Notes to A
Gentleman in Moscow, Book Five and The Afterword
Page 379 VOKS. This is a real Soviet institution that
existed from 1925 to 1958.
Page 382 Crossed himself twice. Orthodox Christians often
make the sign of the cross on their chests like Roman Catholics do, but they do
it differently. Catholics move their hand up, down, to their left, then to
their right. Orthodox Christians move their hand up, down, to their right, then
to their left. That the Count crosses himself here is the first indication in
the book that he has any continuing relationship to Russian Orthodoxy.
Page 382 Presidium and Council of Ministers. These were two
institutions of the Soviet government. The Presidium acted for the Supreme
Soviet, the country’s nominally democratic parliament, between the meetings of
that body. The Council of Ministers was the nominal government of the Soviet
Union. In the USSR there were essentially parallel Party and governmental
organizations. On paper it could look like the government really ran the
country. It didn’t. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union did. The word
“soviet” is the ordinary Russian word for council. Its use as the name of the
country comes from its prerevolutionary use as the name for councils of workers
that formed in opposition to the tsarist regime. That both of these entities
were meeting together at the Boyarsky meant that the country’s most powerful
governmental officials, all of whom of course were members of the Party, would
be together in one place at the same time.
Page 383 Gorky Park. Gorky Park is a large amusement park in
central Moscow. It’s full name translates as The Park of Culture and Relaxation
Named for Gorky (the Soviet author). An aside: American author Martin Cruz
Smith has written a crime novel titled Gorky Park. When I read it back
in the 1980s it depicted Soviet Moscow so well that as I read it I felt like I
was back in that city. I was amazed when I learned that at least when he wrote
the book Smith had never been to Moscow. He got is information about the city
by interviewing Russian ex patriots. That he was able to depict the city so
perfectly without ever having been there is truly remarkable. Towles actually
depicts Soviet Moscow far less well than Smith does. Towles has done his
homework about Russian and Soviet history, but his book is so centered on the
life of the Count in the Metropol that the city of Moscow plays a relatively
small role in the story, or at least it has so far.
Page 389 Yaroslav Yaroslavl. This is a strange name.
Yaroslav is a Russian first name, but Yaroslavl is a city north of Moscow. It
is one of the great centers of old Russian culture with magnificent Orthodox
churches that are well worth the trip to see. Perhaps Yaroslavsky would be good
Russian last name, but I’m not sure Yaroslavl is.
Page 392 Oblomov. Oblomov is the title character in a book
by the Russian author Ivan Goncharov, published in 1859. The character Oblomov
is a young nobleman who is unable to make significant decisions or undertake
any significant acts. He is, they say, the epitome of the “superfluous man,”
the idle rich who have privilege but accomplish nothing meaningful. It seems to
me, frankly, that that’s who the Count is. He did many things in his life, but
did he ever do anything significant? Sure doesn’t seem like he did at least up
to this point in the book.
Page 392 TsUM. TsUM stands for Tsentralnyi universalnyi
magazin, the Central Department Store. The biggest department store I knew in
Moscow was GUM, Glavnyi universalnyi magazin, the Main Department Store. It
occupies most of the east side of Red Square across from the Kremlin. I don’t
know if TsUM is the same store with a different name or not. I bought a
Hungarian vinyl briefcase at GUM that I still sometimes use.
Page 392 Tarnowsky. Sergei Tarnowsky was one of Horowitz’s
piano teachers in Horowitz’s youth.
Page 394 Crossing himself. Once again the Count here crosses
himself (see above). This is the second time he has done so, both of them later
in the book. Odd. Does it have some significance? We’ll see.
Page 397 The Internationale. The Internationale is a song
that became the anthem of leftwing movements around the world in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was originally written in French
and was translated into many different languages, including of course Russian.
Page 410 46 members of a political party. The text refers to
the members of the Presidium and the Council of Ministers as “members of a
political party.” They certainly were all members of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (which was usually referred to as the “KPSS”), but nominally this
is a meeting of governmental institutions not Party ones. Whether he intended
to do so or not Towles’ referring to them as party members rather than members
of the government points to how the USSR really worked. It was the Party that
mattered. The government may have administered policy, but the Party set
policy. The Party was everything. It controlled everything. It controlled
everyone. It was in total control of the place until very near the end of the
USSR.
Page 411 Malenkov and Khrushchev. Upon the death of Stalin
in 1953 Georgy Malenkov became Premier, that is, the nominal head of the
government. He had of course been a Stalinist, as had all of the people
mentioned here. He was also briefly the most powerful, or at least highest
ranking, member of the Party’s Secretariat, making him in effect the head of
the Paarty too. However, he held that position for only nine days. He was
forced to relinquish his Party post but allowed to keep his governmental one.
He was eventually expelled from the Presidium after opposing the rise of Nikita
Khrushchev. The years from roughly 1954 to 1964 are known as the Khrushchev era
of Soviet history. Nikita Khrushchev, so famous for banging his shoe on his
desk at the United Nations, was a close associate of Stalin’s. From 1958 to
1964 he was both General Secretary of the Communist Party (the head of the
Party) and Premier (the head of the government). The Party removed him from
both positions in 1964. The text calls him a former mayor of Moscow. In the
mid-1930s he was the head of the Communist Party in the city and province of
Moscow, which made him the de facto mayor of the city. He oversaw the completion
of Moscow’s magnificent subway system. He spent many of his earlier years as a
Party official in Ukraine, where he was almost certainly involved in the
man-made famine that killed millions of people there as part of Stalin’s effort
to force peasants into collective farms. In 1954 he redrew the borders of the
Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics to move Crimea from Russia to
Ukraine. At the time that didn’t make much difference, but it has played a big
role in international affairs in more recent years.
Page 411 Lavrentiy Beria: Beria is perhaps worth knowing a
bit more about. He was Stalin’s most vicious head of the NKVD, later the KGB.
He was known as utterly ruthless in the execution of his duties. He oversaw a
great expansion of the Gulag. Some sources say he organized the Katyn massacre
in Poland after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939[1].
Many observers saw him as the most likely successor to Stalin. After Stalin’s
death he was briefly Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and one of three
leaders, along with Malenkov and Molotov, who ruled the country. In June, 1953,
with the help of Marshall Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s greatest general in World
War II who had fallen out of favor with Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev staged what
amount to a coup, removed those three leaders, and took over himself. Beria was
arrested on charges of rape and treason and executed in December, 1953. During
his time as head of the NKVD the mere mention of his name was enough to strike
fear into the hearts of most Soviets. He was a truly evil man, as ruthless and
murderous as Stalin himself. Stalin introduced him to FDR at the Yalta
Conference as “our Himmler.”[2]
Page 412 Grand Duke Demidov: The Demidovs were a family of
Russian nobles who before the revolution of 1917 were reputed to be the second
richest family in Russia after only the Romanovs, the family of the ruling
dynasty.
Page 412 The Countess Shermatova: This character and her son
are apparently fictional.
Page 413 Sverdlov: Yakov Sverdlov was an early Bolshevik.
After the tsar’s abdication in March, 1917, Sverdlov returned to St. Petersburg from
internal exile in Siberia (together with Stalin) and became a member of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party. In late 1917 he became chairman of the All
Russian Central Executive Committee, which made him the head of the Communist
state. He may have ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. He
died in 1918 of either typhus or the flu. The reference to a constitutional
drafting committee is apparently the group that drafted the Communist state’s
first constitution.
An aside: It seems unlikely to me that a “Former Person,”
that is, one sentenced essentially to internal exile, would have been allowed
to wait on the leaders of the USSR, although perhaps we are to assume that
these men didn’t know who the Count was.
Page 413 Obninsk: The city of Obninsk is located about 60
miles southwest of Moscow. The Soviets established it in 1945 as a “science
city,” that is, a city established specifically as a place for scientific
research. In 1954 the world’s first nuclear power plant used for the generation
of electricity began operation there. This is the power plant to which the text
refers.
Page 417 Okroshka. Okroshka is a cold Russian vegetable
soup.
Page 432: The sacrilege. This scene is set in 1954. Stalin
died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev instituted a radical de-Stalinization that
removed all images and veneration of Stalin from Soviet life (except in
Stalin’s native Georgia), but he didn’t begin that campaign until 1956. So in
this scene the picture of Stalin that had been on the wall during Stalin’s
lifetime was still there, and the Bishop would still have considered Stalin to
have been practically a demigod and the great benefactor of the Soviet people. He
would indeed have considered shooting Stalin’s portrait to have been something
of a sacrilege.
Page 440 and the later part of the book. As I write this I
haven’t finished the book. I don’t know if Sofia succeeds in her attempt to
defect or if the Count makes it to Finland, but I thought I’d say a bit about
how Soviet performers, scholars, athletes, and others were permitted to travel
to the West. The Soviet authorities went to great lengths to keep people from
defecting. Towles has suggested some of their measures, including having KGB
agents accompany Soviets abroad most everywhere they went. They would also
typically not let anyone go abroad who didn’t have close family that stayed in
the Soviet Union. The thought was that people were less likely to defect if it
meant abandoning family back home. Nonetheless many Soviets who got to travel
abroad did defect. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected to Canada in 1974, is a
good example. Soviets were attracted to the West for at least two reasons. One
was the greater economic prosperity that was available. Another was the much
greater artistic freedom that was also to be had outside the Soviet bloc. The
latter is primarily why Baryshnikov and other performing artists defected. The
character Sofia is at least attempting to do something many Soviet people of
her level of artistic ability also tried, some successfully and some not.
Page 445 Malyshev: He was mentioned earlier, but I’ll tell
abut him here. Vyacheslav Malyshev was a leading figure in Soviet industry in
the 1940s and 1950s. He oversaw the production of tanks during the war, Soviet
tanks being a primary means by which the Soviets defeated the Nazis. He served
as Vice-Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars twice, once under Stalin
and once under Khrushchev. He oversaw the development of the Soviet nuclear
program. He was exposed to radiation at a nuclear test site in 1953 and died as
a result of this exposure in 1957. He is buried in the Kremlin wall on Red
Square, the most honored burial site for Soviet heroes.
Page 452 Old St. Petersburg Station. This is presumably the
train station from which I took the train from Moscow to Leningrad five times
during my stay in the USSR. I have described that train elsewhere in these
notes.
Page 453 KGB men: The name of the NKVD was changed to KGB
(Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopastnotsi—the Committee on State Security—in
Russian only the first letter of the first word of a title is capitalized) in
1954, so Towles is correct to call these people KGB men at this point in the
story.
Page 457 Vyborg: Vyborg, despite the Swedish sound of its
name, is a Russian city about half way between St. Petersburg and Helsinki near
the Russian-Finnish border. Finland had been part of the Russian Empire until
the collapse of the tsarist regime. It is one of the few parts of the Russian
Empire the Soviets never conquered. They invaded Finland in 1939, but the Finns
beat them back in what is called the Winter War.
Page 458 Round up the usual suspects: This is brilliant. If
you’re not familiar with the movie Casablanca that has been referenced many
times in the book, “round up the usual suspects” is what Captain Renault, the
local French police chief played by Claude Rains, says to his officers after a
crime has been committed. It suggests police activity for the sake of showing
police activity rather than any serious attempt at finding a suspect.
Some concluding thoughts: A Gentleman in Moscow is a
beautifully constructed and written novel with a surprise ending. It is I
suppose possible to read it without looking up all of the references to facts
and people from Russian and Soviet history, of which there are dozens at least.
Still, it is impressive that Towles, who as far as I know has no Russian
studies background or experience in Russia, has done so much homework for his
writing of this book. It is not always clear when a person is named whether
that person is historical or fictional, but a great many of them other than the
main characters of the story are historical people. The book contains a good
deal of information about Soviet history up to 1954, but as I’ve commented
before it doesn’t do a great job of conveying what the USSR was really like in
those years. It minimizes the suffering and the terror that the regime
inflicted on the people. It underemphasizes the horror of WWII in the USSR. It
underemphasizes the extent to which the tyrannical monster Stalin got the
people of the country to idolize and practically worship him. Still, it is a
good book and a good read, especially for a Russia nut like me.
Just one quibble: The Count and the other characters in the
hotel seem to have easy access to things essentially no Soviet person would
have had easy access to, especially in the years when this story is set. The
American film Casablanca is a good example. Only top Party officials would have
had access to something like that. The same is true for much of the food and
wine served in the hotel. Towles says nothing about how the Count got ahold of
the movie or how the hotel got the food and wine. It seems that either he
wasn’t aware of the problem or thought it not worth dealing with.
[1]
The Katyn massacre: The UISSR invaded Poland from the east when Nazi Germany
invaded that country from the west. In 1940 the NKVD, under Beria, slaughtered
something like 22,000 Polish military officers and members of the Polish
intelligentsia. The killings took place in multiple locations but collectively
are known as the Katyn massacre after Katyn forest, where some of the mass
graves were first discovered. The Soviets blamed the Nazis for the crime until
1990, when they finally admitted to having done the killings and condemned
them.
[2]
The Yalta Conference was a meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at Yalta
on the Crimean Peninsula in February, 1945.
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