A Short History of Russia - Mark Galeotti

A Short History of Russia is aptly named, covering nearly 1,000 years of history across the world’s biggest country in a little over a hundred pages. The entire soviet period is summarized in less than a dozen pages. Despite the book’s brevity, Galeotti does a good job of distilling the keys points form the era, giving important context on who leaders were and how their personalities, obsessions, and flaws shaped the nation under their tenure. Each chapter ends with a paragraph of recommendations for further reading, which is helpful.

The overall thesis of Galeotti’s book is that Russia is a country without a clear, unifying thread. Sprawling across two continents and eleven time zones, it lacked for much of its history a common geography, ethnicity, culture, or language. This forced a certain obsession with national identity among the ruling class, and made Russians especially eager to define themselves as a people. I don’t know enough to speak to the accuracy of this assessment, but Galleoti argues it convincingly.

I don’t have much else to say about it, other than those looking for a quick primer on Russian history should check it out.

Petersburg - Andrei Bely

I continue my Russian kick with Andrei Bely’s seminal symbolist novel Petersburg. The book’s history is interesting, in that it had two different publications straddling the Russian Revolution. First released in 1913, it received little notice. It was reissued in 1922 with significant cuts, particularly around anything seen as critical to the revolutionary movement. The first version is widely considered superior, and is the basis of the translation I read.

The story is fairly simple: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukov, son of prominent bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich, is recruited by radicals to assassinate his father with a bomb stored in a sardine tin. There are other components, like the moral quandary of his contact among the radicals, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, who faces his own pressure form their leader Lippanchenko; the unhappy marriage of Sofya Petrovna Likhutina and her husband Sergei, the former of whom Nikolai pines for; and Nikolai’s unusual tendency to dress up in a red domino costume and make a fool of himself around Petersburg.

But the core of the story is almost besides the point. Much more focus rests on the tone and language of the book, which translators Robert Maguire and John Malmstad take plains to situate in a context comprehensible to English readers yet faithful to the original Russian, and especially on details of place. The main character of Petersburg is ultimately Petersburg itself, manifest at one point by the living Bronze Horsemen, a symbol drawn from the Pushkin poem of the same name quoted regularly throughout.

As a Symbolist work, Petersburg has moments of impenetrability, but there is a playfulness and sardonic wit that you can appreciate even if some of the details escape you. I would not be surprised to learn that Salman Rushdie read and admired this book, as it feels aligned with his work in tenor if not in form. Ulysses by Joyce is also a good comparison (the only book, incidentally, that Nabokov ranked higher than Petersburg in his personal list of the great 20th century masterpieces of literature).

This is not an easy read, but it deserves its place in the canon.

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

First, I have to admit that the version of The Gulag Archipelago I read was abridged from the original three volumes down to one. I don’t read abridgements as a rule, but this was the only copy they had at the library, and it was at least authorized by the author, so I can hope the key elements were distilled.

The Gulag Archipelago is in part an autobiographical depiction of Solzhenitsyn’s time in a Gulag prison, but it also stretches much beyond that, providing a detailed examination of the Gulag system’s history and sharing stories from dozens of prisoners. The book is unflinching in its criticism, not just of the Gulag system itself, but of Stalin, Lenin, and even Khrushchev, whose “thaw” was supposed to correct the grossest injustices of Stalinist communism but instead simply buried them a bit deeper underground (though it must be admitted that he allowed a bit more criticism, at least).

The tone is so biting, so justifiably aggrieved, that I’m honestly surprised that Solzhenitsyn survived its publication, ultimately suffering expulsion from the Soviet Union rather than prison or death. That alone speaks to some small evolution on soviet punishment, though Stalin set such a lower bar that even serious human rights offences can seem liberal by comparison.

The most shocking part of the book to me was the description of interrogations. I had expected the Gulags to be miserable places, and never thought the Soviets would be averse to using torture, but the breadth and extent of it was absurd, especially because it was all so pointless. Clearly the interrogators knew that these people hadn’t done anything and didn’t have any useful information on dissidence for them. The whole thing was simply a way to meet quotas. As such, why not just round them up and cart them off to the Gulags? It’s not as if there was any actual due process going on.

Solzhenitsyn is foremost among soviet dissident writers, standing alongside Bulgakov and Akhmatova, and deserves his reputation. One day I will need to track down an unabridged translation and readthe parts I missed this time round.