Pale Horse and Remembering Leningrad

Boris Savinkov

Translated by Michael R. Katz*

(Univ of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) $21.95

Boris Savinkov (1879-1925) was a participant in revolutionary terror and was arrested for the assassination of the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, in 1905. “Victim” he was not; victims the novel’s characters aren’t. All of them are more or less committed terrorists who justify their murders of government officials and members of the tsar’s family.

The narrator is “George,” the brains of the operation, who plans the assassination of, sure enough, the grand duke; one of George’s comrades in terror, Vanya, is the novel’s soul. Vanya, who Savinkov based on the revolutionary Ivan Kalyayev, kills in the name of Christ. “We are lacking in faith and we are weak as children; therefore we wield the sword,” he tells the skeptical, nihilistic George. “We raise it not because we are strong, but out of fear and weakness.”

We learn from George’s half-year’s diary as a hit-man that he hates the grand duke, but he wishes he had an actual purpose or belief beyond murder. He snivels: “Why is it all right to kill for the terror, necessary to kill for the fatherland, but for oneself – impossible?” George would like, perhaps, to be as mysterious and wicked as The Brothers Karamazov’s Smerdyakov, but he is after all only a third-rate Raskolnikov. Erna, a bomb-making chemist, is love-lorn for George, who meanwhile is obsessed about his lover Elena, who is married to a military man. She prefers not to choose between her two men. That melodramatic detour is a dead-end.

The novel is worth reading the way a roman a clef by a politician about political shenanigans and intrigues is worth reading. Savinkov seems to know the people and the everyday details of the killers’ lives. In 1909, “when the novel appeared on the pages of the émigré journal Russian Thought, it caused an outrage and shock… for many observers on the left and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in particular, the novel diminished the lofty aura of the terrorists and damaged the revolutionary movement as a whole,” writes Otto Boele in the excellent introduction.

Are the limitations of George’s vision his own or Savinkov’s? Even Savinkov’s contemporaries wondered about his core motivation: “Although no one ever felt inclined to question his courage or his willingness to use any of the weapons he was carrying with him, with regard to death and violence, Savinkov was, as [Richard B.] Spence puts it, ‘basically a voyeur,’” Boele writes.

Pale Horse makes for interesting and troubling reading.

Mary McAuley

(Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2019) $39.95

This is a thoroughly enjoyable memoir and history by the English academic Mary McAuley, who lived and worked in Leningrad and St. Petersburg for various stretches from 1961 into the 2010s. She modestly describes Remembering Leningrad as “an everyday history to accompany the more serious books.” But she is so smart and graceful and unassuming that you will gain more from her reminiscences about Leningrad and Petersburg’s post-Great Patriotic War history than from “the more serious books.” There are many expert accounts of travel and living in the USSR and Russia, but none are more naturally unfolding and interesting than hers.

McAuley remembers arriving with almost no Russian language for her first year in Leningrad as a visiting graduate student from Oxford. Studying labor disputes, she was soon conducting interviews in Russian with workers and supervisors. It’s impossible not to think wistfully or amazedly at what one was and did fifty years before; but most amazingly is that she never lost her connection to her friends and the city. She is nostalgic, but the book is not:

Certain features of Soviet society appealed: greater educational opportunities, the range of jobs open to women, the absence of conspicuous consumption or the social snobbery of British society. While the bureaucracy and the inability to keep to any previous arrangement drove me to despair, I liked the untidiness, illogicality, and emotional warmth that accompanied all activity. Reality was more complex than portrayed in either the standard western or Soviet analyses…

McAuley became a sociologist at Oxford, where she married and had a family, but she also regularly taught and collaborated with Russian colleagues in Leningrad. After the collapse of the USSR, she traveled widely across the country, and she accounts with ease and interest those trips to the Caucasus and the far Northeast. In 1995, she was named the head of the Ford Foundation in Russia, and for the next several years as a grant maker she was able to fund worthwhile educational endeavors across the country.

Probably the best of many excellent chapters is “An Apartment and a Telephone,” her amusing and pained account of buying an apartment in post-Soviet Petersburg in the wild and harrowing early 1990s and then trying to furnish it and get a private phone line. “First we must take a brief digression on the housing system in the late Soviet period and what happened with privatization,” she announces before neatly comparing the eras. Obtaining the apartment on Vasilevsky Island, she acknowledges all of her advantages as a Western professor earning Western money, but she didn’t want to get special consideration or to resort to using her bureaucratic connections to get the services her apartment needed.

Eventually, of course, she did use her privileges:

I had asked a favor from individuals operating a system in a way that I disapproved of, and thus condoned the practices themselves; I had set out to win over the department head and smiled and thanked him, while being inwardly dismayed at the way he spoke to subordinates. Was this any better than offering a bribe?” To her surprise, “I had used connections to get the telephone line and, by the end, had ceased to feel a qualm.

McAuley’s sympathies have always been all in with democracy and social justice, but she understands better than most Westerners what was lost with the end of Soviet times, particularly for its middle-aged and older citizens (among them, McAuley’s friends, most of whom were or are scientists or academics):

The intellectuals, on their state salaries and particularly those who could not turn their hands and minds to business ventures, were struggling. And not only because they had little money. “Look,” said Galina, standing with me in a shop offering some highly-priced goods, “there’s nothing on the shelves.” What she meant was that there was nothing she could afford. An older generation found it very difficult to come to terms with this. In the Soviet period, if something was on the shelves, most people could afford it: the problem was that there might not be much of it.

McAuley is not an outsider so much as a long-time admirer of her Russian friends and the city. I haven’t been to Petersburg in more than a dozen years, but reading her evocations of its charms and quirks and its turbulent history, I now long to return there. “What would Peter the Great make of St. Petersburg today?” McAuley asks. “Has it finally realized his dream? In some ways, yes, and without destroying its grandeur and charm in the process… A period of restoration? Yes, but in another sense too. While the last ten years have seen the restoration of the city, and a rise in the living standards, they have also seen an end to democratic politics.” McAuley is not sentimental about Peter or Putin.

Photos of her friends (from back in the day and now) and maps of the city further personalize and illustrate the memoir. While knowledgeable and informative, Remembering Leningrad is completely free of jargon, surprisingly humorous, almost perpetually pleasant, and wholly sympathetic to the residents of a great city.