Ravens, Enemies and Crumbs

The Raven’s Gift

Jon Turk

St. Martin’s Press ($27.99)

Jon Turk is a scientist and adventurer who has, among many accomplishments, paddled the length of Kamchatka (recounted in a Mar/Apr 2001 Russian Life article by his late wife, Christine Seashore) and the Pacific Rim. Jon Turk is also  a gifted writer and storyteller.

Turk the scientist was not inclined to mysticism. But it was thrust upon him when a series of “chance” events near Vvenka (where Kamchatka Peninsula meets the mainland) led him to be miraculously and inexplicably (in the rational world of modern science) healed by a Siberian shaman, Moolynaut.

Turk recounts his journey through nearly a decade of life, centering on repeated visits to Moolynaut, exploring the lines between this world and the next, between modern culture and Koryak culture, between himself and the world around him. As one Russian friend tells him:

“You are a poor traveler in the Other World… You must make a long, hard journey… in the Real World. You will be hungry and tired. Then maybe, if you are lucky, you will find what you are looking for.”

It is well worth joining Turk on his journey to find what he is looking for. He is uncannily observant and perceptive, self-effacing, sensitive, and quite often very funny.

Know Your Enemy

The Rise and Fall

of America’s Russia Experts

David. C. Engerman

Oxford, $34.95

It is astounding to realize how few Russian experts (barely beyond single digits) there were in the United States before the 1917 revolution and even before World War II. Indeed, in 1948, when the war with Hitler was won and the Cold War just begun, the U.S. government only had about a dozen Russian speakers in its employ.

What followed was an explosion of government funding for academic programs and institutes around the country, the development of Soviet Studies and Kremlinology, and a strenuous effort to “know thine enemy.”

Engerman shows that this effort forged a unique relationship between government and academia. It was a relationship not limited to the hard or social sciences, as it bled over into literature, creating a web of interaction between spies, academics, generals and politicians that somehow linked Pushkin to the Pentagon, yet mostly failed to predict, half a century later, the sudden collapse of the organism under study.

Deeply researched, well-written, this is an important chronicle that explains much about how government and academia still interact, and it should be read not just by Russophiles, but by anyone interested in new academic initiatives to focus on “Islamic Studies.”

A Mountain of Crumbs

Elena Gorokhova

Simon and Schuster, $26

A memoir must tread a fine line between getting personal enough to strike a chord in the reader, but not so intimate that the reader becomes bored by details only of interest to the writer and her family. Gorokhova skillfully traverses this line with grace, candor, and an engrossing narrative.

With a gift of memory that allows her to conjure up an astonishing depth of detail, Gorokhova delivers an intimate view of half a century of life in the Soviet system, eerily complete in its horrid squalor, parasitic fear, and profoundly deep human friendships.

Gorokhova leads the reader through her family’s history, beginning with her mother’s early sparrings with the Stalinist system and culminating with her own emigration from the Soviet Union in 1980 as a erstwhile bride of an American academic. Along the way we meet a profusion of characters so richly-drawn as to seem almost personally familiar to a frequent visitor to Russia.

In short, A Mountain of Crumbs is a fine memoir that reads like fiction but is all the more powerful because it is not.

Russian San Francisco

Lydia Zaverukha and Nina Bogdan

Arcadia, $21.99

A pictorial biography of America’s oldest metropolitan Russian enclave, from the establishment of Fort Ross to the founding of numerous social clubs and societies. This is a nice chronicle of an active expa- triate community seeking, against all odds, to retain its culture, language and history.

Peter the Great

Derek Wilson

St. Martin’s, $29.99

If the longer biographies of Peter (by Peter Massie and Lindsay Hughes) are not for you, or if you just want to visit Peter’s history anew, you can’t go wrong with this tightly and beautifully written biography of Peter Alexeyevich. Derek Wilson is not a Russian expert, but a historian, a biographer, and a fine writer. And he ably packs a very full life into just 202 pages.