Daily Archives: August 18, 2017

As these families decorated their apartments, the party declared war against middle-class peasants. Famines brought on by collectivization spread through Soviet Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia. Slezkine describes a peasant and his family thrown out of their home in the middle of a winter night, leaving his daughter-in-law frostbitten and her 2-day-old baby dead from the cold. While the peasants ate grass, Stalin requisitioned their grain to fund industrialization in the cities. Please congratulate me on my new party card, a requisitioner wrote to a friend. My heart was overcome with incredible joy, like Id never felt before. In the countryside there was cannibalism. Party officials stumbled over corpses. Peasant women who fled the famine became nannies for House of Government residents. The families who remained behind starved.

The turning point in Slezkines story is the 1934 murder of the Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov. Human emotions had always been at the heart of Bolshevism, Slezkine says. The telephone call on Dec. 1, 1934, changed everything. No one believed human emotions anymore. Now Old Bolsheviks became the targets of their own terror. Nights with fewer than 100 executions were rare, Slezkine writes. At the House of Government there was silence. Everyone talks as if nothing has happened, Aleksandr Arosev wrote in his diary.

Tania Miagkovas daughter, Rada, was 8 when her mother was sent to prison. Tania used her time there to read Das Kapital. When her husband was arrested, Tania switched from Das Kapital to Anna Karenina. When her request for transfer to the gulag to be with her husband was denied, she began to read poetry: Mayakovsky, Blok, Pushkin. To her mother she wrote, A concentration camp? So be it! Over a period of several years? So be it! Long, difficult years? So be it! Mikhas must be accepted back into the party.

These chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid. Over all, Slezkines writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful, often undisciplined. The momentum suffers from the narratives overpopulation; and Slezkine falls into digressions about the Exodus, Armageddon and repressed memory theory. Despite meandering, he makes certain arguments clearly: Bolshevism was a millenarian sect with an insatiable desire for utopia struggling to reconcile predestination with free will that is, working ceaselessly to bring about what was supposedly inevitable. Utopias failure to arrive after the Civil War led to The Great Disappointment. In the second half of the 1920s, Soviet sanitariums were filled with Bolsheviks eating caviar, playing chess and suffering from depression.

For Slezkine, two qualities made the Bolsheviks special. The first was wrapping faith in logic: Marxism fused mysticism with scientific rationalism. The second was sheer magnitude: history had known many other millenarian sects, but not on this scale. This book is about the possibilities and limits of social engineering. When in 1934 Evgeny Preobrazhensky said, It has been the greatest transformation in the history of the world, he spoke the truth. The Soviet project was the most far-reaching experiment ever conducted on human beings.

Yet, as Slezkine writes, the Soviet age did not last beyond one human lifetime. Why? He answers: Among the generation enjoying the proverbial happy Soviet childhood, no one read Das Kapital. What they did read was Tolstoy and Pushkin, Heine and Goethe. The Bolsheviks, Slezkine claims, dug their own graves when they gave Tolstoy to their children. The historical novel made it impossible for them to gaze solely into the coming utopia: the parents lived for the future; their children lived in the past. The parents had comrades; the children had friends.

Slezkine plots The House of Government as an epic family tragedy. Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away, wrote an 11-year-old boy in 1938. Mommy was very brave. A few days later: Im reading Tolstoys War and Peace. Then, Mommy-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y!!!

Neither Tania Miagkova nor her husband ever saw their daughter again. Like many children of Bolsheviks, Rada was raised by her grandmother. That many of these grandmothers were orthodox Bolshevik sectarians Slezkine observes does not seem to have diminished their family loyalty. The fact that their families were punished for unexplained reasons does not seem to have diminished their Bolshevik orthodoxy. The two sets of loyalties were connected to each other by silence.

Children from the House of Government without grandmothers completed their school days in orphanages. Many went on to be killed fighting the Germans in World War II. Those mothers who did survive the gulag returned years later, aged. They were no longer needed by their children, who had grown up without them. As one woman whose mother returned said, We never really managed to get used to each other again.

Marci Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale and the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.

A version of this review appears in print on August 20, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Unbreakable Broken.

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The Russian Revolution Recast as an Epic Family Tragedy - New York Times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven.

Or so we thought as we entered the seventies. Smoking weed; falling in love; writing poetry and dreaming of a new and just world order. I had barely entered Presidency College when Naxalbari happened and classmates began to disappear.

They had gone to the forests, in the memorable words of Marxist poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay to fight a war for those who knew not how to. By coincidence, that was when my first book of poems appeared. I got married. All night I stayed awake translating the nine cantos of the Meghnad Badh Kavya, Michael Madhusudan Dutts 19th century epic. I did a day job as an office boy in 14 Bentinck Street where the Chinese shoe shops were.

Satyajit Rays Aranyer Din Ratri had just released. No one had known there was a sexual side to the Brahmo. Shombhu Mitra was still staging Dasachakra based on Ibsens Enemy of the People while Badal Sircar had discovered the Third Theatre and taken his plays out of the proscenium and on to the streets.

Shakti Chattopadhyay, then in his mid-thirties, was lying in the gutters, drunk as usual. His poems scribbled on torn sheets may yet outlive Tagore. Nikhil Biswas had died at 36, leaving behind 10,000 drawings. Yes, it was the best of times.

India was still recovering from the excitement of the Beatles visiting Rishikesh. Ravi Shankar was storming the West, with Yehudi Menuhin at times, with John Lennon other times. Rajneesh was shocking Bombay with his spiritual sermons on free sex.

Dylans harmonica rang in our ears as Blowing in the Wind played everywhere. Madhubala had just passed away. Zubin Mehta was conducting the LA Philharmonic. And I? I was smoking hash with Ginsberg and listening to Howl midst the smell of burning flesh as funeral pyres lit up Calcuttas night sky. Or strolling home at daybreak with the great Ustad after a nightlong concert. No, no one could sing the Malkauns like Amir Khan did.

We were all young then, full of anger and hope. We dreamt of a just world. We believed poverty could be fought and defeated. Che with his trademark beret stared down at us from red posters, though very few among us were actually Red. It was azaadi we yearned for. We protested against the Gulag as loudly as we raised our voice against Mai Lai.

I quit college. Not for politics but for poetry. Poetry, for me, was hope. It was azaadi from the tired clichs of politics. I started a magazine that brought together the best voices. Agyeya and Faiz, Muktibodh and Yevtushenko, Octavio Paz.

Brewing next door was a war. The young students of East Bengal took on the Pakistani army with the poetry of Shamsur Rahman echoing in their hearts: Freedom is a voice everyone hears; freedom is a voice everyone fears. I remember Kaifi telling students in Dhaka that poetry alone can win the war for them.

Around that time, a young man quit his job in Calcutta and caught a train to Bombay to try his luck at the movies. KA Abbas gave him his first break. But it took him a few more years and a film with Rajesh Khanna to be noticed.

A script by two young men, Salim and Javed defined his real role: the role of the Angry Young Man ready to set the skies on fire in his pursuit of hope and justice. It started with a small film called Zanjeer but soon went well beyond cinema. It defined the indomitable spirit of the seventies and raised its richest baritone: Rage.

The rhetoric of non violence had already tired. The young were seeking hope, a new Utopia in a world without answers. Doubt and dilemma dogged them. That is when Bachchan picked up the gauntlet and showed them the way out. India found a new hero. He stood up for the weak and the poor. He fought against injustice and crime. And yes, he was violent when violence was required. He was the new moral compass, the voice that whispered in our ears: Fight back.

The long war in Vietnam had ended. Free Bangladesh was born by the will of its young writers and poets. And India showed it will not cower before the Emergency, come what may. It was a reassertion of our will. The left, the right, everyone got together to fight back the darkness. Till Mrs Gandhi submitted to the will of the people.

The eighties came with the assassination of John Lennon. Andrei Sakharov was arrested in Moscow. The Rubiks Cube arrived. So did the first 24 hours news channel by CNN. Mrs Gandhi returned to power. Mikhail Gorbachev broke the Kremlins grip. The USSR was no more the USSR. Pac-Man took Japan by storm. Led Zeppelin broke up. And Uttam Kumar died. So did Mohammed Rafi. And Sahir. By then I had married again. The Emergency was over. Mrs Gandhi was back in power just one day before my birthday. Naxalbari was also over. My poetry gave way to journalism.

Two years later, Kapil brought home the World Cup. I moved to Bombay. Amitabh won an election and went to Parliament. (I made the same mistake a decade later.) Bofors broke out. And the world as we knew it had changed forever.

The seventies was about freedom, hope, courage. Each one of us against the world, living out our bravest moment. Will that ever come back again? I doubt it.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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The 70s: Naxalbari, LSD, Poetry and the Emergency - Times of India (blog)