Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

It had been a long time since I last read Cancer Ward, and my memory of it was impressionistic, a few images and vignettes to brief to be properly called scenes. It is the sort of book where the plot is difficult to hold in your memory because there’s so little of it. There isn’t much of a narrative arc and no overt conflict. The story, such as it is, merely follows the lives of several patients undergoing treatment for cancer at a clinic in Soviet Uzbekistan.

While an ensemble piece, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov sticks out as the main character. A former soldier undergoing permanent exile as part of the Stalinist purge, Kostoglotov is a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself. His reckoning with his disease, his status in life, and his feelings for two nurses form the closest thing to a narrative thread the novel offers. There are other characters as well, the most notable in my opinion being Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a mid-tier Communist official who adheres rigidly to the party line, and denounced a roommate in order to acquire his half of a shared apartment. Rusanov serves as a foil to Kostoglotov, as the two have diametrically opposed views on the Soviet Union. Rusanov demonstrates the mental contortions the good Soviet citizen must undertake to thrive in that culture without succumbing to guilt or despair, while Kostloglotov’s honesty makes it impossible to function under communism’s yoke.

While light on action, cancer Ward demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s gift for observing fine details of human behaviour, and characterizing people through small gestures. His work is an indictment of communism that showcases power through its plainspokenness. There is no climax or denouement, merely a continuation of existence. Like the cancer the characters suffer, there is remission but no cure.

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.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

I came across this book after reading an article by Timothy Snyder on the history behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his piece, Snyder discusses the long history of invasion experienced by Ukraine and other Eastern European nations existing in the dubious space between belligerent powers. This is an area he explored more broadly in Bloodlands, the title of which refers to a swath of land roughly contiguous with Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine. where the vast majority of civilian death in the European theatre occurred between 1933 and 1945.

Much of this death was part of the Holocaust, but Snyder demonstrates that the Nazis were not the only genocidal force operating in that particular time and place. He provides a detailed rundown of the atrocities that the Soviets committed in these lands as well, from the imposed famine in Ukraine to the Great Terror to the purging of Polish intellectuals. He emphasizes that many of these places were subject to not just one invasion, but two or three, as the Nazis and the Soviets moved from allies to belligerents, and the Nazis from invaders to a broken, retreating army.

Of course, the Holocaust is given much focus, as its deliberate and racist intentions arouse particular loathing, but Snyder makes it clear that the Ukrainians and Poles were at times targeted almost as deliberately by the Soviets, if not with the same absolutist intention to eliminate them.

Snyder’s prose is academic but approachable, engaging and clear without much ornamentation. He had a tendency to repeat certain points, which I suspect is an effective way to ensure the general thesis is clear, though it sometimes grated a bit to hear the same fact several times. Overall, an important study of a particularly brutal stain on human history, one which it is hard to look at but must never be forgotten.

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.