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September 01, 2006

Moscow and Russia

 

Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War

by Rodric Braithwaite

Knopf (September 2006), $30

 

Stalingrad may have been the turning point in World War II (The Great Patriotic War), but it was the Battle of Moscow where Germany suffered its first strategic failure, when the world first saw that the Nazi war machine could be defeated. As such, it was one of the most important events of the 20th century.

Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to the Soviet Union, has compiled an invaluable time capsule of life in the capital before, during and after this monumental battle. Carefully harvesting evocative narratives from hundreds of memoirs, diaries and personal interviews, Braithwaite weaves them together into a moving portrait of a determined people struggling against immense odds. 

This is a refreshingly honest look at the wartime capital, with a convincing account (likely informed by the author’s experience in the highest echelons of state decision making) of Stalin’s and the top leaders’ reactions to the attack, fascinating information on dissent and disarray, and dozens of carefully textured portraits of real people, in their own words. This may well be the best social history we have of life on the Russian homefront (albeit hardly far from the front) during World War II.

Even Braithwaite’s asides are fascinating, as this bit on camouflaging the city against bombings:

 

Architects and students were mobilised to paint trees and the roofs of buildings on the streets and squares of the city. The golden cupolas of the Kremlin churches were painted in camouflage colors, and the red stars on the towers were covered in canvas. The buildings were disguised with camouflage netting. The Kremlin walls were painted in contrasting stripes to look like apartment buildings... Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square was covered to look like a two-storey building. Platforms with mock buildings on them were moored in the river. Nine fake aerodromes, a fake oil tank farm, seven fake factory complexes were built on the outskirts of the city to decoy the German airmen away from their real targets.

 

 

RUSSIA

by Andrew Moore

Chronicle Books (2005), $40

 

It has been several years since there has been a photo book on Russia worth recommending. Moore’s recently published volume ends that drought.

This is not a collection of postcard-pretty pictures of historic buildings or of artsy, post-modernist portraits of a society in tumult. Moore’s photos are counterpoints of beauty and decay, of expanse and emptiness. He seeks out vivid color and remarkable juxtapositions of light and meaning, both within photos and across spreads. Thus, he counterpoises a homey portrait of a modest rabbi and his wife at home with the wild, red interior of a Buddhist monastery, or a screaming bit of Bolshevik stained glass with Stalin’s wide, empty desk in the Crimea.

Moore writes about Russia that, “I had not anticipated a visual world so independent of my previous experiences. There was something of a dark dream about it, illogical and tragic, yet lit by the defiant spark of the unexpected.” 

It is a stunning achievement that he has managed to capture this world so impressively.

 

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