Russias
20th Century
To all those who, against all odds, retained their moral compass and never gave up their vision of Russia as a democracy governed by the rule of law and respect for human rights.
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Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, by Dan Healey
Russias
20th Century
Contents
Acknowledgements
Some years ago, in a used bookstore in Chicago, I picked up a book by Gnter Grass entitled My Century. In 100 stories from 1900 to 1999, Grass spins a masterly yarn around great events as well as little-known episodes from German history. It occurred to me that this might be an interesting new way to look at Russias turbulent history in the twentieth century. Unlike Grass, who mixed fact and fiction, I wanted to write a history book that would reach a general reader but, like Grass, I chose to include issues that may already be familiar together with those that remained a little-noticed footnote to history.
My major debt, therefore, is to Gnter Grass, who despite a controversy late in his life, remains one of the literary giants of the twentieth century.
I am grateful to Rhodri Mogford at Bloomsbury for his full-throated and enthusiastic support of my project. I am also thankful to my colleagues, Ben Eklof and Semion Lyandres, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
My son, Loc, was the first victim of my prose, as he diligently and effectively made his way through the first draft of the book. Insa Blanke, Chris Kubiak, and Michelle Navarre Cleary did the rest. I am particularly grateful to Jeffrey Glover for his meticulous copy-editing and for making the book a better read.
My editor at the New York Times, Marc Charney, taught me that whatever is expressed in 1,200 words can be rendered just as effectively in 1,000, a skill that became useful both in writing a column for the paper and in a book manuscript.
Like every writer who tackles a big topic, I owe a debt of gratitude to so many of my colleagues, past and present, who over the decades have produced numerous studies on all aspects of Russian-Soviet history and culture. In our post-Enlightenment age of information overload and mega data it is easy to lose sight of ones own contributions to human knowledge. Yet I want to reassure them that their scholarly efforts, and hopefully mine, were not in vain.
I owe special thanks to my colleague and friend Viktor Ostapchuk, who throughout the years made sure that I was aware of the Ukrainian perspective.
Finally, I am grateful to my wife Insa and our children, Loc and Tosya, for being a daily pleasure in my life.
Illustrations
Russian writers: Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Anton Chekhov in the Crimea
Russian workers at the turn of the century
Russian peasants
Victims of the Kishinev pogrom
Map of the theatre of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904
A city street during the 1905 revolution
Tsar Nicholas II speaking at the opening of the Duma
Map of the Balkans
Tolstoy in his study two years before his death
One of the assassination attempts on Prime-Minister Pyotr Stolypin
Three-hundredth anniversary of the House of Romanovs
Russian prisoners of war
Grigorii Rasputin
Storming of the Winter Palace
Nicholas II and his family
Dzerzhinskys statue in front of the KGB headquarters
The Cossacks
Children at a camp in Samara, Central Russia
NEP poster that quotes Lenin: The Russia of NEP will become a socialist Russia
Anton Makarenko with students at his orphanage
Vladimir Mayakovsky with his lover, Lilya Brik, and without her in a later doctored photo
Convict labor at the Belomor Canal. The poster addresses the convicts: Canal Army Soldier! Your prison time will melt from your hot work.
A joint military parade of the Nazi and Red Army troops in Brest
Collecting the dead in Leningrad
Soviet soldier seizing a bike from a German civilian in Berlin
Itzik Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels with Albert Einstein during their tour of the West in 1943 to raise funds for the Soviet war effort
Khrushchev visits Uzbekistan
A train departing to the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan. A slogan on the train says: Young hearts to you, the Virgin Lands
A part of the Berlin Wall in 1986
A cover of Kornei Chukovskys childrens book, An Awesome Cockroach
Vladimir Vysotsky
The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and the East German leader, Erich Honecker, greeting each other
Brezhnev receiving a parade with four stars of the Hero of the Soviet Union pinned to his chest
An Afghan mujahideen with an American Stinger missile
The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow
A peace march against nuclear war in London
Reactor no. 4 after an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station
Russias Parliament hit by tank shells in the coup of August 1993
Chechen capital, Groznyi, during the First Chechen War
An apartment building in Volgodonsk, Russia after a series of unexplained bombings across the country
Yeltsins handing over of power to his Prime Minister and now Acting President, Vladimir Putin, in the only peaceful transfer of power in Russian history
Introduction
Quo Vadis?
Is Russia a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma as the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously described it? A state driven by messianic expansionism, according to the Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov? A civilization stuck between apocalypse and revolution, in the words of the twentieth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev? Or is it simply a space defined by its vast size, imperial ideology, intertwined cultures, cohabiting civilizations, and deeply traumatized people?
A reader may find some answers to these questions in this unusual book that consists of 100 vignettes, one for each year of the twentieth century. The vignettes touch on different themes from the history of the Russian Empire and its successors, the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. One could think of this book as a mosaic wherein each year represents a small piece that, when taken with the others, coalesces into a large picture of Russias tortured path through the last century.
Readers, regardless of how much or little they may know about Russian history, will find something new and different in this book. Each vignette offers an insight into Russian society and culture. Those interested in particular topics, whether it be Soviet ideology, culture, economy, anti-Semitism, nationalism, or political violence, will discover common threads that will take them through the entire century. In the end, each vignette will allow a curious reader to further explore a specific theme and interest.
The stories I chose to tell are influenced by decades of studying Russian history, but also by my own experience growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. I wanted to tell the lesser-known stories that cast a big shadow over what some may consider the great Soviet achievements: universal literacy, free medicine and education, industrial and nuclear superpower status, womens emancipation, victory over Nazi Germany, a formidable military force, space exploration, and sports. All this is set in the shadow of the exceptional human and social cost of the Soviet socialist project and the new society it createdone based on habitual lies and violence.
