Over the decades I’ve read many books, before and after the collapse of the USSR. These books would describe the great events, the leaders, the wars, the financial shenanigans, but reading them was like getting all the nutritional and marketing information on a food product but never being able to taste it. Do you want to know what the collapse of the USSR meant to most of its people? Read this great book.
Svetlana Alexievich, daughter of Belarusian and Ukrainian parents, spent years on this book. She has a genius in getting people to open up and then distilling thousands of hours of recorded interviews into the most relevant, revealing and interesting passages. That takes a great deal of skill and artistry. It lifts this book to the level of literature. I cannot remember reading a book that was so moving – much more so than some of the best novels I have read.
Ms. Alexievich deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature she was awarded in 2015, primarily for her books on the Afghanistan war and the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. She was the first journalist who wrote only non-fiction to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This book, an oral history about the disintegration of the USSR, frightened and saddened me. There were passages where I, an old veteran, noticed tears on my cheeks. How can people do such things to each other? Do we all have a beast inside us that the right circumstances and forces can release? How can Armenians and Azerbaijanis, who had lived peacefully as neighbors for generations, commit atrocities against each other? One witness describes an Azerbaijani gang killing a pregnant woman and then cutting the baby out of her. Another describes a terrified little girl climbing a tree to get away from her pursuers. They surrounded the tree and shot at her until she fell to the ground.
Another interviewer describes what his future father-in-law, a retired NKVD colonel, told him about his service, how he would torture prisoners, make them kneel and then shoot them behind the ear. This colonel seethed with rage at the new Russia, but behind his words I felt shame and pangs of conscience, all repressed. After hearing the colonel’s stories, the would-be son-in-law broke his engagement and fled the family.
Many of the people interviewed said they’d never told their story to anyone – not even family members. But finally they were willing to talk. One man described how, as a schoolboy in Ukraine, he fell under the influence of Communist propaganda requiring denunciations of “enemies of the people.” So he denounced his uncle. What had the uncle done? He hid several sacks of flour and other food in the forest because he saw Communist gangs going from farm to farm and confiscating all available food. This was the start of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine in which several million Ukrainians starved. Stalin’s purpose was to force the farmers to give up their land and go into collective farms. But it was also meant to induce terror and break the spirit of the people, make them docile and obedient. (“Bitter Harvest,” a recently released dramatic film, deals with this period.) The uncle was arrested and sent to a Siberian prison; the mother disowned her son and threw him out of her house. The family apparently perished in the Holodomor.
Some old Communists describe how they hate predatory capitalism. They were poor in their time, but the West feared the USSR and they still believed communism would make life better. They had their pride and ideals. Now they have only their poverty, pensions that may not permit even buying a sausage (though there always seems to be money for cheap vodka).
It seems nothing much has changed. During communism it was the opportunists, the liars, thieves and psychopaths who had the best chance to get ahead. After the USSR fell it was the thugs, bribers and people with connections and power who had a jump on everyone else. Strangely, almost none of the old Communists question the criminality of the system. However, one woman, whose daughter was badly injured in a terrorist attack in a Moscow subway, said, “The Chechens are doing to us what we did to them.”
Near the end of the book I became irritated and impatient with the long saga of Lena. But maybe the author wanted to make a point about the Russian character. Lena marries for love but, as happens to the majority of the women in these interviews, her husband becomes a heavy drinker and constantly beats her. After a time, Lena flees to a boy who loved her in school. Eventually they marry and have two sons. Some years pass but Lena is obsessed with a dream she had of a handsome man who is her soul mate. Corresponding with a lifer in prison, Lena decides he is it. She divorces her husband and marries the lifer. No matter that she has married a murderer who is permitted visits only twice a year. No matter that her former husband did not drink, or beat her and that he loved her. A filmmaker hears about Lena and makes a documentary about her life. She and her former husband are invited to Moscow to tell their story before a television audience. Meanwhile, her prison husband says she lives too far away from the prison, located in the boondocks of Russia, and has probably been unfaithful to him. So he demands Lena move to a nowhere town near the prison even though she can visit him only twice a year. Lena complies.
Her prison husband is also a piece of work. He was 18 and walking from a dance with the girl he loved. She asked how much he loved her. He said more than life itself, he would die for her. Dying for me is nothing, she said. Would you kill a man for me? Yes, I would, he replied. Good, kill the next man that comes up the road, she said. And he did.
Now, the Russians may be fascinated with this story, but I am disgusted. This is not great passion and tragedy, but two people in need of psychiatric help. I think Ms. Alexievich is saying the inability to control your instincts and a desire to make the grand gesture is a Russian trait. If you can’t control your instincts and are a romantic you need outside control. Hand the Russians democracy on a platter, and they will choose dictatorship. “Everything Russian is filled with sorrow,” Ms. Alexievich has written.
One lesson I got from the book is that civilization is a thin veneer covering potential savagery, and that democracy is fragile.