Putin, Poetry and Spies

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia

Anne Garrels (FSG, $26)

Anne Garrels, one of America’s most experienced and fearless journalists, has covered Russia intimately for much of the past 30 years. She had two postings in Moscow, one that ended in expulsion in 1982 as persona non grata, and another after the fall of the USSR.

During the latter posting, she at one point decided she wanted to “adopt” a single Russian city and get to know and understand it truly well. That city, selected with a pencil toss at a map, was Chelyabinsk. As a result, Garrels has traveled to the Siberian city countless times over the past two decades and developed deep ties to the people living out their lives there.

This book is the fruit of that commitment. Through pointed interviews, salient vignettes, and a dense narrative style, Garrels refracts many issues of Russian society through the lens of a rather representative industrial city. Crisp chapters focus on issues of marriage, adoption, work, business, the military, crime, drugs, human rights, church, schools, etc.

It must be said, however, that this is not a book that will leave you upbeat or optimistic about where Russia is headed. On so many issues, Garrels ends her chapter on a dark or ominous note, whether because of the chaos of the 1990s, a century of murdering the nation’s best and brightest, or rampant corruption.

Yet she does share numerous glimmers of light and hope: they are the stories of dogged individuals (a mother who refuses to accept doctors’ diagnoses of her special needs child; a forensic pathologist who won’t be cowed; a journalist who is braver than events say she ought to be; a hospital administrator trading in food to see that his staff get paid; human rights activists so exacting that no charges can be invented against them), all of them refusing to fold even though the house holds all the face cards, aces, and even the tens.

“Russians,” Garrels writes early in the book, “are trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in the world.” It is a privilege to read these particular Russians’ stories, even if it means carrying away a deep sadness about the difficult odds they must contend with.

– PR

Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts

Eds. Sibelan E.S. Forrester and
Martha M.F. Kelly (Academic
Studies Press, $49)

The early twentieth century was a time of apocalyptic fears, revolutionary stirrings, and excellent poetry. The window this volume opens to the Silver Age captures all that and much more.

Billed as a coursebook, RSAP will have undoubted value in classrooms exploring pre-Soviet cultural movements and fin-de-siècle poetry. Yet through its diverse poems, essays, and the editors’ explanatory notes, it proves its broader appeal as a gateway to great poetry and a panorama of the turbulent years leading to the Bolshevik Revolution.

Fears that the end of the world loomed with the end of the century were spurred by violence, radicalism, industrialization, and war. For some, just as frightening were critiques of old conventions, sometimes by authors who were Jews, women, from lower classes, or otherwise different from former cultural leaders. These poems’ macabre themes, crafty wordplay, and new universe of symbols carry the chaos and thrill of that transformation.

RSAP includes the period’s big names (Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva) as well as artists with shorter bibliographies (Khlebnikov, Severyanin, Teffi, and more); the translations invariably live up to the editors’ promise of fidelity to meaning and poetic value. Most striking is the primacy of art in the poets’ worlds, and their urge to create, evaluate, and enjoy art for its role in history and its inherent value. RSAP encourages readers today to do the same.

– AU

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence

Jonathan Haslam (FSG, $30)

It can be unsettling to learn, after years of reading history about certain events, to suddenly find that there were other subterranean forces at play, other actors involved, that the turning points or decisive factors you once thought so clear, are rather less so.

So it is reading Haslam’s dense (at times too dense, it can be very difficult at times to follow all the individuals, directorates, divisions and operations) and revealing account of Soviet intelligence from the Revolution to the Collapse.

The compilation and collation of information is impressive and this short review cannot fully demonstrate the broad coverage of this fine book. The fascinating counterintelligence operation that was The Trust (deceiving White emigres into supporting a fictive opposition movement in early Soviet Russia) is covered in great detail, as are the numerous successes and failures in intelligence leading up to World War II, intertwined as they were with Stalin’s personality and paranoia.

Haslam shows how the Cambridge Five played a critical role in turning WWII in the Soviet Union’s favor; how an illegal Soviet agent posing as a hairdresser helped foil the Bay of Pigs invasion; how a middle ranking agent became a vital backchannel in the Cuban Missile Crisis (and how truly close we were to war); how the Soviet reliance on human intelligence and dogged research gave them an upper hand for much of the Spy vs. Spy activity of the 1970s and 1980s; how a single KGB researcher, Yuri Totrov, could use largely public sources to develop a 26-point model that was nearly flawless in identifying CIA operatives in the USSR; how the Soviets were duped into a bungled coup in Afghanistan in 1989; and how the KGB smoke-screened its involvement in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.

Haslan also weaves throughout information on the largely mysterious GRU (military intelligence), revealing the often destructive rivalry between it and the KGB.

This is a book that no person interested in the history of twentieth century Russia can afford not to read. Yet its import does not end with the interpretation of history. For we cannot ignore the dire conclusions presented by Haslan, as he caps 270 pages of meticulously presented evidence with a dark description of the Russia that tried but failed, after the collapse of the USSR, to dismantle the power and reach of its security services:

“...although the goal of communism disappeared, methods tried and tested from the more distant past reasserted themselves with the wars against Islamic-led separatism to the south and the postimperial resentment at US supremacy. It is no coincidence that Putin’s emergence and speedy ascendance, culminating in his electoral victory in March 2000, coincide with both. By 2003, the siloviki (“men of power”), who were figures from the security services, held all the reins. They had come from out of the shadows for everyone to see, a caste that owed its very existence and identity to the history of the Cheka.... a state within a state retreating into the past with the destruction of pluralism and the recentralization of power, then exerting itself to determine the future through a process of stealthy expansion into the former territories of the Soviet Union.”

– PR