The Tides of Time

Here’s a literary recipe.  Take a big book, an epic.  Cover a slice of national history, several decades for preference.  Introduce a family over three generations.  Combine real historical figures with fictitious characters.  Season the whole mixture with fleeting moments of happiness and liberal amounts of tragedy.  What do you have?  You know, surely you know?  Yes, of course – you have War and Peace! 

Actually on this particular occasion you don’t.  What you have Vassily Aksynov’s Generations of Winter, a book which the Washington Post described as “the great Russian novel, the 20^th century equivalent of War and Peace.”  All I can say is that the Washington Post needs to get out more; it needs to wander down the highways and byways of Russian literature.  There are novels far greater than Generations of Winter.  One immediately comes to mind – Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the only modern novel, so far as I am concerned, that really does stand up to War and Peace. 

Of course I can’t blame Aksynov for the hyperbole of the Washington Post.  Ah, but just a minute.  That’s not quite true.  I can blame him inasmuch as he offers a challenge to Tolstoy on his own ground.  The knight enters the lists in a wholly self-conscious way, too big for his horse and too big for his armour.  Tolstoy thunders down, upsetting the mount and unseating the rider!  Oh, if only he had been more modest; if only he had challenged Pasternak first.  For Generations of Winter might weigh in better on a first charge with Doctor Zhivago. 

It’s certainly a book conceived on a monumental scale, one which tackles Russian history head on, a slice of the twentieth century, from the tranquil mid-1920s, a period of relative liberalisation, through the dark 1930s, the time of Stalin’s Great Purge, on to the Second World War.  It follows the fortunes of the Gradov family, in happiness and in sorrow; and when it comes to sorrow no other nation quite matches Russia.  It follows the fate of Boris Gradov, a leading Soviet doctor, and his children – Nikita, a soldier, Nina, a poet, and Kirill, an idealist.  It follows, in turn, the fate of their children. 

The author should know whereof he speaks.  Both his parents were arrested at the height of Stalin’s terror when he was not quite five years old.  His mother was Eugenia Ginzburg, herself a writer, who spent years in the concentration camps of Kolyma and in Siberian exile, recording her experiences in Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.  Aksynov, who did not see her again until he was sixteen, was sent to a state orphanage, another kind of gulag, a death sentence for so many children, from which he was rescued by his uncle. 

Alas, if only he had been a little less contrived in his approach to the subject matter we might be dealing with a superb novel, perhaps even a great one, rather than one which is simply good.  Obviously I can only talk about the English translation but the style, the narrative technique, seems to me to be course and clumsy at points.  The various ‘intermissions’, moreover, are horribly contrived, self-conscious and embarrassing literary artefacts. 

Generations of Winter is also a game of two halves.  Actually – as I subsequently discovered – it really is a game of three parts except the third part is missing!  In large measure this explains why the novel is so uneven.  The first part leading up to the Second World War is assured and focused.  The second part lacks coherence.  In the end, without the sequel, we are simply left hanging, unsure of the fate of the various characters. 

I do not think that Generations of Winter is a great book, but it is an honest one.  It’s an uncompromising picture of what life was like in Stalin’s nightmarish utopia.  It’s a picture of betrayal, of lives all but destroyed by arbitrary whims and political paranoia; it’s a picture of unwholesome people like Stalin and the reptilian Beria, chief of the NKVD, the thuggish and criminal state security apparatus.  It’s a picture, above all, of corruption.  Here the author is direct rather than subtle.  At one point Boris Gradov treats Stalin for extreme constipation.  The dictator, you see, is nothing but a sack of shit. 

I read this book, a surprise gift, over the Christmas holiday and found myself beguiled, my various criticisms notwithstanding.  This is living history, history mediated through the eyes of real people, who when they are not real are fictions!  I followed the Gradovs and their various fates, never wholly losing interest, though from time to time losing sight of some members of the family.

I was irritated, though, by the artificiality which breaks through from time to time.  There are too many contrived encounters, particularly those involving Townsend Reston, an American journalist, and leading members of the Gradov family.  His meeting with Nina Gradov in the Moscow metro during a German bombing raid stretches credulity to the point of absurdity.  Then there is the relationship between Veronika, Nikita Gradov’s wife, and Colonel Kevin Taliaferro, an American military attaché, which takes credulity beyond absurdity.  Here the book descends almost into the comic nonsense of soap opera. 

But, as I say, it’s an honest narrative of dishonest times.  I remember an observation from Doctor Zhivago, where a character says that the personal life was dead in Russia, that it had been killed by history.  There must have been many families like the Gradovs, real people, people who maintained decent standards in the midst of indecency, who did their best to retain something of the personal life; who ensured, even in the most trying of circumstances, that they would not be drowned by the tides of time.  For these generations Generations of Winter stands as a worthy testimony. 

A Million Tragedies

If you’ve seen the David Lean film version of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago you may recall the scene where Lara, hearing wolves howl in the snowy distance, turns to Yuri in fright, saying that this is a terrible time to be alive. This is in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed; history in action, a process that overwhelmed so many individual lives, consumed by fear, uncertainty and terror.

But Lara did not know then how bad things were to become, that the wolves would not stay in the distance or outside the door. In the end she herself was to be the victim of the greatest fear of all – Stalin’s all-consuming Purge of the late 1930s which reached its murderous height in 1937, the Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD security apparatus.

In his novel Pasternak writes of his character;

One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.

She was a nameless number, that’s all, drawn into the maelstrom like so many others. As Stalin is reputed to have said, a million deaths is not a tragedy, merely a statistic. The victims of his regime are gone beyond recall, just a meaningless list of meaningless names, voices that can no longer be heard. The rest is silence.

But it’s not. The silence has been broken with whispers. It has been broken by The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes, a British specialist in Russian history. It isn’t a new work; it was published as long ago as 2007. The subject certainly interests me, having read and reviewed other books on this phase in Russian history, here and elsewhere. I would have tackled it eventually though I finally came to it as the dust settled after one of the little sandstorms that overtake publishing and the academic world now and then, inevitably obscuring the horizon

I’ll come to this in a bit. Let me begin by saying that I consider Figes to be one of the best historians in his particular field. I hugely enjoyed his account of the Crimean War and I think A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 is the single best account of the whole period.

I do not think The Whisperers has surpassed this achievement, but it is still an important forward step in historical research. Its achievement lies in what I would call ‘a panorama from below.’ This is the voice of the voiceless, of people who experienced the Great Terror at first hand, not the politicians, the ideologues and the apparatchiks but the ordinary people of Russia.

Working with a team of researchers, Figes has recovered so much personal testimony on the threshold of an even greater silence. For that alone he is to be commended. He also draws on family archives, letters, diaries, personal memoirs and so on, testimony that would have otherwise have been forgotten, unread and turning yellow with age.

In Stalin’s Russia Big Brother, in the shape of the secret police, was constantly keeping the private citizen under observation, ready to pounce, like a wolf, on the least sign of deviation. I write ‘private citizen’ but there really was no privacy and no retreat. Stalinism fed on moral corruption, and moral corruption begins at the level of the individual.

Yes, the state was ever watchful but it depended most particularly on those who were prepared to denounce others, either for base motives of personal gain – apartment space was at a premium - , or because they wanted to wash out some ‘stain’ in their personal biography by proving themselves more orthodox than the orthodox. One published notice serves here: “I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them God exists, and for that reason I am severing my relations with him.”

Deception and self-deception, lies and half truths, all were absorbed into a jungle-like struggle for survival. Commenting on one journal from 1937 Figes notes that “…people were becoming so adept at concealing meaning in their speech that they were in danger of losing the capacity to speak the truth altogether.”

In a way personal life turned into a bizarre Greek tragedy, all emotion hidden behind masks. Those desperate to speak the truth turned in on themselves, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, confining their thoughts to diaries, a release carrying its own particular danger.

The title has a double meaning that becomes increasingly obvious the further one reads. Whisperer in Russian has two senses: those who speak quietly for fear of being overheard, and those who inform on others, even friends and family, for fear of being suspected. Denounce, in other words, before you are denounced. Figes writes that “The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.”

Personal and moral corruption came through fear and intimidation. There is, however, another form of corruption, one which begins not with baseness but with idealism. The key example here is one Konstantin Siminov, whom Figes singles out as the ‘central figure’ of The Whisperers. He was a journalist, novelist and poet who enjoyed a particularly successful career under Stalin, demonstrating his loyalty time and again.

There was no opportunism here; he was a genuine believer. Even the arrest and disappearance of family, friends and colleagues did nothing to dent his enthusiasm. It was this enthusiasm that allowed him to embrace every ideological perversion, including Stalin’s late anti-Semitism. He was loyal even after the end. As the truth began to come out after the dictator’s death, Siminov held to his early course. The alternative was just too awful: the alternative was to admit that his whole life had been based on a fraud. In the end he did. This was to be his particular tragedy.

The Whisperers is an important book, I would go so far as to say a crucial one, a necessary testimony coming at just the right point in time, coming as a new fog of lies and misinformation about the past and about Stalin descends on Putin’s Russia. Even so it’s not a perfect book; there are flaws. As I hinted above, I read it in the aftermath of a controversy earlier this year. Russian publishers scrapped a projected translation because of alleged ‘inaccuracies.’ The story was picked up by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen, two American academics, who published their findings in The Nation.

Errors of fact are always a concern, particularly when those errors concern people who are still alive. But it seems to me that given the scale and scope of The Whisperers, given the mountain of primary material, such a thing while not excusable is at least understandable. Many of the errors, though, seem to have been introduced by the Russian translators or were present in the source documents. Once this had been taken into account the author wrote that it left “…a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.”

I do not regret this book, perhaps one of the most ambitions and worthwhile exercises in oral history ever undertaken. The flaws notwithstanding, it is a commendable achievement. It is, if you like, the story of a million tragedies.  

Great Catherine

Her name was Sophia Frederica Augusta.  She was a minor eighteenth century German princess of the minor eighteenth century duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.  In the normal course of things she would have married a minor German prince, lived a minor German life and passed into history, minor and unnoticed.  But destiny had another path and another name for Sophia.  She became Ekaterina.  She became Catherine, Empress of all the Russias, known as ‘the Great’ even in her own lifetime.   

Catherine is one of those figures in history who has an enduring fascination for me.  I’m in Edinburgh at the present.  I came here specifically to visit the recently opened Catherine the Great – An Enlightened Empress exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland.  Marking the 250th anniversary of the coup d’état which placed her on the throne of Russia, it tells Catherine’s story through a collection of letters, diaries, jewellery, paintings, sculptures and dresses. 

Most of the items come from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, including a recently restored giant coronation portrait, on show for the first time since the Revolution of 1917 which destroyed the Romanov dynasty.  The whole thing is a marvel, from the paintings, the porcelain, the grand dinner services and the intimate cameos.  It’s a story of Russia in peace and in war, a story of a Russia made even greater by a cultured, humane and civilized princess who took her adopted home to her heart. 

Catherine came to Russia to marry the Grand Duke Peter, the nephew of the reigning Empress Elizabeth.  If things had gone well she may have lived largely in her husband’s shadows and the shadows of history, like most other imperial consorts.  But they did not go well.  Peter and his new Grand Duchess developed a mutual loathing for one another, each taking a variety of lovers. 

Catherine was later to claim that her son Paul I, who succeeded her in 1796, was not the child of Peter but of Sergei Saltykov, one of her many paramours.  It’s almost certainly untrue.  Paul in character and attitude bore a striking resemblance to Peter, and was to fall from power for much the same reasons.  The two portraits on display in Edinburgh also show a remarkable physical similarity between father and son.

In the course of researching Catherine I came across an old movie called The Scarlett Empress, a 1934 historical drama directed by Josef von Sternberg, with Marlene Dietrich in the title role.  She’s really very good in the part, managing to catch the child-like simplicity of the young princess at one point and the scheming femme fatale at the next.  The movie has a marvellous Gothic cum expressionist quality.  The gargoyle thrones and the skeleton table decoration are really quite something.  The history, though, is as grotesque as the gargoyles, with Peter played as an inanely grinning imbecile by Sam Jaffe.

Peter III was, in truth, a competent and reforming emperor, but he managed to alienate just about everyone of significance in Russia, not just his wife.  With the support of the army and the leading Orthodox clergy, Catherine overthrew her husband in the coup of June 1762, after he had only been on the throne for a few months.  She went on to rule in her own right as Catherine II, while Peter was murdered. 

A black beginning did not presage a black reign; just the contrary.  Catherine was to prove herself the most cultured and civilized ruler ever to sit on the throne of Russia, the friend and correspondent of such luminaries of the Enlightenment as Denis Diderot and Voltaire.  I knew about this.  What I did not know is that she also had reason to be grateful to Charles James Fox, that old Whig bore.  His bust is one of the items on display! 

In the course of her reign, until the onset of the French Revolution introduced a note of caution, Catherine was instrumental in the pursuit of social and economic reform.  She was a great patron of the arts and sciences, encouraging all sorts of new enterprises.   In 1763 she founded Russia’s first College of Medicine.  Russia’s army and navy were hugely expanded, bringing success in war, particularly in successive conflicts with the Ottoman Turks.  Power, majesty and art; it was all a reflection of her glory. 

I loved it all; I spent over two hours in close examination of all sorts of marvellous things, walking in the footsteps of a remarkable woman, Matruschka, a petty German who became a great Russian.  I thought of her and her lovers, particularly of Prince Grigory Potemkin, the great passion of her life, shown here in portrait and sculpture.  

I loved Catherine’s formal paintings, pure expressions of power and majesty. But it was another kind of depiction altogether that wholly beguiled me.  Painted by Vladimir Borovikovsky, it shows Catherine, informally dressed, walking with her dog in the parkland of Tsarskoye Selo, a country gentlewoman, unremarkably remarkable.   The other remarkable painting is that entitled Catherine II in Travelling Costume by Mikhail Shibanov, formally accepted by the Empress though it is unflattering portrait, showing her as an old woman. 

Quite apart from being Russia’s most successful ruler, Catherine was an avid collector of all sorts of objets d’art.  The Edinburgh showcase was but a small cross-section of her collection, antiques and sculpture as well as painting.  And all that sumptuous table ware, porcelain, ceramics, jewels, gold and silver! 

It was such a pleasure also to see some of the court costumes and regimental dresses that the Empress herself wore.  When I was in Moscow I saw the boots that Peter the Great made for himself on display in the Kremlin Armoury Museum.  He was a giant of a man, reflected in his footwear.  Catherine was of more modest stature, reflected in her own costumes.  But as I stood and watched, knowing that she had been there, I still felt myself in the presence of one of history’s giants.  If Russians knew how to read, she once said, they would write me off.  Russians know how to read; they will never write Catherine off.  Such a thing is impossible.  

The Weight of History

I bought Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and his Hangmen six or seven years while I was studying modern Russian history in sixth form at school. I never read it, though, because it was squeezed out by another book published at about the same time – Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

My present fascination with the writing of Vasily Grossman persuaded me to turn to the long-neglected Raysfield for some additional background information on the nature of the Soviet state and the terror apparatus it spawned. I’m rather glad I did because this is a good book, though not a great one, a reasonably through treatment of the people and the institutions without whom Stalin could not have functioned in the way that he did.

It’s a set of mini-biographies, or perhaps pathologies is a better expression, of Stalin himself and the successive heads of state security, appointed after the Bolshevik coup in late 1917. They are there in all of their fanaticism and depravity.

Imagine, if you will, some kind of reverse Darwinian progression, with successive stages of moral, sometimes physical, degeneration. Imagine also a progress in inhumanity and cruelty that is a perfect echo of the progress and inhumanity of communism at large. Now picture the men; picture Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Cheka, the first in a long line of sinister acronyms, and then those who came after: Viacheslav Menzhinsky, Genrik Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria. These are the principal players, though the book also features some of those spawned in their shadows, even deeper levels of ugly depravity.

It’s also a biography of the institutions themselves and their evolution, from Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to MGB, to the FSB of today. These awful acronyms both display and hide so much. They are the cords in a binding wrapped ever closer around the body of Russia, tighter and tighter, as freedom was squeezed to death. The awfulness was there right from the beginning in the system created by Lenin; Stalin simply made it even worse, with the aid of his various hangmen.

I knew more about some of the men featured in this book than others, quite a lot about Dzerzhinsky, who, if he had survived, would almost certainly have gone the same way as Yagoda and Yezhov, men who supped too close to the devil, and nothing at all about Menzhinsky.

I thought of Yezhov, who presided over the hysteria of 1937 and 1938, which we now know as the Great Terror, as the individual with most blood on his hands, but the weight is heaviest on Menzhinsky, head of the OGPU at the time of forced collectivisation and a state-induced famine that lead to the death of millions. There is genocide here, ethnic-cleansing before the world had ever heard of ethnic cleansing. The urban terror, the Yezhovchina, of 1937 to 1938 was bad, but the rural terror of 1930 to 1933 was even worse.

Rayfield tells his story well, scholarly but with a strong seasoning of passion, though I do have serious reservations over some of his more dubious judgements. In Murdering the Old Guard, section six of the book, he says that Stalin was no more a communist than a Borgia pope was a Catholic. That’s a rather odd contention because the Borgia pope – I assume he is thinking of Alexander VI – was a Catholic, just as Stalin was a communist. The difference is the one was an aberration of a system of belief and the other its most refined expression. More seriously, I think his analysis of Stalin’s relations with Hitler both weak and seriously inaccurate at points, showing that his grasp of the twists in Soviet foreign and ideological policy is not quite as strong as it should be.

The conclusion, though, is superb. As he says, it is a paradox that Russia’s two greatest novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in all their work insisted that only by full confession could the crimes of the past be absolved and life become endurable again – “…yet today’s Russian state refuses to abjure Stalin and his henchmen.” Hardly surprising when that same state is run by a man who is by career and choice, as the author puts it, a successor to Yagoda and Beria, a state where “..the FSB has taken, in alliance with bandits and extortioners, the commanding heights of the country’s government and economic riches, and goes on lying to, and when expedient murdering, it’s citizens.”

How much worse the situation seems to have become since I bought this book, how much Russia moves in an ever downward spiral, crushed under the weight of its unrequited history;

Until the story is told in full, and until the world community insist that the legacy of Stalin is fully accounted for and expiated, Russia will remain spiritually sick, haunted by the ghosts of Stalin and his hangmen and, worse, by nightmares of their resurrection.

Tears Flow

Vasily Grossman, as I wrote here quite recently, was a writer of unique genius, a great war correspondent and an even greater novelist. Earlier this year I read Life and Fate, a panoramic novel set in the Second World War. I don’t think I’ve ever been as overwhelmed by a work of fiction, at least not since I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s an astonishing tour de force, a description of people and places and events delivered with freshness and stunning insight. Even before I finished I offered the following comment;

As a novel it is also intensely honest, making no allowances for the ideological shibboleths of his day, so honest that the book was ‘arrested’, yes, arrested by the KGB in the early 1960s. Grossman was subsequently summoned to the office of Mikhail Suslov, the chief ideologue of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years, who told him that the book could not be published for another two or three hundred years, an act of extreme censorship coupled with a paradoxical recognition of its lasting importance. Fortunately, a copy of the manuscript was smuggled out to the West, where it was published and hailed as a work of genius.

Sadly Grossman was unable to enjoy his literary triumph: he died of stomach cancer in Moscow in 1964. At the point of his death he had no reason to suppose that Suslov’s prediction was not true, that it would take two centuries for his great work to emerge from the ideological shadows. But he was already working on another novel, a novel that could not have been published in the old Soviet Union in two millennia, never mind two centuries. This is Everything Flows, which I finished today in one feverish sitting, stopping only to top up my tea from the samovar.

Yes, Everything Flows is a novel, unfinished at the time of the author’s death, but it’s also a kind of testament, a political and philosophical indictment not just of the moral corruption of communism but of Russia itself, of that dark place in the Russian soul that forever eschews freedom in favour of slavery.

The criticism is trenchant. Life and Fate could be taken in large part as a demolition of Stalinism, an altogether more honest testament that Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. But Everything Flows goes deeper; it goes so far as Lenin, still sleeping away in Red Square, the supreme icon of national servitude. For a moment, for the briefest of seasons in the spring of 1917, Russia scented freedom. The path lay open. Russia chose Lenin, who came not to liberate the country but to refine and amplify the most regressive features of its history;

And so it was that Lenin’s obsession with revolution, his fanatical faith in the truth of Marxism and the absolute intolerance of any dissent, all led him to advance hugely the development of the Russia he hated with all of his fanatical soul…Did Lenin ever imagine the true consequences of his revolution? Did he ever imagine that it would not simply be a matter of Russia now leading the way – rather than, as had been predicted, following behind a socialist Europe? Did he ever imagine that what his revolution would liberate was Russian slavery itself – that his revolution would enable Russian slavery to spread beyond the confines of Russia, to become a torch lighting a new path for humanity?

Russian history, paradoxically, went into reverse. Stalin quickened the process, taking it as far as it would go, substituting freedom with the most abject forms of state worship, something that had not been seen since the days of Ivan the Terrible. By the 1930s, the time of collectivisation, the time of the Terror Famine, the time when the state deliberately starved millions of its own citizens to death, the Russian peasantry was more completely enslaved than it ever had been under the Tsars. It’s almost as if Alexander II, the Liberator, the man who ended serfdom, had never lived. That was the legacy of the Revolution.

There is a witness here, a man who filters these thoughts through his head. He is Ivan Grigoryevich. His freedom died earlier than most. Sent to the camps as a young man, he returns thirty years later, a ghost from the past, a husk of a ruined life. Stalin is dead but there has been no proper reckoning; there never will be a reckoning. Such reckoning as there is comes only as an act of moral and historical reflection.

There are those that Grigorivich left behind, like his cousin Nikolay, a mediocrity who prospered in a time of mediocrity and bad faith. This ghost is not entirely welcome, neither by Nikolay nor by his wife, both of whom remained ‘free’ insofar as freedom involved all sorts of shabby compromises. This is a theme, this guilt come resentment, that Solzhenitsyn was to take up in Cancer Ward. These are the little people, the beetle people, who prospered at the expense of those far more talented, who died or disappeared.

The novel ranges over some of the tragedy, looked at in simple human as well as grand historical terms. There is the tragedy of the Terror Famine, told by Anna Sergeyevna, Grigorivich’s lover, full of guilt for the part she played;

How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that the kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that the Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. I can see now that we are all human beings.

There is the tragedy of Vasily Timofeyvich, Ganna, his beloved wife, and Grishenka, their infant son, explored in a brief and incredibly poignant chapter, killed by starvation, lying in their hut over the winter, not separated even by death.

There is the tragedy of Masha, arrested in 1937 at the height of the Great Terror, madness within madness, simply for being married to a man that the state had declared guilty. Separated from her husband and her child, she was sent to the gulags, convinced that it was all a mistake, that her sentence would be revoked, that they would all meet again never to be separated. In the end hope died;

A year later Masha left the camp. Before returning to freedom, she lay for a while on some pine planks in a freezing hut. No one tried to hurry her out to work, and no one abused her. The medical orderlies placed Masha Lyubimova in a rectangular box made from boards that the timber inspectors had rejected for any other use. This was the last time anyone looked on her face. On it was a sweet, childish expression of delight and confusion, the same look as when she had stood by the timber store and listened to the merry music, first with joy then with the realisation that all hope had vanished.

This could have been an angry book, a bitter one; the anger caused by so much betrayal, the anger of history, the anger of an author whose life’s work had been frustrated. But it’s not; it’s a bold, moving and scrupulously honest book, a story told on a number of narrative levels, a story told with simplicity, insight and tremendous clarity. It stands as a noble testament. If you love Russia, if you love the past, if you love the truth, if you love freedom I urge you to read this. If you can do so without descending at points into tears then you have far greater powers of emotional control than I have, than I will ever have. Everything Flows is a great work of literature. It is an even greater tribute to the human spirit.

Reflections on a Great Man

On Mamayev Kurgan, the hill overlooking the Russian city of Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, there stands an enormous statue of a female figure wielding a sword, raised into the sky. This is The Motherland Calls, commemorating the epic struggle for national survival at the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the pivotal moments of the Second World War. On the wall leading to the mausoleum underneath the statue you will find carved in huge letters the following words;

An iron wind hit them in the face, yet still they came on. A superstitious dread must have seized the foe: ‘Were these men really mortal?’

Inside a Russian soldier answers in letters tooled in gold around the base of the dome;

Yes, we were mortal indeed, and few of us survived, but we all carried out our patriotic duty before holy Mother Russia.

Neither outside nor inside the monument will you find out who wrote these words. If you ask the guide they give a general answer or simply pretend not to know. Actually, they are the from In the Direction of the Main Attack, an article by Vasily Grossman, published in Red Star on 20 November, 1942, the day after the Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad began.

Grossman was one of the greatest of all war correspondents, particularly popular with the soldiers - officers and enlisted ranks - simply because he wrote in honest, straight-forward and gripping terms, free of bombast and the kind of inflated hyperbole usually favoured by the Soviet press. He had that rare talent only granted to the very best journalists – an understanding of the importance of detail, of the small significances overlooked by those who have been mesmerised by the ‘big picture.’

In addition he had a huge amount of personal integrity, a commitment to honesty and a commitment to the truth. It was this that lead to a steady distancing from the Soviet state, from a system based on ugly lies and blatant hypocrisy, moral corruption of the worst kind. That’s why his name is not mentioned on the Stalingrad monument, why he is still a figure that incites a degree of disapproval in Putin’s Russia, a country which, once again, sees virtue in the likes of Stalin and – for the love of God – Lavrenti Beria, the one-time head of the KGB, that jackal of the human race.

Grossman was so much more than a mere reporter. He is a great novelist in a country of great novelists. Last year I read Life and Fate, his master work set during and immediately after the Second World War. I was overwhelmed by the experience, not having previously been acquainted with any of his work, an omission I have since made good. This novel, one of sweeping vision, is now being serialised by BBC Radio in a week-long celebration of Grossman’s work.

During the war Grossman continually sought solace in Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace. The title of his own novel is in deliberate homage to Tolstoy. What Tolstoy did for the Patriotic War against Napoleon Grossman did for the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Both men created Homeric epics for the age.

But of the two, though it some will consider it sacrilege to say so, I think Life and Fate is the greater, simply because the author is less intrusive, or less obviously intrusive, than Tolstoy, who offers extended and rather tiresome reflections on his own personal philosophy of history, interventions that interfere with the books narrative flow.

Life and Fate seems to me to be just as sweeping but a lot more human at the level of detail. It’s also the most biting indictment of Stalin and Stalinism that I have ever read or am ever likely to read. This was a book so explosive that it was actually ‘arrested’ by the KGB, notwithstanding the fact that it was submitted for publication during the period of Khrushchev’s so-called thaw in the early 1960s. But one copy remained undetected, finally being published in the West after Grossman’s death.

Although the reaction was initially quite muted, the reputation of the novel, and of Grossman as a writer, has grown steadily over the years. Life and Fate is not simply about war or politics or struggle or treachery or disaster or adversity or triumph; it’s a book which celebrates truth and kindness, held up as the greatest standard of all, greater than the smelly littlie orthodoxies, as George Orwell put it, that contended so hard in the last century for the human soul.

Death of Idealism

Hans Fallada’s novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein, given the English title Alone in Berlin, is a political thriller set in the German capital during the Second World War. It focuses chiefly on an act of resistance, futile and pointless, by an elderly couple who decide on a postcard campaign, denouncing the regime, after their only son is killed at the front. It’s both an act of faith and of desperation, whispers in a hurricane, never destined to be heard.

I was reminded of it recently on reading an article by Robert Hornsby in History Today (Circles of Subversion in Khrushchev’s USSR) which touches on attempts at resistance within the Soviet Union, small scale, fragmented and isolated, sometimes no more than a single individual pretending to be a large organisation. My first reaction was one of surprise that there was any subversion at all, believing that independent-minded defiance had been more or less bled out of the Soviet State by Stalin.

Apparently not, for hundreds of clandestine organisations and groups appeared during the so-called ‘thaw’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of which secretly distributed manifestos critical of the existing system, a little in the fashion of the couple in Fallada’s novel.

A lot of these groups were made of religious or national dissidents, but there were some ‘idealists’, including members of the Communist Party or the Komsomolsk, the youth wing, who took the nonsense of socialism seriously, simply believing that it had somehow been corrupted under Stalin.

The information we have, mostly retrieved from KGB archives, includes leaflets reminiscent of the slogans of 1917, one calling for “land to the peasants, factories to the workers and culture to the intelligentsia.” Others called for a Nuremberg-style indictment of Stalin’s surviving henchmen or the suspension of article 58 of the criminal code, long used in the persecution of ‘anti-Soviet’ elements.

Although these people when caught, as they most often were, were prosecuted using that blunt tool, on the assumption that they were acting under hostile influences, they were neither anti-Communist nor pro-West. Typical here was the Union for the Struggle for the Revival of Leninism established in 1963 by one Petro Grigorenko, aiming to return the USSR to ‘true Leninism.’

The fact is that these ideological simpletons took Khrushchev at his word, that Stalinism was an aberration and that the system could be reformed from within. In reality the regime was intolerant of any challenge to its ideological monopoly, even from a supposedly Marxist-Leninist perspective. As Hornsby says, when a new crackdown began in late 1956 in the wake of the Hungarian uprising officials were specifically told that ‘neo-Bolshevik’ elements were not to be tolerated or mistaken for allies.

It could not last; the idealism could not last in a system that was unresponsive, bureaucratic and sclerotic. The instability and false hopes of the Khrushchev era gave way to the relative prosperity of the Brezhnev period, in which oppression went hand in hand with an increase in living standards. By the mid-1960s the Communist idealism revived by the thaw was in terminal decline, not just because of the efficiency of the state security apparatus but because nobody cared and nobody believed.

Sorry, there was one last believer, who by one of history’s acutest ironies turned out to be the General Secretary of the Communist Party itself – Mikhail Gorbachev. His labour was beyond that of Hercules, to reform the unreformable. In retrospect his initiatives look almost comically naïve, all based on a call for ‘openness’ in a society that had learned apathy as a mode of defence. The idealists, the believers, the Leninists were all gone.

Romanov Remembrance

Among the more notable items I saw on my tour of the Kremlin on a particularly memorable Christmas Day, several years ago now, was the Faberge Eggs in the Armoury Museum, those splendid jewelled creations made by the firm of Peter Carl Faberge for the last two Tsars to mark the Easter holiday.

There is one in particular that stood out - the Kremlin Egg, a gift from Nicholas to the Empress Alexandra in 1906. For me there was something almost magical in this, a trace from the past, a link with those long dead royal martyrs, the first drops in an ocean of martyrdom.

The Russian royal family has long been a subject of unique and compelling fascination for me, not just Nicholas and Alexandra but also Alexi, the Tsarevich, murdered when he was only fourteen years old, and his four sisters, the grand duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, who referred to themselves collectively as OTMA.

The murder of the royal family in July 1918 in the sinisterly named House of Special Purpose in Yekaterinburg was a hideous crime. Even at the time it was a source of some embarrassment to the Soviet government. It was over a year after the event before it was prepared to admit that Alexandra and the children had been killed alongside Nicholas, and even then the Social Revolutionaries, opponents of the Bolsheviks, were blamed for the atrocity.

The guilt has haunted Russia ever since, evidenced by the fact that no fewer than three official inquiries have been opened into the regicide since the fall of communism, opened and then closed again just as quickly.

Now the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna Romanov, a descendent of the last Tsar who also claims to be his heir, has won an important victory in a Moscow court, obliging Russia’s Investigative Committee to hand over the eight hundred page dossier it holds on the killings and the aftermath. Her lawyer, who claimed it as a triumph over “legal nihilism in Russia,” says that she plans to publish the documents along with her own assessment of the investigation carried out by the state prosecutors.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union the official line taken by the judicial system was that massacre had been a ‘crime’ rather than an act of state policy. The reticence here clearly goes beyond the legal system into the heart of Russian history and politics. There has never been a serious attempt to come to terms with the past, no truth and reconciliation committee to draw attention to the criminality of a huge part Russia’s recent history. After all Lenin, or what purports to be Lenin, the criminal in chief, still sleeps in Red Square, an object of idle curiosity.

I honestly don’t think these documents will tell us much that we don’t already know. The communist line that it was chiefly the work of the local Ural Soviet, backed by Yakov Sverdlov, then Party Secretary, was an obvious lie, an attempt at official distance. Perhaps we may learn a little more about the precise role of Lenin and the Bolshevik government. I said in a previous article (The Murder of the Romanovs) that Lenin was at least guilty by association. It will be helpful if the accusation can be made more exact.

The remains of the Tsar and his family were finally interred in the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Saint Petersburg. Now canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, they stand as testimony to the crimes of communism. Transfigured in death, the triumph of the Romanovs has as been all the greater.

Plodding Romance

I’m such an enthusiast for lost causes, movements which I imbue with my own romantic vision: the Cavaliers of the English Civil War, the Confederates of the American Civil War and the White Guard of the Russian Civil War.

I have a particular enthusiasm for the latter, for the men and women who tried to save Russia from Lenin and his criminal band. I have a particular enthusiasm for the leaders of the White Army; men like Anton Denikin, Pytor Wrangel and Aleksandr Kolchak. Ever since the fall of communism there has been a new appreciation of these people, once defiled. When I was in Moscow I was able to lay some flowers on the grave of Denikin, reinterred with honours in Donskoy Monastery in October, 2005.

It was therefore with considerable anticipation that I recently approached The Admiral, a 2008 Russian-language movie about Aleksandr Kolchak, once an Arctic explorer, an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy and finally head of the anti-Communist forces in Siberia as Supreme Ruler of Russia, captured and executed in February, 1920. Vilified by the Soviets, there are now monuments to his memory in both Saint Petersburg and Irkutsk.

The Admiral, unfortunately, is a plodding disappointment, a movie constructed in such a way that it inevitably invites comparison with David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, far superior in every sense. Doctor Zhivago is a love story set against the grand sweep of Russian history, a tale of ordinary lives being submerged by history.

The Admiral is also a love story, that between Kolchak (Konstantin Khabensky) and Anna Timiryova (Elizaveta Boyarskaya), a poet and his long-standing mistress. The couple are handsome, just as handsome as Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, but sadly there is no chemistry at all, no spark of life in their tepid romance. Their exchanges are wooden, their encounters barren.

The other point of contrast is the handling of the wider themes, the handling of events. In Zhivago the scenes of war, of revolution and of civil war were woven effortlessly into the lives of the principle characters. But with The Admiral, despite some impressive moments, including the early footage of naval combat during the First World War, history seems to hang around, waiting to be introduced at periodic interludes.

I was so looking forward to seeing this movie. A reassessment of the career of Kolchak and the struggle of the anti-communist resistance was long overdue. My disappointment at this uninspiring and plodding effort was therefore so much the greater.

The valley of death

It’s Good Friday, April 10, 1846. Jerusalem is packed with pilgrims on an Easter weekend that happened to fall on the same date in both the Latin and Orthodox calendars. The mood is tense. The two religious communities had been arguing over who has the right to be first to carry out the rituals at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the holiest places in Christendom, standing on the spot where Jesus is said to have been crucified.

That Friday was to be anything but good. The Catholics arrived only to find that the Greeks were there first. A fight broke out, priest against priest, soon to be joined by monks and pilgrims from the respective camps. People fought not just with fists but anything they could get a hold of – crucifixes, candlesticks, chalices, lamps and incense burners. Wood was torn from the sacred shrines and used as clubs. Knives and pistols were smuggled into the church. By the time the Mehemet Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, had restored order forty people lay dead.

This dreadful incident, all in the name of a shared belief, marks the departure for Orlando Figes’ Crimea, the Last Crusade, the first full account of the Crimean War that I have read. I know Figes well, one of the best specialists on Russian history in the English-speaking world, the author of the superlative A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924. Although his history of the Crimean War lacks the range and power of the latter book, he has done a tremendous service, placing the conflict firmly within the context of the Eastern Question – the issues arising from the continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire – and European power politics as a whole.

I’m not completely convinced by his ‘crusading hook’, I have to say. Yes the war did begin with a conflict over who had the best claim to protect the holy places within the Turkish empire, the Catholic French or the Orthodox Russians, and again, yes, Tsar Nicholas I was strong in his conviction that he was a defender of the ‘true’ faith, a defender of the Orthodox faithful in all the Turkish lands. But almost immediately, when the fighting started, the religious issue was obscured by more general issues arising from European geopolitics. Besides, a war which involved Turkish Muslims, British Protestants and French Catholics, on one side, against Orthodox Russians, on the other, does not look much like a ‘crusade.’ The Tsar may have begun with crusading thoughts, but before his death in March 1855 he was more preoccupied by the decline in Russian power.

Figes' greatest service has been to rescue the conflict from fragmentation and partiality, the preserve, at best, of amateur military historians, more interested in the clash of arms than the reason for the clash of arms. The war may have been tragic and ‘unnecessary' but it still marks and important stage in the development of European politics and diplomacy. It marks the end of the Concert of Europe, the arrangement between the powers to police the settlement of 1815 emerging from the Napoleonic Wars. It marks the break in the informal alliance between Russia and Austria that helped preserved that settlement in aspic, allowing for the rise of new nations like Italy and Germany. So, in all, it was so much more than the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Thin Red Line and the Lady with the Lamp.

So far as the conflict itself is concerned there was really no need, as the author shows, for the Crimean War ever to have been the Crimean War. There was no need, in other words, for the landing on the Crimean peninsula, followed by the lengthy, and bloody, siege of the port of Sevastopol, for the simple reason that the Russians had suffered a serious tactical and strategic reverse in early 1854.

They had previously occupied the semi-autonomous Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia, now Romania, with a view to pushing south of the Danube in a march on Constantinople. But unexpectedly tough resistance by the Turks at the fortress of Silistria prevented any further advance. When this was coupled with the landings of the French and British at Varna, in what is now Bulgaria, and the threat of Austrian intervention, the Russians had no choice but to withdraw from the occupied provinces. But the blood was up; the war had to run its course, Russia had to be humbled; Sevastopol had to fall.

Crimea marks a vital stage in the development of warfare, combining elements of the old and the new, combining the Napoleonic Wars at one remove and the First World War at the other. It was the last of the old wars, if you like, containing the seeds of the new. Although it may come as a surprise, the campaign on the Crimea itself, and its eventual outcome, was far more a French than a British affair. The French contributed many more troops. It was their capture of the Malakhov redoubt in September 1855 that led to the fall of Sevastopol and the end of the war.

Diplomatically their role was also decisive. Palmerston, who succeeded the far less militant Aberdeen as prime minister in 1855, rather took on the role of Cato the Elder. Cartago delenda est was his war cry. His Carthage was Russia, which he intended to remove forever as a threat to the British Empire. If he had had his way the Russian borders would have returned to those of 1709, before Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava. The press was behind his war-drive, the people were behind him, even the Queen was behind him; the French were not. He did not have his way because Napoleon III had other visions. Britain may have had the fleet, but the French had the army.

This is a good story, an important story told with verve and style, told in a wholly compelling fashion with plenty of balance and nuance, placing the Crimean War in proper context. The author is to be commended for his industry and his scholarship, for writing a first-class account of an important passage in European history.

A million tragedies

An important new book was published earlier this year. It’s called Drawings from the Gulag, containing an extraordinary and disturbing collection of sketches by one Danzig Baldaev, a former official in the NKVD, Stalin’s security police. I was fully aware of the horror of the Soviet camp system from the work of people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov among others. But these graphic drawings give the sheer savagery of it all a terrible immediacy.

Baldaev himself has an interesting history. The son of a rich Mongolian intellectual, he was born in 1925 in the south-east of the USSR. Like so many others, his father was arrested during the Great Terror of the 1930s, while he and his sister were consigned to an NKVD orphanage, set up specifically for the children of ‘enemies of the people.’ One does not have to imagine too hard to conjure up the treatment children received in places like this.

Later, after leaving the orphanage, Baldaev was ordered to become a guard in one of the NKVD labour camps. To amuse himself he starred to sketch the various tattoos displayed by the criminal fraternities. On learning of this his superiors encouraged him to continue, believing such designs supplied valuable intelligence on the links between inmates and the criminal underworld outside the camp system. Baldaev was therefore given permission to travel from camp to camp, recording tattoos along the way.

Unbeknown to his superiors he was compiling a secret dossier, detailing the various outrages that were such a feature of the whole gulag system. His sketches show scenes of torture, degradation and execution, by the NKVD as well as that practiced by prisoner upon prisoner. There are scenes of sexual torture, of mass rape, of an axe being raised as criminals make ready to decapitate one of their fellows. For once the cliché applies: an image really is worth a thousand words.



Compared with the flood of information about the Nazi camp system, including movies like Schindler’s List, so many people in the west are still comparatively ignorant over the horrors of the gulags. So far as I’m aware the only English-Language film featuring the Soviet camp system is the British adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, made in the early 1970s. Hollywood has never tackled the subject.

I discovered from a review article by Olrando Figes in The Times that a new movie touching on Stalin’s camps is to be released this month. The Way Back is really about a prison break, a highly improbable one at that, only featuring camp life in a fairly brief slot at the beginning. There is still something lacking here, something revealing about our lack of interest in the mundane horrors of the Soviet camp system compared with the grotesque horrors of the Nazis. Figes makes an excellent point:

We do not feel as close to Russian peasants as we do to Western European Jews. We’re not sure that the Russians are “like us” at all. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been a film to engage us in the tragedy of the gulag. It is in part a legacy of the Cold War. Perhaps we feel that the Russians brought their suffering on themselves – victims of a revolution that went wrong. Or perhaps, in some former left-wing quarters, we still cling to the old romance about the Soviet Union that puts its victims out of sight – a rose-tinted view of the revolution that can be seen in Reds (1981), Warren Beatty’s love song to Bolshevism, which still colours views in Hollywood. In 2008 it was voted one of the ten best epic US movies by the American Film Institute.

It is, I think, time for a new song, a song to all the victims of Bolshevism, a song that will help us understand the terrible human suffering involved; to understand that a million deaths is a million tragedies.

Out of the shadows

There are many periods in history, malevolent periods, when one simply would not wish to have been alive, if any choice was offered. There are many places one would not wish to have lived, if any choice was offered. To have been born in, say, 1920 and to have lived between the eastern border lands of Germany and the western fringes of the Soviet empire is high among the worst times and the worst places. There the mills of Hitler and Stalin ground fast and exceeding small, killing millions in a mere fifteen year period between 1930 and 1945.

My book juggling at the present includes the recently published Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. It’s something of a tour de force, a first class piece of writing and research, casting all the more light because the author draws on sources not previously used by western historians, including those in the Polish archives.

The raw facts are known, the bleakness of the facts; deaths so numerous and so unnecessary it’s almost impossible to comprehend: death by deliberate starvation, by mass deportations, by shooting, by gassing- millions and millions of people, from impoverished peasants to cultured intellectuals. They died not for what they did but who they were, ‘kulaks’ or 'sub-humans', it really makes no difference what terminology is used. In the end death does not discriminate.

History and time should bring closure. So far as the Nazi state is concerned it has simply because it was defeated in war, because the enormity of what it achieved in a mere six years was open to the world, open to those with means of seeing and wit to understand. But the Soviet state, the Stalinist state, with crimes as great as if not greater than the Nazis, obscured its criminality.

Some attempt was made to come to terms with the past after the death of Stalin. Still it’s as well to remember that, even at the height of the sc-called thaw, Khrushchev only ever condemned his predecessor for his crimes against the Communist Party, not against the people at large. It was left to writers and poets like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Vasily Grossman and Anna Akhmatova to bring home the full horror in simple, honest words. The state itself, in its shame, closed the door, going so far in Soviet and even in post Soviet days partially to rehabilitate Stalin in his monstrosity.

But change happens, even if by the smallest of degrees. Take the example of Kaytn Wood, where thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were murdered in the spring of 1940 on the orders of Stalin. For years after the fiction was maintained that this was the work of the Nazis, though the full truth was finally acknowledged in the 1990s. Vladimir Putin attended a joint Russian and Polish commemoration this year, though there was still an attempt to take distance on the issue, that it was an ‘error of the past’, an ‘error’ accompanied by continuing attempts to whitewash the architect of the crime.

Now the Duma, the Russian parliament, has at last condemned Stalin by name for the massacre of Katyn in the face of opposition from the Communist deputies, the moral and practical equivalent of the Nazis. “Published documents”, the Duma declaration makes plain, “…not only revealed the scale of this horrific tragedy, but also showed that the Katyn crime was carried out on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet officials.” The document goes on to call for the massacre to be investigated further in order to confirm the list of victims. Attention is also drawn to the thousands of Russians murdered in the same place during the Great Terror.

There will be no trial; it’s too late for that. But some justice, even late justice, is better than no justice at all. It’s certainly encouraging to think that, under the guidance of President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia is at last opening to the full truth of its past; that a new way is possible, a new way out of the shadows cast by Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, the shadows cast by the lie of communism

The Prophet Irrelevant

I mentioned last December that I visited the house, now a museum, of Leon Trotsky when I was in Mexico City, his last place of exile (The Artists and the Revolutionary). I walked through the bedroom where the bullet holes from the assassination attempt of May 1940, led by the artist David Siqueiros, can still be seen. And then there is the study where Ramon Mercader lethally assaulted him with an ice pick in August of that same year, a time when the world’s attention was elsewhere. Finally, in the garden, there he is: his grave, with the hammer and sickle carved. The whole thing simply filled me with a sense of melancholy, not readily dispelled by the hot Mexican sun.


I have no sympathy at all for Trotsky as a politician or a thinker. But, my, how could I not be moved by a fate of a man who went from the height to the depths of history in such a short space of time; the hero of 1917 to the exile and outcast of 1940, living constantly in fear of his life. No longer the prophet armed, not even unarmed; simply irrelevant.


Trotsky was the author in so many ways of his own doom. A brilliant organiser, the man who created the Red Army almost single-handed and led it to victory in the Civil War, he was still a very poor judge of people, and quite hopeless when it came to playing the treacherous back-stabbing political game so favoured by the Bolshevik party, which became particularly intense after Lenin went into decline, suffering successive strokes before his death in January, 1924. Above all he misjudged Stalin, his nemesis, describing him as a ‘grey blur’, dismissing him in the most condescending and racist terms in a highly tendentious biography.

There is a tendency to assume that if Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had been the victor in the internecine party struggles of the 1920s things would have been so much better. I see no evidence at all for this. His conduct during the Civil War and after was just as brutal as any other Bolshevik apparatchik. More than that, the Stalinist programme of collectivisation and industrialisation, pursued with such murderous energy after 1928, was earlier the programme of Trotsky and the left opposition. Trotsky as Vohzd may have been less paranoid than Stalin. I do not believe he would have been less murderous, especially given that both men shared the same visceral hatred for the Russian peasantry.

When he died that August all those years ago he had long since been bypassed by the main currents of history, his rag-bag followers organised, if that’s the word, in the so-called Fourth International, another irrelevance. He died the last victim of the Moscow Show Trials, a victim of the relentless malice of Stalin, a victim of his own delusions. My previous assessment of the man still stands;

…one has to reflect that, in his days of power, it was he who denied life to others, who acted in a brutal and oppressive fashion, a fashion that closed so many futures forever. Too much was sacrificed on that abstract alter to which he dedicated his life, the alter of a frightful idol. We all, each and every one of us, only ever live in a perpetual present. It is a terrible thing to destroy others in the name of a bloodless utopia.

The nameless one

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make tsar of Russia. This observation was brought on by another report I read in The Times, this time about Ivan VI, Russia’s forgotten tsar. Ivan was not just forgotten by missing, having no known grave. Now his remains have seemingly been uncovered in the village of Kholmogory in the Archangelsk region of northern Russia.

Ivan’s fate makes that of the fictional man in the iron mask seem almost benign. He was a loser in a contest where to be in second place was lethal. Ivan succeeded the Empress Anna, his great-aunt, in October 1740 when he was only eight weeks old. But before he even knew what it was to be Autocrat of All the Russias he was overthrown in December 1741 in a coup organised by Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. Elizabeth was proclaimed empress while the unfortunate child tsar was sent to Kholmogory on the White Sea, where he remained for the next twelve years, isolated from family and friends, seeing only his jailers.

It was ferociously cruel, given his age, but rival claimants to the imperial throne were a serious worry to a nation that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had gone through a period of anarchy and upheaval, forever known as the Time of Troubles. Concerned by fresh troubles, Elizabeth had Ivan secretly moved to the Shlisselburg Fortress near Saint Petersburg after rumours began to spread about his presence in the north. There he was held simply as the “nameless one”, his identity unknown even to the prison governor.

Conditions for Ivan improved slightly on the accession of Peter III in 1762 only to deteriorate even further after he was overthrown in yet another palace coup. Catherine II, the new empress, ordered that the “nameless one” be held in even more stringent conditions, placed in manacles and scourged if necessary. His cell contained no natural light and the only book he was allowed to read was the Bible. Catherine also issued secret instructions that Ivan was to be killed instantly if any attempt was made to release him.

Ivan spent twenty years in solitary confinement before the end came, something of a mercy in the circumstances. Although a state secret of the first rank, his presence in Shlisselburg was finally discovered in the summer of 1764. In the course of a bungled attempt to free him Ivan, now aged twenty-three, was stabbed to death by his guards in accordance with the Empress’ orders.

Hitherto he was assumed to have been buried in an unmarked grave in the fortress. The new discovery was made as archaeologists were searching for the grave of his father in Kholmogory. A sarcophagus was found containing the skeleton of a man of Ivan’s age whose left shoulder blade had been pierced by a sword. Subsequent tests in Moscow at the Russian Forensic Medicine Centre have confirmed that the bones are those of the lost Tsar, according to Vladimir Stanulevich of the Emperor Foundation, a body set up to examine the remains.

It’s possible, I suppose, though until comparative tests are carried out some doubts must remain. The obvious question is why would such trouble have been taken to carry Ivan’s body all the way back to the White Sea? Catherine had no more rivals, so it is possible that she agreed to this final act of mercy, allowing Ivan to be buried alongside other members of his family.

But the Romanov family remains wary, issuing a statement that Ivan’s identity should be confirmed as a certainty before he is reinterred in the family vault in the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Cathedral in Petersburg. The Emperor Foundation is asking for government help to carry out DNA tests on Ivan’s siblings, who died in Danish exile. One can only hope that the nameless one is close to being named at last.

Lara’s Dream

I adore Dr Zhivago, both Boris Pasternak’s novel and David Lean’s 1965 movie of the same name. The theme is sombre enough: a tragic and moving account of the way in which history can tear apart the lives of ordinary people, people who simply want to live and love…and write poetry.

Set against the final years of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Civil War, it tells the story of Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and a poet. Married to one woman, Tonya Gromeko, he falls desperately in love with another, Larissa Antipova, simply known as Lara. They originally meet with Zhivago is serving in the Russian army as a medical officer during the First World War and Lara as a nurse.

Their second and more fateful meeting comes during the Civil War, when Zhivago leaves Moscow with his family for the relative safety of the Ural Mountains. He finds Lara in the town of Yuriatin, where she is working as a librarian, there beginning an affair. But the great events of the day ebb and flow around these little lives, consuming and destroying, separating Zhivago and Lara, the first time temporarily, the second time forever.

For me this wonderful story is about love in a time of death. More than that, it’s about the victory of life over death and ideology. There is a point in Lean’s movie where Lara, disturbed by the howling of wolves close to the dacha where they are staying says to Yuri that it is a terrible time to be alive. It’s a time when ordinary happiness was impossible. But before they part Zhivago writes his greatest poems, the Lara Cycle. The whole thing is just impossibly romantic.

I put on my ushanka, my Russian fur hat. I can just see myself in the role of Lara, weeping as the wolves call in the distance.

You it was who shaped my fate,
And then came times of war and ruin.
And for many a long day
There was no word of you, no sign.

Then, after many moons, again
Your rousing voice once more has called me.
All night I read your Testament
And woke as from a swoon next morning.

Lenin contra Marx

By the late 1890s it was obvious that history was not going to follow the lines predicted by Karl Marx. Capitalism was not impoverishing the working-class; just the reverse. The proletariat was growing richer, not poorer, and thus had much more to lose than 'their chains.' In Germany, home of the largest Marxist party in the world, there were those like Eduard Bernstein who drew the obvious conclusions: that further economic progress would bring socialism of its own accord, without any need for revolution. Capitalism, in other words, was socialising itself. Socialism would thus be attained by evolution, not revolution.

These ideas were taken up in Russia by the likes of S. Prokopovich and E. Kuskova, who put them forward in a pamphlet, which Lenin's sister, Anna, described as the Credo. In this it was argued that the political struggle was a distraction, and the Russian Social Democrat and Labour Party should thus place its greatest emphasis on the economic struggle; the struggle, that is, with employers for the improvement in pay and conditions.

For Lenin these Economists were proposing the worst form of heresy. He insisted on the primacy of the political struggle. But, in support of this position, he looked not to western Marxism but rather into the Russian past, to the likes of Mikhail Bakunin, who argued that people were tyrannised in the first place not by economic systems but by the state and the church. He was effectively turning classical Marxism on its head: for economics, in the Leninist scheme, no longer had primacy. More than that, he began to focus ever more on the corollary of this argument, another reversal of Marxism: that the emancipation of the workers would never be accomplished by the workers themselves. He was now on the high road to Bolshevism, a doctrine that was to owe virtually nothing to Marx, and much to the traditional forms of Russian conspiratorial and nihilist politics.