like these two go a long way toward suggesting at least some of what Russia suffered...

...The story of the village's subsequent misfortunes under Communism is quite detailed...

...Besides the Koltsovo story, Echoes of a Native Land contains much else of merit...

...When the Osorgins left Koltsovo in October 1918, the peasants wept...

...376pp...

...to October 1918, when the Osorgins were forced to leave...

...Some of them emigrated after the Russian Civil War, while others went on to live in the suburb now called Peredelkino...

...Schmemann's book is mostly devoted, though, to the experiences of his mother's family, the Osorgins (intermarried with the famously liberal Trubetskois)— and especially to the lives they led on an estate acquired in 1843 on the banks of the Oka River in Kaluga Province, 90 miles south of Moscow...

...In 1905 the author's great-grandfather Mikhail Osorgin, a tolerant moderate, was Governor of Tula Province, where he experienced both the Tsar's famous Manifesto of October 17 (promising civil liberties) and immediate efforts by the authorities to limit its application...

...With all its faults (many of them were gradually being rectified), one can only regret the brutal destruction of the old rural civilization...

...The only ones to formally express regret were the local Jews, who had trusted him and now feared a pogrom in his absence...

...The narrative is enhanced by the excellent photographs and by useful maps...

...These are recounted mostly by village residents, Communists as well as nonCommunists, from their own memories and those of their parents and neighbors...

...But after Schmemann's great-uncle Georgy (an exceptionally fine young man, judging from photos and from his letters quoted in the book) was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1928, most of the rest of the family also made their way abroad...

...Thousands upon thousands of documents, personal memoirs, letters and pictures, hidden away by individuals, families, libraries and state archives, have come out in the open...

...Formonths after the Osorgins left Koltsovo, the villagers would send them food in starving Moscow...

...Taplin's Afterword, briefly recounting a visit to Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's third largest city, reminds us of how tricky it can be to try to infer a Russian "whole" from the sum of relatively few disparate parts—whether these are showplaces like Moscow and St...

...On the "piano," as it were, there is the baseline story of the author's assiduous researches since 1990, both in libraries and interacting with all sorts of sources...