The Evil That Runs Through Men's Hearts

Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?”

The great writer could have been, and likely was, talking not simply about the hearts of human beings, but also of the Soviet Union. For in no country during the 20th century was so much evil perpetrated by and upon a nation by its own people.

As a historical and sociological phenomenon, this is at once attractive and repellent, intriguing and hideous. We are drawn in by the murderous enigma that was Stalin, then stay to marvel at the coterie of political eunuchs that surrounded him, or to study the world war he fostered, or simply to understand the inhumane empire he created, founded upon hell-bent industrialization and a totalitarian time bomb.

And there is plenty to study. So much so that one starts to think that surely everything must have been written that could be written about this horrific episode of human history. And then new books appear. And then some more.

Oleg Khlevniuk’s Master of the House focuses on the tip of the Soviet iceberg, on the Politburo in the 1930s – the crucial point when Stalin was cementing his grip on power, when the political system slid from oligarchy into dictatorship. It is a masterful, extremely readable tome (bias alert: the book’s translator is Nora Favorov, a regular translator for Russian Life and Chtenia) that debunks theories about moderate vs. conservative factionalism during this period, and uses access to previously closed archives to provide incomparable insight into Kremlin court politics. Khlevniuk shows that the top leaders did not have entrenched ideological differences that crystallized into factions (i.e. conservatives and liberals), but that their policy differences depended in larger part on which institutions they headed and represented. In addition, he shows that the Soviet Union was a true dictatorship by this era, that “there is no sign of a single important decision taken in the 1930s that did not belong to Stalin and certainly no sign of any that were taken against his will.”

As Khlevniuk also demonstrates, Stalin’s dictatorship showed its flaws vividly in the first days and months of the war. Less than three months after Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, Leningrad was surrounded and besieged, forbidden from surrender and therefore doomed to starvation. The tale was told in excruciating detail in Harrison Salisbury’s 900 Days, and now historian Michael Jones provides a sobering update, Leningrad, by tapping into newly available eyewitness accounts and diaries. He looks at aspects of the siege long-suppressed by the Soviets, and paints a very up-close-and-personal portrait of this difficult time. It is presented in eleven chapters that read like fine magazine journalism, each examining different facets of residents’ experience in the besieged city, each as well-written and affecting as the last.

Owen Matthews’ enthralling contribution, Stalin’s Children, is ostensibly the author’s personal journey – excavating his family history (his father married a Russian in the 1960s). But, in the process, he unearths everyday Stalinist reality, showing the very graphic and personal effects of the events and decisions Khlevniuk writes about in Master of the House – in particular the infamous 1934 “Congress of Victors” and the murder of Kirov.

Two things make Matthews’ tale truly engaging. First are his narrative leaps back and forth in time, paralleling the Russian experiences of his father and grandfather with his own as a Moscow Times reporter in the 1990s. It brings the stories home and makes the past all the more palpable. And sets your head nodding when he makes passing comments like, “The Wannsee memorandum of 1942 which mapped out the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem is more famous – but the Soviet Communist Party’s condemnation of the kulaks to extermination was to prove twice as deadly.”

Second, is his keen reportorial eye:

The investigator appointed to the case was Svetlana Timofeyevna, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. She was a confident and matronly woman who sized me up with a shameless, penetrating stare, well used to separating men into wimps and loudmouths. She was one of those portly, invincible, middle-aged Russian women, whose kind lurked like Dobermans in the front office of all Russia’s great men; they ruled ticket offices and lorded it over hotel reception desks.

James Palmer’s eye is equally keen, yet, in The Bloody White Baron, his is focused on one of the more bizarre and contradictory characters in Eurasian history: Baron Ungern-Sternberg. A Russian noble who believed himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, who conquered Mongolia – wrestling it away from China – then ruled it brutally for a short time, until he was captured and executed by the Soviets, he was a sadistic murderer whose antisemitism, mysticism and genocidal rampages presaged the Nazis. This is an epic biography (ranging from WWI battles, to the Civil War, to Manchuria) told it in an easy style that infects the reader with curiosity, peeling back myths to reveal the strange and twisted man that was Ungern-Sternberg.

That Eurasia has had more than its fair share of tyrants more or less in the Ungern-Sternberg mold is the impetus for Jeffrey Tayler’s new book Murderers in Mausoleums. Setting out on a journey from Moscow to Beijing that is book-ended by the eponymous mausoleum residents (Lenin and Mao), Tayler wants to look at how life is being lived in the villages and towns of the Eurasian space today, unfiltered by analysts or media, to see how people are getting by, to understand how Eurasians can so value liberty yet so idealize dictators.

It would be impossible to summarize what he finds (hint: see the opening quote by Solzhenitsyn), but if you have read Tayler’s River of No Reprieve, about his trip down the Lena River, you know that half the fun is in the journey.