Russia in Review

    I decided to start this year with a focus on Russia, and I read five books about Russia: War and Peace, Collapse, Stalin, Doctor Zhivago, and The Future is History. Two were fiction, works of acclaimed Russian literature, and the other three were non-fiction, including one biography. Four of the authors were Russian, and the other one, Stephen Kotkin, is an American of Belarussian-Jewish descent. I also watched Come and See, a Belarussian movie from the 1980s about a boy's experiences in World War Two in Nazi-occupied Belarus. The books covered, in the order listed above (which is also the order I read them in), the 1800s-1810s, the 1980s-1990s, the late 1920s to 1941, the 1900s-1940s, and 1984-2015. So this was largely a focus on Russia in the pre-WWII Stalin era and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    The biggest theme in my readings was war. So I came away with a feeling of Russia as a civilization facing hordes of enemies within and without, constantly in a struggle to survive. It is hard for me to say whether this is some deeper truth about Russia or just says more about my interests. I think it would be hard to find a time when Russia was not in some deep conflict. The entire existence of the Soviet Union it was either in conflict with itself or with America or Germany. And then the one book I read set in a pre-Soviet time was set in Tsarist Russia's wars against Napoleon. It would be interesting to read about Russia in more peaceful times.

    With all this war and conflict, Russia felt very bleak. And that, to me, is a truth about Russia's last century or so. The Soviet Union dealt a huge injury to Russian civilization from which it has not recovered. The initial Revolution and Civil War obviously killed millions, but the collectivization of farming and the subsequent purge under Stalin were even worse. Communism took away Russia's best minds and put the whole society under tyranny for generations. It was amazing how different War and Peace really felt as a book compared to all the others that were set during Communist rule. Soviet Russia was really right up there with Nazi Germany but was allowed to linger on for decades after the Nazis were toppled. The resulting structure left in the 1980s was totally hollow because everyone, even the leaders, understood that the Stalinist tyranny was totally beyond the pale.

    While I didn't really love Doctor Zhivago, something striking was how Russia produced so much good literature, especially before Communism. Between Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Nabokov, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, it's just an unbelievable run of legendary authors. I would love to read more of them. And it is really apparent how the best of them were either before Stalin (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), ended up disillusioned with Stalin (Gorky), had their work suppressed by Stalin (Pasternak), or went into exile because of Stalin (Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn). And since then, my impression is that great literature has basically been extinguished in Russia. Russia has seriously declined from being a cultural powerhouse before Communism to being what Masha Gessen called a place without a future in The Future Is History after Communism.

    It is really clear to me now how Moscow is the center of a Russian world that extends to the Baltics, Poland, the Carpathian Mountains, Transcaucasia, and Siberia. The Russian people are at the center and all the other peoples around them are really just dealing with it. It reminds me of how Mexico and the Caribbean sort of exist in the hinterland of the United States and are forced to deal with whatever America does. Russia also is similar in the way it intervenes in those countries, usually without any foreign countries saying anything about it, which shows why Russia is so offended by NATO expansion and Western support for Ukraine. Russians really view places like Crimea as something even more integral than the United States views Latin America, since Ukraine and Belarus were not just formerly part of the Soviet Union, but also Slavic peoples, known as "Little Russia" and "White Russia," respectively. All in all, this sort of unit on Russia left me much more interested in Russian history, Russian people, and especially Russian literature.