Notes to A
Gentleman in Moscow, Book Three
Page 173 The quick review of the rise of Stalin. There are
several things mentioned in one paragraph on this page that may be worthy of
comment. The First Five Year Plan: Lenin had instituted something called the New
Economic Policy. It permitted a certain amount of individual entrepreneurship
in the economy. Stalin, who was firmly in command by the years mentioned here,
undid it. He introduced strict centralized economic planning in the form of the
Five Year Plans. Everything in the economy was dictated from the center by the
Party. The Five Year Plans specified everything the economy was to produce,
down to the level of how many 10 penny nails and how many bolts and washers.
Towles is right that Stalin transformed Russia from an agrarian economy to an
industrial one, but eventually the centralized planning that Stalin introduced
so strangled the economy that the USSR, quite surprisingly actually, collapsed
in 1991.
Nikolai Bukharin: Bukharin was one of the so-called Old
Bolsheviks, the people who had led the Communist coup of 1917 and guided the
Communist regime through the civil war that followed. He was for a while the
editor of Pravda. He advocated policies that Stalin opposed including Lenin’s
New Economic Policy and forcibly exporting the revolution to western Europe.
Stalin eventually eliminated all of the Old Bolsheviks as potential rivals for
power. He had Bukharin executed in 1938.
Return to autocracy in all but name: Stalin became far more
of an autocrat than the tsars ever were. He instituted what was in reality one
man rule of the entire Soviet Union. Everyone in the country had to kowtow to
him. People were sent to the Gulag for even making jokes about him. After his
death in 1953 Khrushchev, as his successor, denounced his “cult of
personality,” and Stalin’s image disappeared from Soviet life everywhere except
in Stalin’s native Georgia.[1]
Khrushchev, however, did not denounce Stalin’s economic policies or one party
rule, the things that eventually undid the USSR.
Article 58 of the
Criminal Code: Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federated Soviet
Socialist Republic outlawed and provided the death penalty for
counterrevolutionary activity. It was the legal façade Stalin put on his
extermination of the Old Bolsheviks and an untold number of others designated
as enemies of the workers or enemies of the people. If you were arrested under
Article 58, and thousands upon thousands of people (or more) were, you were as
good as dead. I have read stories of people whose job it was to spend entire
work shifts shooting people in the back of the head. Those killed were victims
of Article 58 and of Stalin’s terror. Stalin did lead the USSR in its defeat of
Nazi Germany, and the Soviets defeated them far more than we did. (Americans
like to say that D-Day was the turning point of WWII in Europe. It wasn’t. The
Battle of Stalingrad was, and that battle, in which orders of magnitude more
people died than Americans died in the whole war, was long over by D-Day. The
Germans were already in retreat in the east and essentially already defeated.
The Battle of Kursk, which followed Stalingrad and was the greatest tank battle
in history, sealed their doom.) The USSR became a world power under Stalin, but
Stalin accomplished all of that at a price in human lives that even surpasses
the number of deaths Hitler caused in Germany and the rest of Europe.
Page 173 Black Marias. Black Marias was the term applied to
the black vehicles the agents of the NKVD (KGB) used when they arrested
someone. They usually came in the middle of the night to haul off some
unsuspecting soul who very probably was never seen again. Much of the
population of the USSR lived for years in terror of the Black Marias.
Page 174 Those who have access to foreign currency. Under
the Soviets the ruble was not freely convertible. It was not hard currency. It
could not be exchanged for hard currency. The Soviets always needed hard,
convertible currency, so there were establishments where only hard currency was
accepted. It was not legal for ordinary Soviet people to possess hard currency,
so these establishments catered mostly to foreigners. When I was in the USSR
there was a chain of stores called Beriozka. It was illegal for Soviet citizens
to enter them, which made going to them always feel a bit awkward. But in those
stores you could buy Stolichnaya vodka for next to nothing. You could buy
Russian arts and crafts. My Russian fur hat, which was indispensable in the
Russian winter I lived through, came from the Beriozka in the Hotel Rossiya
near Red Square. That’s also where we bought vodka to toast the leaders of
Czechoslovakia the day we learned of the Soviet invasion in 1968. We had US
dollars, and the Soviets were eager to get their hands on as many of them as
they could.
Page 180 Fraulein. This German word is actually spelled Fräulein
and is pronounced Froyline.
Page 181 Comrade. The Russian word is tovarishch, with the
stress on the a. In the Soviet Union everyone called everyone else tovarishch.
The Communists used it place of other forms of address that tended to suggest a
social status, as our main character’s title Count does. (Shch, by the way, is
a single letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. It looks like this: Щ.
The phonetic exercise for learning to pronounce it is to say Danish cheese,
running the sh and the ch together.)
Page 182 October 25th Prospekt. When I was in
Leningrad in 1968 and again in 1976 the name of this main street had been
changed back to Nevskii Prospekt, which is its name today. I don’t know when
that happened. October 25, 1917, is the date of the Bolshevik coup in the
prerevolutionary Julian calendar that Russia used and that the Russian Orthodox
Church still uses. In our Gregorian calendar the date is Nov. 7. When I was
taking my first year seminar in imperial Russian history at the UW in 1970-71
my major professor asked us why the Russians had used the old calendar. I said
probably because they thought the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory
XIII, who introduced it in 1582, was a papist plot. Nailed it. It is
significantly more accurate than the older Julian calendar. The Russians knew
that of course, but they weren’t about to use something promulgated by a pope.
Page 183 Brother Fyodor. Presumably Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Page 184 Komsomol. Komsomol is an acronym for the Communist
Youth Union (Kommunisticheskii Soyuz Molodozhei). It was a junior version of
the Communist Party except that while not everyone ended up belonging to the
Party every young person was a member of Komsomol.
Page 184 Machine tractor station. When the Communists
collectivized agriculture farm machinery was put into machine tractor stations.
No one owned farm machinery individually. It was held in these centralized
facilities and shared by a number of collective farms.
Page 184 Battleship Potemkin. The battleship Potemkin,
pronounced Potyomkin, with the stress on the yo, was a Russian battleship
stationed at Odessa on the Black Sea in 1905. A mutiny of its crew is a
celebrated part of the Russian revolution of 1905. In 1925 the great Soviet
filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made a memorable movie about that mutiny that every
Russian knows. The film has a world-famous scene of a baby in a baby carriage
careening down a long, broad set of steps in Odessa. It is indeed very dramatic.
Because the reference here is in italics the reference is probably to that
film. The ship was named after Grigory Potemkin, a Russian military leader and
favorite (and possible spouse) of Catherine the Great. He is perhaps best known
for creating what are called Potemkin villages. When Catherine would travel in
Russia he would construct false front villages along her route so that rural
Russian life would look better to her than it actually was.
Page 186 Kulaks. Kulak is the Russian word for fist, but it
came to refer to wealthier peasants who employed other people to work on land
the kulaks owned. Although they were a sort of rural capitalist Lenin tolerated
them as part of the New Economic Policy. Stalin eliminated them.
Page 190-191 Ivan Rosotsky. Both this character and Anna
Urbanova, whom we meet again here, are fictional characters.
Page 192 Peterhof. Peterhof is the German spelling of Peter
the Great’s enormous palace complex on the Gulf of Finland that he built quite
intentionally to rival Versailles. In Russian it is usually called Petrodvorets
or sometimes Petergof, Russian having no h sound and dvorets being the Russian
word for palace. It is an amazing place. You can easily find pictures of it on
the internet. It was very badly damaged in WWII, but by 1968 when I saw it for
the first time the Soviets had beautifully restored it to its former glory. It
doesn’t look at all Russian. It looks French, which is exactly what Peter
intended.
Page 193 General Secretary Stalin…was not smiling. This
scene, while perhaps fictitious, is historically accurate. In Stalin’s USSR
everyone fell into line with his slightest whim. If they didn’t they
disappeared into the Gulag or were shot in the back of the head. If Stalin
disliked some work of art for any reason that work and that artist were done.
Writers, filmmakers, and musicians were constantly being accused of being
insufficiently revolutionary (or improperly revolutionary) in their work.
Dmitrii Shostakovich, for example, faced such charges, but he, thank God, was
somehow able to survive them. A great many didn’t.
Page 193 The Plenum. The reference is probably to a meeting
either of the Central Committee of the Communist Party or of the Politburo, the
agency that under Stalin became the effective ruling body of the USSR, doing of
course only what Stalin wanted done.
Page 198 Exceeded their quota. In theory the Five Year Plans
established precisely what each element of the economy, indeed what each
factory and each farm, was to produce over the plan’s five years. Yet people
were always urged to exceed the quotas established in the plan. There were
banners on buildings in the USSR saying things like “We will complete the Five
Year Plan in four years!” Never mind, I guess, that doing that would actually
violate the Plan.
Page 200 Poltava. Poltava is a small city in central
Ukraine. In 1709 it was the site of a battle between the forces of Peter the
Great and forces of the king of Sweden that Peter’s army won. It is one of the
more famous battles of Russian history. Notice: It is a famous battle of
Russian history, but it took place in what we know as Ukraine. The Russian
imperial government never recognized Ukrainians as a separate people from
Russians with their own language and culture. It just considered Ukrainian to
be a dialect of Russian. There never was an independent nation of Ukraine until
1991. Many Russians consider Ukraine really to be part of Russia to this day.
Just don’t say that it is to most Ukrainians.
Page Osip Ivanovich Glebnikov. This character is fictional.
Perhaps a note on Russian naming conventions would be appropriate here. Every
Russian person has three names—a first name, a middle name called a patronymic,
and family name. The patronymic is built from the person’s father’s first name.
Here, Osip Ivanovich means Osip son of Ivan. The feminine form of Ivanovich for
a daughter of someone named Ivan would be Ivanovna. Addressing a person by her
or his name and patronymic is a formal form of address. Thus, if a person addresses
Russian president Putin as Vladimir Vladimirovich, that is, by his first name
and patronymic, that person is being formal not familiar. It would not be good
Russian practice to address him as Gospodin Putin—Mr. Putin. I suppose a
Russian would know what you meant, but they’d also know you aren’t Russian.
Page 214 Dzerzhinsky Street. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the first
head of the Cheka, the first iteration of the Soviet secret police. He was as
brutal as the reputation of the institution he headed. A statue of him stood in
front of the Lubyanka, the informal name of the huge building that functioned
as the headquarters of the Cheka and its successors up to and including the KGB
and that now serves as the headquarters of the Russian successor to the KGB,
the FSB—the Federal Security Service. The statue was torn down after the fall
of the USSR.
Page 214 The Commissariat of Internal Affairs. The NKVD, the
parent institution of the secret police. For a while a successor to the Cheka
and predecessor of the KGB simply went by those initials, NKVD.
Page 215 OGPU. The OGPU (the letters are the Russian
initials of the agency’s official name, the Unified State Political
Administration) was the first successor to the Cheka. Some sources say it was
supposed to work with more restraint than the Cheka had, but I certainly doubt
that it did.
Page 271 A store which served the highest members of the
Party. Although the Soviet Communists claimed to be radically egalitarian and
dreamed of a classless society, Soviet reality was very different from that
ideal. The top officials of the Communist Party lived at a level of luxury of
which the average Soviet citizen could not even dream. In later Communist
years, for example, it was well-known that the top Party people had access to
world class health care in Moscow, something completely beyond the reach of
ordinary Soviet people. When we were in Moscow in 1975-76 we were lucky. We had
access to the doctor at the American embassy. We didn’t have to depend on the
hopelessly inadequate Soviet medical system. We would not have taken Mary’s
brother Matt, who turned two over there, to Russia had that not been the case.
I’ll have more to say about the Soviet medical system at the end of these notes
on Book 3.
Page 229 Hooliganism. Hooliganism (spelled and pronounced in
Russia gooliganism because, as I’ve said before, Russian does not have an H
sound) was a common word in Russia when I was there so long ago. I assume it
still is. Just about any unacceptable public behavior would be labeled
gooliganism. Calling someone a gooligan was a common way of disapproving of
that person. Hooligan and hooliganism were perhaps the most common of the
Russian words borrowed from English.
Page 229 Sergei Kirov. Sergei Kirov, an Old Bolshevik, was a
close personal friend of Stalin’s. He was a member of the Politburo and the
head of the Communist Party in Leningrad. He was assassinated in 1931. Stalin
used his assassination as a pretext for starting (or intensifying) his purge of
supposed opponents from the Party. There is a good deal of speculation that
Stalin ordered the assassination precisely so that he would have a pretext for
doing what he intended to do anyway. That allegation has never been proved, but
Stalin certainly was not above having a friend killed for Stalin’s own
political purposes.
Page 229 Stakhanovites. In the Soviet Union a Stakhanovite
was a worker who greatly exceeded his or her work production quota. The name
comes from Alexei Gregorievich Stakhanov, a coal miner who supposedly mined 102
tons of coal in less than six hours on August 31, 1935. The First All-Union
Stakhanovite Conference took place in the Kremlin on November 14-17, 1935. The
Party always encouraged people to be Stakhanovites, although, as I’ve said,
exceeding the Five Year Plan actually violated that Plan.
Page 230 Kuznetsky Most. “Most” is the Russian word for
bridge. Kuznetsky means blacksmith’s bridge. It is the name of a street in
central Moscow that used to have a bridge over a small river that, I assume,
flowed into the Moscow River, the larger tributary of the Volga on which Moscow
is built and that flows right past the Kremlin. That little river now flows
through a tunnel, so there is no bridge on Kuznetsky Most.
Page 231 Alexander Ilyich. Nina addresses the Count by his
name and patronymic. As I said in an earlier note that is a formal form of
address among Russians. It is strange that Nine addresses her old friend that
way. It suggests perhaps that something has changed in Nina that has changed
their relationship.
Page 233 Sevvostlag. Sevvostlag, short for Russian words
that mean the northeast camps (severvostochnyie lageria), was a collection of
forced labor camps set up in farthest eastern Siberia to work on building roads
and other construction projects. It was not a good place to be. Nina’s husband
would actually be lucky to survive five years there. Many construction projects
in Stalinist Russia were built with convict labor. When we were in Moscow for
the 1975-76 academic year we lived in the enormous main building of Moscow
State University. It was built at least in part by forced convict labor. It was
completed in 1953, the year Stalin died. Google “Moscow State University
Building” to find information on and pictures of this imposing but very
Stalinist building.
Pages 232-233 Sofia/Sonya. Sonya is the diminutive of Sofia.
Family members and friends usually address each other by the diminutive of
their names. Recall that Sasha is the diminutive of the Count’s name Alexander.
Page 237 Name day celebrations. In pre-revolutionary Russia
everyone, more or less, was named after some saint of the Russian Orthodox
Church. The saint’s feast day on the church calendar was the person’s name day.
Name days were celebrated in place of birthdays.
Pages 248-249 Marina and Sofia. A word about Russians and
children may be appropriate here. I remember back in the Cold War years some
American saying that she hoped Russians loved their children as much as we
Americans do. The answer is: Of course they do, perhaps in a way even more so.
At least they tend to treat young children differently than we do. Until about
the age of 6 a child in effect can do no wrong. When we would take Matthew (age
two) with us to visit those two journalism students we got to know he would do
things like start opening drawers and cabinets and pulling things out of them.
We of course made him stop. Our hosts would say: Oh no. Let him be. He’s just a
little one. Having a small child opened doors. When we arrived in Moscow and
went into the airport to go through customs there were no customs officials
there to process a plane load of people into the country. We waited and waited.
Then someone said to us: Go down to that station at the end of the line. We
said that’s for people with diplomatic passports, and we don’t have diplomatic
passports. This person said to us: No, but you have a little one. So we went
and got into the country that way. Someone from Moscow State University was
supposed to be there to meet us to take us to the university, where we would be
living, but no one was. As I asked around someone said go to the university’s
hotel. I didn’t even know the university had a hotel, but we got a cab and
went. The woman at the front desk said: You have no reservation, but you have a
little one. I’m sure we can find you something, and she did. In our experience
Russians just got googly over young children. Sofia here is older than Matthew
was when we were in Russia, but it’s not surprising that Marina immediately
takes to her in a maternal way.
Page 258 Understanding of the West. Perhaps it would be
appropriate to say something here about the relationship between Russia and the
West. Russia’s origins are more Asiatic than European. Russia was isolated from
western Europe for centuries both by geography and by historical circumstances.
Russia was under what is called the Tatar Yoke, that is, domination by an
Asiatic people from the east, from at least the twelfth to the sixteenth
centuries. During that time Russia did not participate in the major cultural
developments in western Europe, namely, the rise of cities, the development of
nation states, the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation. As a result
Russia never developed any traditions of democracy or of respect for human
rights.
Starting at least by the sixteenth century the Russians
began to consider themselves to be superior to the West. After the Ottoman
Empire took Constantinople in 1453 the Grand Dukes of Moscow began to call
themselves Caesar, in Russian tsar, and they began to call Moscow the Third
Rome. Rome itself, the First Rome, had fallen to the barbarians and had
betrayed true Christianity through its allegiance to the Pope and in other ways
as well. The Second Rome, Constantinople, had fallen to the Muslim Ottomans.
The Muscovites began to say we are the Third Rome, and a fourth there shall
never be. It was primarily their Orthodox Christianity that made the Russians
think of themselves as the true successors to the Byzantine Empire, never mind
that the culture of Byzantium was Greek and the culture of the Russians wasn’t.
Russia’s isolation from western Europe continued well into the seventeenth
century. Until the reign of Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725) Russia’s
interactions with the West consisted mostly of wars with European forces
including the Lithuanians, the Teutonic Knights, Poland, and Sweden.
All of that began to change with Peter the Great. Peter
wanted to turn Russia into a more western nation. He built the new city of St.
Petersburg to look like a west European city not a Russian one. He made
everyone around him dress in western clothes and made the men shave their
beards after the western style than current. He imported western technology
into Russia, especially shipbuilding technology. He built a magnificent palace on
the Gulf of Finland to look like and rival Versailles. He expanded Russia’s
territory to the south, but mostly he is known for his efforts to westernize
Russia.
From the time of Peter on a thin layer of Russian society at
the top became westernized. They learned and imitated western culture.
Catherine the Great (ruled 1762-1796), who was herself German not Russian and
who became Empress when her husband Paul III died, perhaps with a little help
from Catherine, further westernized the court and the top levels of Russian
society. She invited leading thinkers and writers of the French Enlightenment
to come to Russia. She significantly expanded the Russian Empire. It was under
Catherine that Crimea, for example, became part of Russia. More importantly for
our purposes she furthered the westernization of the upper levels of Russian
society.
None of these developments had much of an effect at all on
most Russian people. Well into the nineteenth century most Russians were
peasants. Most were illiterate. Life for most was hard, even very hard by our
standards. They had essentially no rights. They were ruled by upper classes of
nobles and landowners who cared nothing for them or about them. If they had any
education at all—and most didn’t—it was education in Russian Orthodox
Christianity. That form of Christianity has much in it that is admirable, but
it never became a center of opposition to the tsars the way the church became a
center of opposition to secular rulers in the west. It did little to advance
literacy or independent thinking among most of its people. The elite of Russian
society, like Count Rostov in this book, were educated in western culture and
ways. Most Russians by far weren’t.
One way to understand what Stalin did with the USSR is that he
brutally forced it to become a more western nation at least in several ways. He
forced rapid industrialization of the economy. He greatly expanded basic
literacy among the population. He claimed to rule according a political
philosophy called Marxism, which was purely western in its origin and
orientation. The Soviet Communists did a great deal to make Russia more
western, but they never even tried to remedy Russia’s lack of a tradition of
democracy or respect for individual human rights. They put a veneer of respect
for those things into their system. The constitution Stalin had drafted for the
USSR created a nominally democratic political system and guaranteed freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, and other civil rights valued in the West. Those
things however had no practical effect. No Soviet citizen charged with a crime
was allowed to raise the rights guaranteed in the constitution as a defense.
The country was ruled, ruthlessly under Stalin and firmly if somewhat less
ruthlessly after him, by the Communist Party; and the Communist Party was ruled
solely by Stalin during his lifetime and by a small group of men at the top of
the Party (the Politburo) after Stalin’s death.
On this page of the book the Count undertakes to “further
the former Red Army colonel’s understanding of the West.” A colonel in the
imperial Russian army would likely already have had a good understanding of the
West because only men from the elite levels of Russian society became officers
in the army. In the Red Army, the army Leon Trotsky created for the Bolsheviks,
it was very different. Men of noble or otherwise elevated birth were thrown out
of the army at best. People from the masses of the Russian population rose to
positions of power and responsibility whether they were qualified for those
positions or not. Osip here seems to be one of those people. He does not have a
good understanding of the West. That means he was not highly educated either
before the revolution or after it. The Count undertakes to remedy some of the
deficiencies in this man’s education.
Page 260 A picture of Lenin on the wall. After his death in
early 1924 Vladimir Lenin became the central icon of the Communist state, and I
mean icon in a quasi-religious sense. When I was in the USSR in 1968 and again
in 1975-76 his picture was everywhere. It was often set up in public spaces,
like subway stations, in what looked for all the world like the way Russians
used to, and some still do, set up religious icons in their homes. One of the
Party slogans you’d see plastered around said “Lenin zhil, Lenin zhiv, Lenin
budiet zhit’—Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live (presumably forever I
guess). The echo in those words of the way Christians think about Jesus is not
coincidental.
Page 262 Viktor Shalamov. This character is fictional. Goslitizdat
would be an acronym for Russian words meaning State Literature Publisher. It
is, or at least was, an actual Soviet publishing house. In the USSR all
publishing was tightly controlled by the government, which meant in fact that
it was tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Perhaps you have heard the
Russian word samizdat. That word is a combination of parts of two
Russian words meaning self-publishing. In the years after Stalin’s death as
things began to loosen up just a little bit people began putting out copies of
unauthorized writing and circulating those copies among friends. They called
doing this self-publishing, samizdat. The Soviets tried to curtail it
by, among other things, restricting access to copiers and copy paper. They
never succeeded in stopping it altogether.
Page 263 The overnight train from Leningrad. When I was in
the USSR the pride of the Soviet railway system was a train called Krasnaya
Strela, the Red Arrow. One train would leave Moscow bound for Leningrad, and
one would leave Leningrad bound for Moscow, every night at midnight. The trains
arrived in their destination cities about 7 am the next morning. I rode that
train back and forth between Moscow and Leningrad five times. It was a really good
train, especially by Soviet standards. The engines came from Czechoslovakia.
The cars—sleeping cars at that—came from East Germany. The Soviets knew better
than to use Soviet equipment for the pride of their railway system. It wouldn’t
have been nearly as good.
Page 264 Tiergarten. The Tiergarten in Berlin is the zoo.
The word means animal garden. I went there more than once when my family and I
lived in Berlin for the 1957-58 academic year.
Pages 264-265 The incident of striking words about bread
from a letter by Chekhov. The Soviets went to great lengths to keep the people
from getting the idea that things were better in the West than they were in the
USSR. The directive to strike to reference to better bread in Berlin would not
have come in order to save paper. It would have come because bread is a staple
of the Russian diet, and the Party just wouldn’t have it that there was better
bread outside the USSR than inside it. Some Russian bread is actually quite
good, but I suppose that German bread is on the whole better.
Page 269 Ryabushinsky’s mansion. The Ryabushinskys were a
family of wealthy Russian industrialists.
Page 269 Socialist realism. Socialist realism is a style of
writing and painting that became the only officially tolerated form of Soviet
art. It basically propagates, in highly stylized form, the regime’s propaganda
about its nature and goals, glorifying the working class and the Communist
Party.
Page 269 Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Mayakovsky
(see earlier notes). These were all prominent writers in the early Soviet
period who later fell into disfavor with the regime and were therefore silenced
one way or another. Bulgakov’s book The Master and Marguerita is
particularly worth reading.
Page 271 Nina Kulikova does not return. I suspected this
development when she left for far eastern Siberia. Given the realities of
Soviet Russia and the hardship of life in eastern Siberia it was unlikely at
best that she would ever be seen again, assuming of course that the book was
faithful to Soviet reality in this regard, which it seems to be.
Page 274 muzhik. A muzhik is simply a Russian peasant.
Referring to muzhiks from Georgia may be an inaccuracy, or perhaps the author
is using muzhik to mean any peasant, not necessarily a Russian one.
Page 275 Kuybyshev. Kuybyshev was the Soviet name of the
Russian city of Samara, located on the Volga River in southeastern Russia. It
is not that far from Stalingrad, today Volgograd, the scene of the most brutal
and destructive battle of WWII. Valerian Kuybyshev, after whom the Soviets
renamed the city, was an Old Bolshevik (see above—Stalin killed nearly all of
them) who served in various significant offices of the Soviet government and
the Communist Party. He died of natural causes in 1935, before, I guess, Stalin
got around to killing him.
Page 277, more or less. The Soviet Union in WWII. Towles
mentions a few facts about the USSR’s involvement in WWII, but he hardly does
it justice here. We Americans can’t really imagine how calamitous and nearly
disastrous for the USSR generally and the Russian people in particular it was.
The Soviet death toll is usually estimated to be around 20 million. Moscow
wasn’t destroyed, but several other Russian cities were, especially Stalingrad
(Volgograd). I commented in an earlier set of notes on the hell that Leningrad
went through during a Nazi blockade of the city. The turning point of WWII in
Europe was the Battle of Stalingrad (fought August, 1942 to February 1943). It
is the largest battle in history. Something like 2 million people were killed.
By contrast, the US had less than 500,000 killed in the entire war. Our losses
in the war are of course a tragedy, but Soviet losses exceeded them by orders
of magnitude. The devastation of WWII set the Soviet economy back by decades.
The Soviet Communists used it as an excuse for poor economic performance even
in the late 1960s, when I was first in the USSR. Essentially every Soviet
family lost someone in that war. Russians don’t call it WWII. They call it “the
Great Patriotic War” or “the Great War of the Fatherland,” depending on how you
translate the Russian word otetchestvenaya. By 1941, when Hitler invaded, most
Soviet people would probably have been happy to be rid of the Soviets, but the
Russians at least (though not many other people of the USSR, including the
Ukrainians) rose en masse not to defend Communism but to defend Mother Russia.
Page 285 Great Patriotic War. Here Towles uses the common
Russian term for what we call WWII that I mentioned just above.
Page 287 Bread and salt. As Towles says an offering of bread
and salt is indeed an ancient Russian sign of welcome and hospitality. It goes
way back in Russian history. Once again we see that Towles has done his
homework.
Page 288 Of an era on its offspring. In the context of
Soviet Russia Mishka is lucky to be alive. He apparently has survived a
sentence in the Gulag, that system of Stalinist prison camps that Solzhenitsyn
has described so powerfully. By saying that Mishka shows the marks of an era on
its offspring Towles seems to be making this fictional character a symbol for
what happened to Russia under the Communists. Russia, never truly wealthy or
necessarily all that healthy in its political, social, and economic structures,
was indeed reduced to ragged clothes and a nonfunctional leg. The best elements
of Russian society were killed between 1917 and 1945 in an endless series of
civil war, Stalinist terror, and WWII. Russia was wounded by Communist control
of the culture, which stunted cultural development of nearly every kind (except
perhaps for classical ballet and music). Towles suggests that reality in his
mention of several great writers and poets (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, etc.) whose
voices were stifled by Communist censorship. I experienced the USSR in the
summer of 1968 and during the 1975-76 academic year as drab, uncreative, and
essentially depressed artistically, intellectually (though the USSR did still
produce great scientists and some respectable scholars in other fields),
economically, and in virtually every other way. It seemed a giant, inert
colossus that wasn’t at all unstable but that certainly wasn’t going anywhere. It
turned out to be far less stable than we thought it was back in those days.
Page 288 Yavas. Yavas is a locality in a region of Russia
called Mordovia. Mordovia is nominally a republic, but it is in effect part of
Russia. It is located in the Volga region of east central Russia. Its
population is a mix of Russians and a people called Mordvins.[2]
Their demographics are quite complex, but they constitute one of the larger
non-Russian ethnic groups in Russia.
Page 292 The luckiest man in all of Russia. We might well
find the idea of being confined to one particular building for the rest of our
lives abhorrent, but the Count truly is better off than millions upon millions
of Soviet people were under the Communists. He is living in a relic of the
prerevolutionary past. The descriptions of the foods available in the Boyarsky
show that somehow that hotel had access to things most Soviet people couldn’t
even dream of. So far at least, though people around him have been touched by
the Stalinist terror (Nina, Mishka), the Count has not except by being confined
to the Metropol, something that happened before Stalin rose to power. Some high
Party officials may have been living as well as the Count was, but most Soviet
people lived far harder, more impoverished lives.
Page 294 Gingyr Rogers. That’s how her name is spelled in my
copy of the book. It’s got to be a typo.
Page 315 Peasant market in the square. Under Stalin the
Soviet Communists set out to collectivize all agriculture, that is, they forced
the peasants into collectives where everything was directed from above
according to the current Five Year Plan. Private ownership of land was anathema
to the Communists. Nonetheless, perhaps because they realized that the people
had to be fed, they allowed the members of the collective farms to have small
(very small) plots of land on which they could do what they wanted. Each person
decided what to plant and how to manage the property. These members of the
collective were allowed to bring the produce of these small plots into the
cities and sell it in peasant markets. These small plots made up only a very
small percentage of all of the land in Russia, but they produced something like
half of all of the food people ate. Quite understandably the members of the
collective devoted as much time and energy to these plots as they could, and
the plots produced at a much higher rate than the collectively worked land did.
We went to a peasant market in Moscow on occasion. There was produce there you
absolutely could not get anywhere else in the city.
Page 315 They had it to themselves, at least for now. In the
Soviet Union it was rare for a family to have its own apartment. Getting one’s
own apartment was a goal nearly everyone had, and hoping to get it was a major
motivation for repeating the Party line and staying obediently in order
according to the Party’s dictates. Most families had to share apartments with
other families. Crowding was endemic, and privacy was hardly available at all.
The “at least for now” here reflects the real possibility that some authority
would put another family in this apartment, forcing its current occupants to
share it, probably with strangers.
Page 315 Kotlety. Kotlety is just the Russian word for
cutlets.
Page 315 Waiting in line at the milk store at a
decommissioned church. Several realities of Soviet life are reflected here.
Waiting in line was endemic. Everyone did it all the time. I recall waiting in
line at a paper goods store that had actually gotten some paper goods. The line
stretched a long way down the block. Often people would wait in line for hours
hoping to get some rare item only to find that the item was sold out by the
time they got into the store.
The Soviets shut down a great many churches, mostly of
course Russian Orthodox churches. They used the buildings for various purposes.
One of the main churches in Leningrad became a museum of atheism. Under Stalin
the Soviets tried to eliminate Russian Orthodoxy, but they couldn’t do it. Too
many people clung to the old faith. When I was in the Soviet Union people said
that only old women go to church. That was largely true (it was illegal to take
children to church), but it seems there was generation after generation of old
women who went to church. During WWII Stalin actually relaxed the restrictions
of Orthodoxy as part of his effort to get the people to fight the Nazis. Ever
since 988 when the Grand Prince of Kiev converted to Orthodox Christianity Russian
and Orthodox have virtually been synonyms. To be Russian was to be Russian
Orthodox.
Let me tell you two more stories from my experiences in the
USSR. On Easter, 1976, we went to the St. Sergius Holy Trinity Monastery
outside Moscow, a truly sacred site for Russian Orthodox people, for the Easter
service. It started at about 10 pm on Holy Saturday and lasted until sunrise on
Easter morning—in a church without pews mind you. The church we were in was the
cathedral church of the Patriarch of Moscow, but he wasn’t there. He was
celebrating the Easter mass in one of the churches in the Kremlin. The church
was packed, and it wasn’t packed only with old women. Rev. Mike Spangler, the
pastor of the Anglo-American Church associated with the American and British embassies
in Moscow, had arranged the trip for us. We traveled to Zagorsk, the city where
the monastery is located, in the American embassy’s school bus—a real American
yellow and black school bus. Believe me, traveling through Soviet Moscow in an
American school bus is not a good way to go unnoticed. That trip was one of the
highlights of my time in the USSR. Somehow I had the sense that a lot of people
were there not because the service was Orthodox but because it was Russian,
about which more below.
Another story. I’ve mentioned the journalism students we got
to know. Shortly before we left Mike Spangler, with whom we had become good
friends, gave me a book, in the Russian original, by Nikolai Berdyaev. I wish I
remembered which of Berdyaev’s works it was, cut I don’t. Berdyaev is the
best-known Russian Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. He was one of
a number of young Russian Marxists who in the early twentieth century returned
to the Orthodox Church. He is part of what is called the Silver Age of Russian
culture, the ten years or so before the outbreak of WWI. He is indeed a major
figure in twentieth century Russian culture, but if Soviet students ever heard
of him it was only as a class traitor who betrayed the workers by abandoning
Marxism and returning to the Orthodox Church, which the Russian Communists saw
as nothing but oppressive. I gave that book to the young man who was a Moscow
State University student we had gotten to know. He had assured us that he was
an atheist and that he couldn’t understand how we Americans could believe in
God. When I gave it to him he nearly broke down in tears. He said to me: “You
cannot know what you have done for me.” I’m not sure I really understand that
statement, but I know that many young Russians were drawn to the Orthodox
Church not because it is Christian but because it is so Russian and so closely
identified with Russian identity. It was the only large institution in the USSR
not devoted to the goals and ideology of the Communist Party. I suspect this young
man had heard of Berdyaev and knew that he was a major figure of Russian
culture but that he never thought he’d ever actually get to read any of his
work. The Soviets tried to destroy national, cultural identity. Soviet people
weren’t supposed to be Russian, Latvian, Kazakh, etc. They were supposed to be
Soviet. The Communists never succeeded in that effort. Russians knew they were
Russians. They valued being Russians. They knew that they didn’t have access to
many of the treasures of Russian culture, so many of which are associated with
Russian Orthodoxy. When they had a chance to access some of those treasures
they jumped at it. I suspect that is what the young man I gave that book to was
doing in his strong reaction to my gift.
Another observation since I’m at it. One of the great
tragedies of the Soviet period of Russian history was that it deprived people
of their history. Yes, they were taught history; but they were taught a Party
line version of history that omitted much and distorted more. It was all taught
through a Marxist-Leninist lens. Many educated Russians knew they weren’t
getting the whole story, and they longed for access to reliable information
about their culture and their past. I trust that now that the Soviet Union is
gone they have gotten that access.
Russian medicine in Book Three. This book contains an
incident in which Sofia falls, seriously hurts her head, and has the Count take
her to what used to be the best hospital in Moscow. It is hardly that anymore.
It is overcrowded and understaffed. It is dirty. There is no surgeon on duty.
It is not a place where Sofia would be likely to get decent medical care. She
gets it only because Osip has connections and calls on them. He gets Moscow’s
best surgeon to come provide her the medical care she needs and then to get her
transferred to a much better hospital. This story accurately reflects the
Soviet medical system as I knew it. The medical care available to most Soviet
people was woefully inadequate. Everyone knew that when you were admitted to a
hospital you were bound to come down with some secondary infection because of
unclean conditions. Hospital patients, sometimes at least, had to provide their
own food. I once saw a line of people outside a Soviet maternity hospital
carrying food for their family member inside. Medicine was not a highly
regarded profession. Most of the doctors were women. There is of course nothing
wrong with women doctors, but in the Soviet Union most doctors were women
precisely because it was not a highly valued or rewarded profession, so men
tended to avoid it. Shortly before I went to the USSR for the first time in the
summer of 1968 I was diagnosed with a serious lung condition that would require
surgery. I asked my doctor if I could nonetheless go on the Indiana University
Russian study program to which I had been admitted. He said yes, the worst
thing that can happen is that your lung will collapse, you’ll know it, you’ll
be able to tell doctors about it, and they’ll be able to deal with it. If I had
known then what I learned later about Soviet medicine, I wouldn’t have gone.
I’m glad I went of course. I had no medical problems, and I had a lot of
fascinating experiences that I still cherish.
Some concluding remarks on Book Three. The latter part of
this book contains fascinating discussions of what it means to be Russian.
Mishka says that it means destroying everything the country has created. Osip
says yes, but that is necessary for progress. The Soviets certainly did destroy
much of what Russia had been before 1917. They also preserved a lot of Russian
cultural treasures, especially the ones that attracted foreign tourists with
hard currency, but they did in fact set out to remake Russia from the ground
up. They radically restructured the economy. They greatly expanded public
education, but it was education done for purposes of indoctrination more than for
purposes of true education. Yes, the Russians did burn Moscow in 1812 to keep
Napoleon from gaining any advantage from having captured it, but I’m not sure Russians
as Russians are any more likely to destroy their cultural monuments than any
other people are. The Soviets did a lot of such destruction, but since the fall
of the USSR the Russians have done a lot to reclaim their ancient culture. Just
as one easy example, they changed the name of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg
and the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd—the City of the Volga, the great river
Russians call Mother Volga.
In Russian studies, and among Russians themselves, there is
a lot of discussion of just what it means to be Russian. There is a lot of
discussion of the so-called “Russian soul.” Here’s what I think that “soul’s”
chief characteristic is. Russians know that as a people they have suffered more
than most people have. Their history has not been an easy one. It is marked by
foreign invasion after foreign invasion. By authoritarian and unjust rulers
followed by totalitarian and even more unjust, more brutal ones. The standard
of living has never been high. In the twentieth century every family lost
people to war and the Stalinist terror. The Russian soul is the ability to
survive suffering and even to take pride in doing so. Russians will say we know
how to suffer better than anyone else. We take pride in suffering. We don’t
expect not to suffer, and we bear up under it better than anyone else. That,
plus consuming huge amounts of vodka, is what it means to be Russian.
[1]
Stalin was Georgian not Russian. His birth name was Dzhugashvili. I was in
Georgia for a few days in the summer of 1968. Stalin’s picture was everywhere.
In the hotel and in the taxi cabs. We were taken to his hometown of Gori, where
there was a Stalin museum. It seemed like the Georgians were saying yes, he was
a son-of-a-bitch, but he was our son-of-a-bitch, and boy did he kick some
Russian butt. Of course he kicked a lot of other butt too, but never mind.
[2]
Not everyone in Russia is Russian. Not by a long shot. There are dozens and
dozens of different ethnic groups in Russia, perhaps more like hundreds. The
country called Russia covers most of what was the Russian Empire (and the
Soviet Union covered a lot more of it). As the Russians expanded out from the
region around Moscow they came to rule a great many people who weren’t
Russians. Most of those people are still there.
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