Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
Metropolitan Books, $30
A Writer at War
Vasily Grossman
Pantheon, $27.50
It is astonishing to realize, as Catherine Merridale asserts in her introduction to Ivan’s War, that we know relatively little about the life of common soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War II, and that “most of what we know concerns soldiers in Hitler’s army.” Certainly Russia produced ample fictional accounts (most polished clean with Stalinist rags), plenty of boasting memoirs of top generals and leaders, and a library of books analyzing battles and engagements, strategies and tactics.
But, as to the story of the common recruits – Ivans – we know comparatively little. Where did they come from, who were they, what did they eat, how did they survive from day to day, what did they talk and laugh about, how did they die, how did they deal with atrocities? Answers to the most common questions have been shrouded for six decades beneath shrouds of “decency” and “secrecy.” And the fact that it was illegal for Soviet soldiers to keep diaries during the war.
Merridale approached this gap in the historical record as would an anthropologist, poring over wartime memoirs and articles and, more importantly, interviewing over 200 living veterans. The result is a dense, readable account of life on the eastern side of the Eastern Front, a textured portrait of a hardened, suffering generation. In the two decades prior to the war, Merridale notes, well over 15 million Soviets had perished in war, famine and purges. During the war, the Red Army was at least twice effectively destroyed and renewed in its entirety. The scale of the slaughter before and during the war was hellishly unimaginable. From out of that wasteland Merridale retrieves stories of amazing humanity – helping us better understand and appreciate all of those who lived and died during that horrific interregnum.
If Merridale’s recounting is anthropological, Grossman’s (A Writer at War) is personal and journalistic. Defying the ban on diaries, Grossman filled journals with astoundingly precise and cutting observations of life, from the brutal experiences of soldiers, to the petty machinations of generals – all recorded post-factum, as he did not take notes during interviews; he just listened and relied on his prodigious memory.
No Russian and likely no Western journalist saw as much of the war as Grossman did. And certainly none was both as ruthlessly attached to recounting the truth and as supremely gifted at writing it. Indeed, it is a measure of his truthfulness that his novel about Stalingrad, Life and Fate, was banned by the KGB in the 1960s (but miraculously saved and published after his death). His account of Treblinka, published in this volume, is searingly poetic and one of the great works of journalism.
Editors and translators Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova masterfully weave commentary between Grossman’s notes to make this a seamless and informative account of his harrowing travels along the front – more than once narrowly eluding capture (and certain death) by the Germans. But Beevor and Vinogradova also deserve much praise for preserving and translating Grossman’s frank, parsimonious style. It is something like a hybrid of Chekhov and Voinovich, treading the thin line between reality and a nightmare. And it is thoroughly addictive.
These are the sort of histories we need our children to read in schools, that we need to read ourselves. Stories about the broad sweep of battles can be interesting and engaging. But, as these two volumes show, they can also be profoundly misleading.
Putin’s Russia
Anna Politkovskaya
Metropolitan Books, $25
Anna P. is “just a woman living in Russia,” in the city of M. There, she infuriates the powerful by writing about crooked business deals, the disgraceful state of the Russian army, terrorism, Vladimir Putin and, well, anything else that infuriates her. Anna, understand, is a journalist, a fiercely-independent journalist at a time when Russian journalists are told to not make waves, to go along and get along, to put their shoulder into the corporate machine. One guesses she has more friends than jealous admirers.
Anna has been an outspoken opponent of the war in Chechnya, of conscription, of greedy privatization and, of course, President Putin, whom she calls Akaky Akakievich Putin II, as if he were a soul brother of Gogol’s pitiful main character in The Overcoat. So, if you want to preserve in yourself (assuming that is all you had to begin with) an idyllic view of Russia as the land of matryoshka dolls, golden-domed churches and snow-cooled vodka after a banya broiling, then just walk right by. Don’t bother picking up Anna P.’s book. It will only upset you.
You see, Anna has a passion for writing about what clings to the undersides of stones – the dirty, ugly aspects of business, politics, the army, whatever. There is some of it in every country and culture, and Anna gets rather impatient with those who presume to argue that there is none (or very little) of it in Russia. Sure, she can sound a bit screechy and imperious when she is writing about hazing or the KGB or how some businessman stole millions. But clearly that is to be preferred over jaded nonchalance.
Anna P. may say she is “just a woman living in Russia,” trying to be modest about the fact that she is a widely decorated and trusted journalist. But the fact is that, if what she says proves true, that Russia is sliding back into a Soviet-style dictatorship, then history might well judge her as that corrupt state’s first dissident.
River of No Reprieve
Jeffrey Tayler
Houghton-Mifflin, $24
“You never know who or what might step out of the taiga uninvited.”
So is correspondent Jeffrey Tayler forewarned by his knowing guide down the Lena River, Vadim.
Tayler, an American living in Moscow, got it into his head to recreate a Cossack-era journey down the Lena – Russia’s third longest river and the only major one without hydroelectric dams, thus navigable for the entire 2,400 miles from Ust-Kut to Tiksi.
It is a trip through the heart and wild of Siberia, from near Lake Baikal, through Sakha, to a point hundreds of miles beyond the Arctic Circle, through regions so sparsely populated, some might call them primeval.
In the classic style of the genre, Tayler uses the journey downriver to parallel his own discovery of the culture and people of this region, to plumb their lives and mores. But this is not an “eye-opening” travelogue, where the writer goes in search of the soul of Russia. Tayler, ever the grizzled correspondent, knows Russia all too well to begin with. If anything, he is looking to have his proto-Russian worldview challenged, to knock some of the rough edges off his cynicism. Most of all, we suspect, he is really just trying to understand and appreciate one Russian: Vadim, the tough, taciturn giant he is stuck in a boat with.
This is a good adventure story, well-told. That it happens to take place in the depths of Siberia is icing on the cake.
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