Russia's Woes Remembered
SHUB, ANATOLE
Russia's Woes Remembered Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th Century Russia By Catherine Merridale Viking. 402 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "The New Russian...
...Where soldiers in the West fought for years across a single strip of Flanders and Picardy, the armies of the East would move, fighting through the Polish and Galician plains and marshes, skirting the Carpathians, and wading in the endless mud along the Danube...
...Medical and other professionals responsible for the care of the dying and bereaved at the time (doctors, nurses, priests, Communist Party activists...
...Merridale originally thought that a study of changing funeral practices might illuminate the initial Bolshevik promise to create a new Soviet man...
...And there are sensitive descriptions of the funerals of Tchaikovsky (a national occasion), Shostakovich (who left instructions prohibiting music) and the actor-balladeer Vladimir Vysotsky (a national occasion for the generation of the '60s...
...Even today, many Russians think that anyone prosecuted by Soviet authorities "must have done something wrong...
...Altogether, Merridale draws on tapes or written notes of interviews and talks with more than 150 people...
...The leading advocate of embalming, Merridale reports, was the technocrat Leonid Krasin (often labeled "pro-Western" because he spoke English...
...Even at familiar points in the narrative, Merridale turns up new information...
...Petersburg Cathedral of St...
...Neighbors helped lead archeologists, investigators and researchers to the mass graves...
...But "it did not take long, as I leafed through flimsy carbons in the Communist Party archive, to find the Bolsheviks purblind and even cruel...
...I am certain that the time will come when one will be able to use the elements of a person's life to recreate the physical person...
...The story of the decision to embalm Lenin's body likewise contains information that was new to me...
...Although Merridale does not cite him, Stalin told Winston Churchill that collectivization cost 10 million lives...
...But not all of Night of Stone is devoted to violent deaths...
...It is estimated, however, that between 1.6 million and 2 million died as a result of the fighting between 1914andl917...
...Merridale describes how Stalin's 1937 census was suppressed because it showed that millions of lives had been lost in southern Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan because of the famine...
...The totals may be higher...
...view the easy questions that they brought with near contempt...
...The children of survivors...
...Medical and other professionals responsible for the care of survivors today...
...Merridale cites mass graves unearthed in various parts of the country where the number of visible casualties invariably and by far exceeds the figures originally reported by the police...
...Within a decade of seizing power, they had even created a substitute cult of the dead for themselves...
...Lenin's preserved corpse was installed at the heart of their new capital, and Red Square, the parade ground of Soviet power, became a grave...
...Thus, while Merridale started with "an idea of revolutionary culture," she ended up with "an investigation into mass mortality and survival...
...Russia's troops, professional and conscript, confronted their opponents in desperate conditions...
...Research on reanimation apparently continues...
...A new Russian "population deficit" emerged in the 1990s as a result of infectious diseases, alcoholism, malnutrition, botched abortions, nuclear radiation and other environmental degradation, along with inadequate medical and other public services...
...Inevitably in Russia, there were spontaneous conversations, too, on railroad trains and elsewhere...
...Merridale has deftly mined Russian official archives and the classic individual testimonies (from Pitirim Sorokin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Varlam Shalamov, etc...
...The sheer weight of the losses, colored though they may be by stories of escape, by courage and generosity, by flashes of humor, even by the surreal, is such that any listener is likely to...
...Post-Soviet Russia experienced nothing resembling the de-Nazification imposed in western Germany by Allied forces in 1945...
...Their precise numbers will never be known...
...As often in Russia, confusion—a kind of personal freedom—reigns...
...and Germany...
...Then there is the genuine pride, among middle-aged and older people, in the Soviet Union's World War II victory...
...The somnolent Leonid I. Brezhnev era ("We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us") remains the primary focus of popular nostalgia, but part of its tepid aura is projected backward...
...She is a sophisticated, sympathetic listener, and presents her findings in brisk, vivid prose...
...Time and again, years and decades after the Nazi and Soviet repressions, Russians (and Ukrainians, Belarusians and others) remembered the officers in charge of the killings, where they did the killing, and where the remains were buried...
...You arrive with clear-cut questions, neatly typed...
...They were not necessarily ill-equipped, or not at first, but they could not match the Prussian troops they faced...
...Even on the basis of official statistics, between 1914 and 1953 Russia incurred a "population deficit" of 65 million lives (adding to outright deaths the children who might have been expected to have been born if their parents had not been killed by the forces of Stalin and AdolfHitler...
...There is a lucid discussion of the Nazi massacre of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar and how the Soviets tried to keep the site hidden...
...The reaction against Soviet official amnesia, in a kind of samizdat mourning for the casualties of World War I, came in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Solzhenitsyn's August 1914...
...I have already read it twice, with increasing enlightenment, and intend to read it again...
...This figure may be compared with that for the whole British Empire, which lost approximately 767,000 men between 1914 and 1918...
...However, memory of past nightmares has not vanished...
...For example, one brief sentence suffices to note Trotsky's absence from Lenin's funeral, but she later devotes an incisive page to his order to halt retreats in the Red Army by shooting political commissars and commanders...
...was often crude andhysterical...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "The New Russian Tragedy," "An Empire Loses Hope" Catherine Merridale, a young British historian, has written an unusually rewarding book on how Russians recall the many traumas of their country's awful 20th century...
...Working with human rights and veterans organizations, as well as opinion researchers, she conducted individual and/or group interviews with four categories of people in Moscow, St...
...Many grim pages show how savage the Civil War was on both sides, and how the OGPU from Belarus to Kolyma literally covered up its mass murders, planting trees atop mass graves...
...Many Russians, the author found, still hesitate to discuss the Soviet regime...
...Merridale starts her book with a trip in October 1997 to memorial ceremonies in a village 12 hours northeast of St...
...but she has also done significant original probing...
...I would imagine that at least some of this reticence can be explained by the fact that most of the interviews were conducted indoors...
...Merridale dismisses as a "stunt" Yeltsin's July 1998 reburial of the apparent remains of Tsar Nicholas II, in the St...
...she does not repeat what has been written 1,000 times elsewhere...
...As for World War II, "certain types of death, including most of those for which the NKVD was responsible, were not discussed at all...
...I am certain," Krasin declared at a funeral in 1921, "that the time will come when science will become all-powerful, and that it will be able to recreate a deceased organism...
...Peter and St...
...It includes well-written, politically shrewd accounts of the funerals of Tsar Alexander III, Lenin and Stalin...
...According to polls, many continue to admire Lenin and Stalin while despising Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin...
...Paul...
...Merndale's description of these memorial ceremonies is fascinating in many respects, but other passages in her book also merit close attention...
...you leave with narratives, dialogues, evasions, long digressions, laughter, more phone numbers, photographs and tears...
...The Russian/Soviet historical traumas cited by the author range chronologically from the famine of 1891 (a basis of comparison with the later famines of 1922, '33 and '47) to the wars in Chechnya (where Russian destructiveness recalls the scorched earth of Stalingrad...
...Petersburg, where 60 years earlier the secret police murdered 1,100 men and women...
...The casualties on all sides were heavy, but the Russians, characteristically, lost more than anyone else...
...Between the two World Wars Russia experienced the cruelties of the Civil War, the famine caused by forced collectivization of agriculture, and Joseph Stalin's purge of Communist party cadres...
...The stiff resistance that confronted Nikita S. Khrushchev's initial "de-Stalinization" has not been forgotten either...
...Some is probably due to the lingering effects of Stalinist propaganda, and even more doubtless reflects a traditional Russian stoicism...
...The current consensus is that all these events together caused more than 50 million unnatural deaths, of which2527 million—twothirds of them civilians— fell m World War II...
...Merridale notes: "No one who saw the front could ever have idealized it...
...modem expediency, revived religion, superstition, and the flotsam and jetsam of other kinds of practice—everything, in fact, from the pre-Christian to the rationalistic Soviet and the New Age...
...She also quotes ajournalist who observed at the time that the Tsar might have been reburied, but the greater priority, the body of Lenin, was still inviolate in its mausoleum...
...She now observes that "all funerary ritual in modern Russia is a mixture of personal invention...
...In a masterful retelling of the siege of Leningrad one leams, inter alia, that after the siege was lifted dead bodies were found in basement storage areas of the Hermitage...
...about 1,686,000 men...
...As might be expected, people were most willing to talk about World War II...
...Petersburg, Kiev and several smaller towns: • Survivors of the main catastrophes of 20th-century Soviet history...
...Their resentment of the church...
...Taboos still inhibit discussion of some of these events...
...One awaits from President Vladimir V Putin a long-overdue Russian census...
...France, which lost 1,383,000...
...She collectedmaterial about 1920s creations like the League of Militant Godless and the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Cremation...
...Since 1918, for example, no effort has been made by the state to commemorate Russian lives lost in World War I, a conflict condemned by Communists as an "imperialist" war...
...The officer in charge, who had supervised the killings of other political prisoners in the Leningrad region and on the Solovetsky islands, some of them quite prominent, was himself convicted and shot in 1939 for an excess of zeal...
...Their campaign against ritual degenerated into vandalism...
...She concedes at the outset that the interviews forced an evolution in her perspective: "Anyone who has collected spoken testimonies will know how they confound even the most meticulously planned research...
...Sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences and on a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, she spent two years (1996-98) in the former Soviet Union—in major cities, in bygone labor camps, at old and newly discovered burial sites—talking with and listening to survivors...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
